Rotting Y-fronts top drawer for healthy farmland
Burying cotton underwear in a field can reveal level of the soil’s fertility, vital for strong crops and livestock
BURYING a pair of underpants in a field may not seem the obvious starting point for the perfect roast, but farmers are being urged to dig deep for tastier meat.
The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board and Quality Meat Scotland (QMS) claim interring a pair of cotton smalls in a pasture can reveal vital information about soil fertility.
According to the experts, sterile and lifeless soil will keep underwear intact, but organically thriving soil will eat away at the briefs, leaving nothing but the elastic waistband. Dig up the pants after just two months, and it is possible to judge how healthy the land is.
Soil conditions on beef and sheep farms directly influence how well grass and forage crops grow and, consequently, the quality of the feed they produce. And better feed produces healthier, tastier animals.
Iain Green, a Scottish farmer of Corskie Farm, near Elgin, in Moray, has been burying his pants in various fields since September. “The theory behind the test is that the cotton will be devoured by the microbes and bacteria in the soil, so the more you have the better,” he said. “We buried them in different fields, some which we think have healthier soil and others which aren’t as good.” Earlier this week fellow farmers and officials gathered at Mr Green’s farm to dig up his underpants and analyse the findings. Mr Green added: “The results were very interesting. We have quite a wet field here and obviously that has been starved of oxygen and the underpants were hardly touched.
“However, with our arable fields, which are cultivated heavily, they were eaten away, but we do cover them with a lot of muck. It was a success and a simple and cheap way of testing soil. The cotton is the important thing, rather than the underpants.”
The “Soil my Undies” challenge was launched by the California Farmers’ Guild in July and is being adopted by agricultural organisations across the world. Evan Wiig, executive director of the guild, said: “Cotton is an organic material and breaks down naturally just like anything else you’d put in your compost pile.
“So if you bury cotton in soil teeming with life, all those creatures will begin to feast. If you have dead soil, if it is totally lifeless, you should be able to pull the pants out of the ground, throw them in the washing machine and put them on like nothing ever happened. If you have incredibly healthy soil, you should have nothing left but an elastic strap.”
A spokesman for QMS said it would like farmers across Britain to adopt the test as way of checking the productivity of their soil.