Did You Know Healthy Soils Eat Underpants? 

Burying your cotton underwear can be used to measure soil health [1, 2, 3]. Soils contain billions of little workers (including: worms, bacteria, fungi & insects) which cooperate to decompose organic matter. Digging up buried cotton underpants several weeks later shows how active soil communities are. The more degraded the fabric, the healthier the soil is.

Soil health is critical for many things, including biodiversity, carbon sequestration, climate resilience, flood prevention, agricultural sustainability and productivity. This simple experiment illustrates how we can all learn about the hidden and fascinating universe below our feet [4].

[1] How hungry is your soil? Feed it some pants to find out! (thescottishfarmer.co.uk)

[2] Why you should plant some pants in your garden in France (connexionfrance.com)

[3] Underpants experiments are taking place in Australian paddocks and gardens (abc.net.au)

[4] Proof by underpants (University of Zurich - Department of Plant and Microbial Biology)