HAMILTON, Ohio – Ripped, torn, full of holes, and completely soiled. That’s how Butler County farmers wanted to see their undies on display at the Butler County Fair when they took part in the Soil Your Undies challenge.

Five farmers “planted” a new pair of cotton underwear in May or June and “harvested” them six weeks later, in time for display at the fair. Those undies created quite a stir.

The undies won’t break down in just any soil. Healthy soil contains billions of microbes that consume the cotton. One teaspoon of healthy soil contains more microbes than there are people on the planet, according to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service website. In addition to chowing down on organic matter like cotton, they also help soil resist erosion, cycle nutrients, and store water.

To participate, the farmers picked an area in their field that they wanted to learn more about, said Brady Smith, Butler Soil and Water Conservation rural specialist. They buried the underwear, with the elastic waist band sticking out of the soil, and left it there for six weeks.

“Then they looked at the physical changes, how much of the underwear had decomposed, and what percentage of it had been eaten by the soil microbes,” Smith said. “It is not a quantitative test; it is only a visual experiment. But they can learn how much biological activity there is in the soil.

“So, the more full of holes and decomposed the underwear is, the more biologically active the soil is,” he explained. “It’s a good beginning step to get people interested and looking at what is going on below the surface. Farmers are obviously in tune with what is going on above the surface with crops, but this is to encourage them to start figuring out what is going on in their soils.”

There were definite differences in the five pairs of undies.

Farmers who had been doing cover crops and either no-tillage or reduced tillage had more biological activity, in most cases, than farms that may have had a lot of disturbance recently.

The underwear Stephan Janos had planted was in bad shape when he dug it up, which was a good thing. The field had been farmed no-till for about 16 years. For most of those years, it had a cover crop.

“Some of the years it had some pretty good mixes but the last few years it has just been cereal rye,” he said.

“Planting cover crops has leveled out this whole field,” Janos said. “There are parts that have good soil, very good yields, then there are other parts that have more clay and are not as good. Even this year with the wet July we had, the whole field (of soybeans) looks about the same.”

On the other hand, the underwear planted on Jeremy Fruth’s farm was the “best” or in this case the “worst.” It was the best preserved of them all.

“It’s weird because we do all the right things, I think, and the undies looked what we thought was the worst,” Fruth said. “We do cover crops every year. We use some synthetic fertilizer, but we also use natural manure and chicken litter.”

Fruth and Smith agreed that the spot where the undies were buried is a little wetter. Not enough that it usually is a yield drop but it is significantly wetter than the rest of the field.

“I was intrigued when he dug them up,” Fruth said. “He (Smith) was really interested in it too. This is the most complete pair and I don’t know why. And I know right where that spot is. We are going to harvest some of the best beans from there that we have ever harvested. It is really weird. I think it is an outlier. I think that is a dot on a graph that is not supposed to be there.” 

Another pair of underwear was buried in a field that was not a farm field but had been planted with native grasses and wildflowers, Smith said. That field had the highest rate of decomposition, so the microbes were the most active.