The idea may be pants, but it really works!
WHILE the fine ladies involved in the Women’s Lib movement of the ’60s and ’70s may have burned their bras to bring about a revolution in thinking, farmers across Scotland have recently been burying their boxers towards a similar end.
And the underground underpants movement, which has caught the imagination of farmers all over the country, hopes to make farmers change the way they think about their soils.
The thinking behind the idea is simple – bury a pair of 100% cotton pants in a field and then dig them up eight weeks later to see how they look. The shabbier and more degraded they are, the more bugs, microbes and worms are present – so the better the health of the soil.
The scheme went viral on Twitter when farmers in England started posting pictures of the results of their pant-burying experiments online.
But like true Scotsmen, growers north of the Border weren’t willing to be outdone and quickly adopted the practice aimed at letting the winds of change blow away cobwebbed thinking on soils.
One farming organisation encouraging the pant-burying experiment has even been bulk-buying the requisite cotton boxers for farmers to bury.
But the serious side behind the attention-grabbing idea is to help raise awareness of just how important it is for crops to grow good root systems – and to highlight the role which the bugs and beasties in the soil play in maintaining the health of our crops.
For while there might have been a tendency to look on soils as a simple chemistry set in the past, these days more is known about the importance of soil micro-organisms – and that the millions of life-forms in every ounce of soil play a key part in getting good yields.
Farmers have long known they have to nourish the bugs in the cow’s stomach to feed the cow – and it’s now clear it’s just as crucial to look after the soil microbes.
The message is getting there, but while we regularly inspect our crops and check the leaves and shoots, it’s much rarer for us to take out a spade and have a dig down to the roots to see how the other half of the plant is getting on.
To further encourage folk to look at their soils there’s also going to be a national “pant comparison” later in the year, where the effects of different ways of sowing and growing crops have had on farmers’ underwear will be discussed.