Soil your undies!

A few weeks back I am sitting at my desk when I get a strange request from Sally Dickinson, one of the CottonInfo REOs, to help her soil her undies. At first I thought this was a prank, but after some slightly selective Google searching I found that the #soilyourundies is a genuine way to help farmers assess their soil health. 

How to soil your undies

The premise is simple. You take a pair of white cotton underpants, bury them at 5 cm depth in the soil, mark the burial site, return 8 weeks later and exhume the pants. Over this period of time the soil microbiology gets to work in breaking down the cellulose of the cotton fibers back into it’s glucose components. This they use as a food source and so at the end of the 8 weeks all you should have left if the elasticated waste in a healthy soil. By comparing different soil types, irrigation, cultivation or crop management practices it allows anyone to gauge how potentially contrasting soils compare in their soil health.

Now, whilst Armidale is not a recognized center for cotton production, there’s just something not quite right about our climate, we didn’t want to miss out on this opportunity to get in on the act. So, we persuaded this year Cotton production students to #soilyourundies. We filled two large trays with 30 kg of grey vertosol soils from the river banks near Boggabri near cotton fields and the other from a low to moderate potassium cereal cropping site located near Bannockburn, wet them up and buried our pants at 5 cm depth. 

Our vertosol experiments

We’ve removed the vagaries of weather by placing our soils in the glasshouse where we can look after them consistently, but the students have hypothesized that the Boggabri soil will be healthier and we’ll be left with more pants in that soil than the Bannockburn one. Secretly I am hoping that it will be the other way around, but suspect there may be little difference. I guess we’ll see in 8 weeks time.

In the meantime, if you want to join in then please do. If you head to the CottonInfo web site you’ll find plenty of tips and info on how you to can #soilyourundies.

Video – Cotton Production soiling their undies

Cotton undies get buried