Soiled undies, soil health and mycorrhizal myths

Abstract

In 2018 a Nuffield scholar returning from Canada brought the idea of soiling a pair of cotton undies to investigate soil health to the attention of Oliver. This soil health engagement tool seemed like a brilliant idea and so Oliver with the assistance of his colleagues in CottonInfo organised for a few dozen pants to go out to some cotton growers. The plan was the growers would soil them (i.e. burying them in the soil) and bring them in to the Australian Cotton Conference to start a conversation around soil health. The discussion the returned pants generated and the competition for the most degraded pair of pants between growers led to an extension of the project, which over the next few years grew beyond our cotton farms, into their communities and eventually across every state and territory in Australia in a citizen science challenge. The result of this simple engagement tool, which involves burying a pair of cotton pants five cm deep for eight weeks and then looking at the level of degradation, has got thousands of Australians thinking about their soil health and ways to either maintain or improve it (Figure 1).