Soil Your Undies, a soil health test with origins in southwestern Ontario, has been awarded an international prize in soil science.
The Ig Nobel honours surprising and seemingly silly achievements that nonetheless contribute to scientific understanding. The Ig Nobels are awarded annually by Improbable Research, an organization promoting knowledge by “making people laugh, then think.”
The 2026 Ig Nobel soil science award was presented on Sept. 3 in Zurich, Switzerland, to Franz Bender, Marcel van der Heijden, Atlant Bieri and Pia Viviani, for burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants across Switzerland, then digging them up after two months to measure decomposition, and by extension, the level of soil microbial activity. Nine hundred soil samples from the burial sites were also collected.
As detailed by Bender and van der Heijden, the citizen-science project helped “collect a unique dataset,” and provided “the opportunity to advocate for soil conservation in Switzerland and beyond.”
“We provided the citizen scientists with personalized feedback, including soil analysis results, interpretation tools and tips for sustainable soil management. Hopefully, the sensory experience of recovering a decomposed pair of underwear from their own land has inspired the participants to see soil as a living system and a vital resource and empowered them to serve as conscientious soil stewards,” the scientists said in a statement.
Chatham-Kent origins
What the Swiss researchers accomplished was a scaled-up version of a project first tried 11 years ago in Chatham-Kent.
“My advisor sent me to the Midwest Cover Crop conference with Anne Verhallen. We heard someone saying you could use cotton as a nice (soil health) indicator test. It’s not a strong scientific thing, but it’s a good demonstration,” said Claire Coombs, a certified crop advisor based in Renfrew who, in 2015, was a technician working with Ontario’s agriculture ministry.
“I don’t know how it came up, but we thought men’s underwear briefs would be really funny.”
Verhallen, then a soil management specialist with the ministry (now retired), credited Dresden-area farmer Woody Van Arkel, who also attended the cover crop conference that year, with creating the “Soil Your Undies” name for the project.
Once back in Ontario, Verhallen armed Coombs with one package of white men’s briefs and directed her to Merlin-area grain grower Blake Vince’s farm. The pair buried the first sets of undergarments, one in a conventionally managed field, and the other in a heavily cover-cropped no-till location. Two months and a bit of digging later, one showed little degradation, while the other had been almost entirely eaten away.
“I took a video and just narrated what I was doing,” said Vince. Little did he know a snowball had begun rolling down an unexpectedly large slope.
Verhallen, Coombs and Vince started sharing their experiment at field days. The Innovative Farmers Association of Ontario took an interest, as did the media, including the mainstream press. They also found engagement on social media, with Twitter being “huge in the farming community” at the time.
One way or another, the project Coombs and Blake both describe as “catchy” and “funny” made its way to Switzerland.
Marcel van der Heijden, one of the Ig Nobel recipients and a researcher with the Swiss department of agroecology and environment, told Farmtario he and his colleagues first heard about Ontario’s Soil Your Undies phenomenon in 2017. It motivated them to run their own project in 2019.
“It was a very big success. Then we moved on with a much larger citizen science project with over 1000 participants across the whole of Switzerland, and comparing different land-use types, in 2021,” van der Heijden said. It was the latter project which won them the Ig Nobel for soil science.
Recurring interest in Soil Your Undies
The Swiss initiative isn’t the first scientifically validated Soil Your Undies study.
“Dr. Lori Philips with Agriculture Canada worked with it as well. I gave her the samples from a bunch of the guys in the (Ontario) Soil Network. She looked at the ‘undies sphere’ and the biology that was acting close to the underwear,” said Verhallen, adding she loves the fact that interest in Soil Your Undies seems cyclical.
“New people continue to discover it, and 4H groups have also run with the idea. The original set of underwear, I think the ministry still has them…and they’ve been all over Canada with different people.”
For Vince, seeing what was originally intended to be a humorous, informal experiment morph into a popular phenomenon in Ontario was pretty gratifying. Knowing it’s been internationally appreciated is similarly “pretty cool.”
Coombs thinks the same.
“I was excited that people think that’s really important,” she said. “The fact this has gone around the world and it gets people talking about soil health and soil biology, it’s just awesome.”
