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Armidale, Australia – What can white cotton underwear tell you about the health of your farm or garden soil? It’s a lot, it gives.
Hundreds of people – from farmers to school children – are burying cotton underwear in back gardens as part of a scientific science project to bury eight weeks later as part of the Soil Your Undies Challenge, which began before expanding abroad in the United States. boost Australian.
Cotton is made up of a sugar called cellulose, making it a delicious snack for microbes and the army of other small decomposers that live in the soil. The state of the recovery of the clothing will indicate the health of the microbiome. If there is not much left of the cloth, the earth is full of health and activity. If it is mostly intact, work is needed to improve the situation.
Oliver Knox, a senior lecturer at the School of Environmental and Rural Sciences, University of New England (UNE) in New South Wales and CottonInfo, a joint expansion program for the Australian cotton industry, are behind the effort started in 2018 by Knox and Sally. Dickinson, a regional expansion official at CottonInfo, asked 50 farmers if their underwear would be ready for burial for science.
“Not only did they compete with each other and they said things like,‘ My land is better than yours because I have more degraded pants, ’” Knox said, laughing.
A healthy soil microbiome is the lifeblood of plants and can also accelerate growth and promote disease resistance. Experts believe it can also affect the food content of our food.
Farmers who indicated that the soil was poor in health began to look at ways to regenerate their land, such as changing crop rotation or leaving more mirrors in the soil. “It made us all think about the soil and we realized that soil assessment was a beautiful and accessible way to make it available to the public,” Knox said. “That’s what I love about the project.”
Since then the Soil Your Undies campaign has spread to tight farming communities and schools have also merged.
An estimated 400 people have been buried in underground clothing across the continent, allowing scientists to study terrestrial health in different parts of Australia and collect data for other research. People are approaching now results on the CottonInfo map.
The Australian project is also fundamentally different from the rest of the world.
Elsewhere, people would let the elastic belt look down on the ground as a marker, but on the first try Knox found that the drawers had been stolen at night.
At the place where the mysterious disappearance occurred the leg marks suspected the thief to be a kangaroo; so today – all over Australia – they bury their underwear to make sure they are fully protected from the wildlife.
The microbiome under your feet
In addition to New Zealand, Otago schools also run Soil Your Undies campaigns.
New Zealand school children are preparing to bury a pair of underwear at the school [Courtesy of Bridget McNally]
“The students and their teachers are very happy to know the world under their feet,” Michelle Cox, Soil Your Undies coordinator and soil science communicator, told Al Jazeera. “But like most people on the planet, they know very little about the soil, and they haven’t thought much about how it works and how important it is to our well-being and the life of our planet.”
The government-funded national science program for citizens was launched as a pilot project with six schools in September 2020 and another six will be part of the project next July. They hope to eventually expand nationally.
The children reported that most of the land where the underwear or sample worms were buried had little soil life and very few clothing had significant degradation.
Cox is not surprised that many of the sampling sites have been in schools, as they often have heavy pedestrian traffic in cut grass areas, so it is likely to be too dry, compact, or organic matter essential to sustain soil microbiome.
In contrast, the sites that gave very good results were well mulched, near composting sites or near different plantations. It is noteworthy that the team at the University of New England in Australia may fall to the ground where the soil microbiome may be affected by drought or floods, so as climate change is affected by extreme weather, our soil could also be damaged.
As students extract additional data from soil samples, they will be able to complete more pieces of the “earth puzzle” and develop an in-depth understanding of soil health, how to create and maintain it, and suggest ways to avoid problems. it happens first.
“Many scientists agree that we have less than 60 years of soil left on our planet, less than 60 crops,” Cox said. “However, if we take practices that rebuild the microbiome of our soil and thus improve the health, strength and productivity of the soil, we can prevent this catastrophe.”
Lessons for the future
Returning to Australia, Belinda Waldorf and her students are students at Armidale Waldorf School in North New South Wales, Oliver Knox and the UNE team have reported.
They buried a couple of pendants in the school garden and were pleased that the couple disbanded eight weeks later.
Waldorf says the experiments were fueled by the activities of existing students, including running a school worm farm, composting school waste, and organic farming facilities.
“I think students are much more aware that ways of planting and growing food, even on a small scale, can have a big impact on the environment,” he said.
A collage showing how a pair of cotton cloths dissolve in the weeks they are buried in the ground [Courtesy of Oliver Knox]
One of the first questions the kids wanted to answer to Knox is why they wore clothes.
Scientists have long used something called Shirley soil burial fabric, but that doesn’t make the garment attractive to PR, nor is it always easy to find plain cotton. It’s likely to be a pair of polyester-cotton underpants in eight weeks, which is usually 65 percent cotton. While cotton can be eaten, Knox says the rest is a thin net tied to a strong waist – 35% of the non-cotton product.
In addition to the health of the soil, he also thought about the material choices people make and end up in landfills.
“Under the right conditions, we know that cotton will break down, but the raw material mixed with man-made fibers will not respond in the same way and can stay in our environment for a very long time,” he said. “That’s what we should think more about.”
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