Farmers Urged to Bury Their Underpants for Better Beef

The latest advice for farmers sounds like a superstition: to improve yields, dig a hole in your field and bury your underpants for two months. If you have several fields, you'll need to cough up more underwear. The idea began with the "Soil My Undies" challenge from the California Farmers’ Guild, and is now recommended by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) and Quality Meat Scotland (QMS). But it's no old wives' tale. The underwear must be made of cotton, and the result is a relatively cheap and easy soil test.

Evan Wiig, Executive Director of the California Farmers’ 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 it 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.”

Soil that is worked over by microbes, insects, and worms will be more nutritious for the plants that grow there, and for the animals that graze the fields. Read more about the underpants test at the Telegraph.