What’s the best way to test the quality and vitality of the soil we depend on to grow crops, grow the trees we need to filter impurities from the air and provide us with oxygen? Of course, it’s to get a bunch of people to bury their underwear in the dirt for two months. That’s called science, baby, and it’s an actual experiment, the details of which you can read about in a new paper published in Plants People Planet.
Researchers recruited about 1,000 volunteers across Switzerland, who buried more than 2,000 pairs of organic cotton underwear at roughly 1,000 locations. After 30 days, and again after 60 days, the participants dug up the increasingly disgusting-looking underwear, took a picture of it, then sent it to researchers along with soil samples. In other words, people mailed out literally soiled underwear in the name of science.
It sounds absurd, but there is a point to it all. Soil is packed with bacteria, fungi, earthworms, and all sorts of organisms that break down organic material and return nutrients to an ecosystem. Cotton is mostly cellulose. Leave it buried underground, and all the soil will naturally break down the underwear.
The more it’s broken down within the allotted time spans, the more biologically active that soil is likely to be.
Scientists Buried 2,000 Pairs of Underwear to Test the Health of Soil
The results found that private gardens had the liveliest soil, with 58 percent of the underwear decomposing after two months. Lawns were a lot less active, with around 40 percent of the underwear being devoured by the earth. Agricultural fields and meadows fell somewhere in between. This suggests to the researchers that the biggest factor was what the land the underwear was buried in was being used for when it wasn’t an underwear graveyard.
The resulting “underwear index” can be used to determine the health of soil, a lot like the already established teabag index, which is the same idea (burying something in dirt to get a rough sense of soil health) just with a thing that isn’t being used to support your genitals unless you have a non-traditional relationship with tea. The researchers also asked participants to bury teabags along with the underwear.
While everything you’ve read so far suggests that underwear being rapidly devoured means you’ve got good, active soil, that isn’t exactly true. Extremely rapid decomposition can also mean you’ve got a nutrient overload on your hands and a patch of dirt that is out of balance, officially becoming a plot of land teeming with too much of a good thing.
Our soil, like, well, we treat it like dirt, but its health is vital to our planet’s health and our survival as a species. If all it takes is burying some undies in the dirt to get a sense of how well it’s doing, then let’s all grab a shovel and our least loved cotton underpants and get to digging in the name of science.
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