Soil Your Undies- A Look at Soil Microbe Activity

It is safe to assume most people have heard of planting corn, soybean, wheat, and other crops, but what about underwear? Well, in the name of research, that is what we did at our Highway 57 Soil Health Demonstration Plot!

On June 19 each plot (conventional wheat, no-till wheat, conventional soybeans, no-till soybeans, conventional corn, and no-till corn) was "planted" with 1 pair of cotton underwear, in additional to an extra pair planted in an undisturbed fence line. We then waited 60 days to "harvest" the underwear and see how much work the soil microbes did! The healthier the soil, the more broken down the underwear.

Observations made in the Winter Wheat plots:

• If you live near Lake Michigan, it comes as no surprise that we have a lot of heavy, red, clay soils in our area. And it is no different at our demo plot. If you look at the conventional wheat, you can see the red coloration on the underwear. Whereas, the no-till plot shows much darker soil. Even while digging you could see the plating and large clumps of the red clay compared to the cakey, aggregates of the no-till plot (signs that we are slowly improving our soils in the soil health plots!)

• There is much more deterioration within the first 1-5" of the underwear, as compared to the lower 5-12". Obviously showing where most of the microbes are spending their time eating!

Conventional Winter Wheat No-Till Winter Wheat

Observations made in the Soybean plots:

• Wow! Look at that no-till soybean photo! Nothing left but the elastic. This year the no-till soybeans seeds were untreated, which just goes to show the impact treated seed can have on the microbes in the soil.

• Even as we were digging around the no-till underwear plots, you could see amazing amounts of earthworms, beetles, and larvae surrounding the underwear! This was not the case for the conventional underwear plots.

Conventional Soybeans No-Till Soybeans

Observations made in the Corn plots:

• This is the one plot where conventional appears to have outcompeted with the no-till plot. You can see there was no deterioration in the top 1-5" unlike all the others. This could be due to the way the underwear was planted in this location (scrunched or not low enough below the surface of the soil).

Conventional Corn No-Till Corn

Observations made in the Undisturbed Fenceline:

• We "planted" in this location so we had a control that we could compare all the disturbed fields to an undisturbed area.

• Amazing that even the no-till soybeans outcompeted with the undisturbed location. However, overall the undisturbed area showed the most deterioration compared to all other disturbed locations. This indicates the impact that soil disturbance, even how minimal, can still impact the work the soil microbes are doing in our soils.

Undisturbed Fenceline

Overall, we are extremely happy with how this research project turned out! We learned quite a bit just from a little bit of digging and a few cotton pairs of underwear.