Buried Underwear Changed How We Think About Soil

In 2021, researchers at Agroscope, the Swiss federal center of agricultural research, partnered with the University of Zurich on a citizen science project with one of the most unusual methodologies in memory: asking 1,000 volunteers across Switzerland to bury their cotton underwear in the ground, leave it for two months, and then dig it up and send it to the lab. The project, officially called "Proof by Underpants," produced more than 2,000 pairs of buried underwear and 12,000 tea bags from nearly 1,000 sites across the country, generating a dataset that took researchers five years to fully analyze. Results published in August in the journal Plants, People, Planet revealed that private garden soil decomposed the underwear fastest, lawns the slowest, and agricultural fields and meadows ranked in between. The insight is elegant: healthy soil contains billions of microbes that consume organic material like cotton, and as the US Department of Agriculture puts it, "one teaspoon of healthy soil contains more microbes than there are people on the planet." The dirtier the underwear, the healthier the soil.

A Canadian version of the same experiment had already changed one farmer's life. Norm Lamothe, who runs a 500-acre farm in Ontario, first tried the "Soil Your Undies" challenge in 2015 and found his white Hanes almost completely intact after being buried, a sign of depleted microbial activity. "That's really what started my journey down the soil health path," he said. Over the following decade he rotated crops, brought in sheep to graze and return nutrients to the earth, and rebuilt what had been lost. When he tried the experiment again, the underwear he pulled up was much more tattered. He had the original pair framed and it now hangs in his office. "It makes a nice conversation piece with people wondering why there is underwear on the wall," he said.

Source:https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/new-study-bury-underwear-soil-health