Healthy Soil Will Eat Your Underwear

How healthy is your soil? If you want to know all you have to do is bury your underwear, says Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) soil management specialist Adam Hayes.  Last summer, Hayes helped members of the Renfrew County Soil and Crop Improvement Association bury underwear in their fields to determine the amount of biological activity in their soils. They buried cotton briefs six to eight inches deep in the soil in late May and then dug them up in early August. The first soiled brief in the picture above (second from the left) was from the no-till field with cover crops. Hardly anything remained of the brief, indicating extensive soil microbiological activity. The brief from the mulch (reduced) tillage soybean field (third from the left) had more material remaining when compared with the no-till/cover cropped soil, and the conventional tilled corn (for right) had the most material which indicated the least soil microbial activity. All 5 briefs buried at each site were weighed, with the results matching the degradation observed in the photo.