Corskie Farm tested soil fertility with buried cotton underwear

Iain Green of Corskie Farm, just north of Elgin in Moray, buried cotton underwear in different parts of his 2,800-acre farm, in fields he believed had healthier soil and in fields he suspected were weaker. The trial ran with Quality Meat Scotland and the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board.

The theory behind the 'soil my undies' test: cotton gets devoured by the microbes and bacteria in soil, so the more material disappears, the more life the soil holds. When officials and fellow farmers gathered at the farm near the mouth of the river Spey to dig the pants up and analyse the results, the differences were plain — a wet field starved of oxygen left the underwear hardly touched, while heavily cultivated arable fields that get a lot of muck had eaten it away.

Green called it a success and a simple, cheap way of testing soil, noting that the cotton is the important thing, not the underpants. Fellow farmers left surprised and keen to try it themselves, and QMS said it hoped the test would be adopted by farmers throughout the country as a way to read their soil's productivity.

Soil biology is hard to see from the surface, and lab tests cost money a farmer can spend elsewhere.

Cotton is a uniform, standardised feedstock, so the amount devoured is a directly comparable readout across fields.

The test reads biology where it lives — a waterlogged, oxygen-starved field failed the test exactly as its crops would.

Anyone can replicate it with underwear and a spade, which is why other farmers immediately wanted to try it.

The cheapest instrument is sometimes already in the drawer — a standardised everyday object can read a complex system that an expensive test would measure only in numbers.

The dig-up drew QMS officials and neighbouring farmers, several of whom went away to run the test on their own land. Green rated the trial a success — the wet field's barely-touched pants versus the muck-fed arable fields' shredded ones matched what he suspected about his ground — and Quality Meat Scotland said it hoped the test would now be adopted by farmers throughout the country as a means of gauging soil productivity.