| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Underwear Under Where?
Cornucopia’s Take: South Dakota State University Extension shares photographic evidence of how tilling affects soil microbiological activity.
Tighty Whities Can Tell You About Your Soil Health
On Pasture
by Kathy Voth
 |
This is a fun experiment you can try with your own pastures and fields. It comes to us from Anthony Bly and Sara Berg of South Dakota State University Extension. Just remember that different areas will have different kinds of soils and you may get different results.
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 in the Aberdeen and Ipswich areas, 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.
A new brief was compared to one brief from each field.
The post Underwear Under Where? appeared first on Cornucopia Institute.
Source: https://www.cornucopia.org/2017/01/underwear-under-where/
