USDA: Here at The Era, we get a lot of emails. One recent message caught our eyes as being a bit different than what we usually see.
It dealt with underpants being used to determine soil health for farmers. Talk about finding the bottom line.
It is called the “Tighty Whities Experiment.” We swear we aren’t making this up.
The following is an explanation from On Pasture.
“Soil microorganisms require carbon to survive. Men’s cotton underwear briefs contain high amounts of carbon. Therefore, briefs can be buried in the soil and retrieved later to see and evaluate soil microbiological activity and ultimately, soil health status. During the South Dakota Soil Health Coalition’s first Soil Health School, a ‘Tighty Whities’ demonstration was conducted.
“The briefs were buried to about the waistline in the soil five weeks ahead of the school at 3 sites that included: corn with conventional tillage, soybeans under mulch tillage, and no-till soil currently with growing cover crops. Soil health school participants had the opportunity to extract the briefs and view the results of five replicates in each field. Results were revealing…to say the least.
“The first soiled brief was from a 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 had more material remaining when compared with the no-till/cover cropped soil, and the conventional tilled corn had the most material which indicated the least soil microbial activity.”
The more decayed the briefs are, the healthier the soil. Healthy soil supports “bacteria, earthworms and other creepy-crawlies that should be wriggling below the surface,” read a story on the topic on Delaware News Journal.
They call it the “Soil Your Undies Challenge.”
The Farmers Guild gives some instructions: “Simply bury a pair of white, 100 percent cotton undies beneath your soil, come back two months later and dig them up. Sterile, lifeless soil will keep your tighty-whities clean and intact whereas busy, organically thriving soil will eat away at your briefs, leaving nothing but an elastic strap!”
