Do you know your mollisols from your alfisols?

April 30, 2024 10:24 AM

"So when you say judging, it’s not, this soil is great. This soil is bad. It’s classification and analysis, right?" (scroll to bottom for transcript). To prepare for the National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest, they spent three intensive practice days describing soils derived from glacial till, outwash, lacustrine sediments, and loess. They braved freezing temperatures, snow and sleet, high winds, pits partially filled with water, and muddy conditions before the weather finally cleared up for the two competition days.
By the way, did you know there are state soils? (folder of pdfs for all states & PR & VI) and New Jersey’s is named Downer.

Iowa State University hosted the 2024 National Soil Judging Contest last week but I can't find the winners announcement! Recent winners: 2023 (Univ of Maryland); and 2022 (Virginia Tech). Here's a pdf of the 2022 judging handbook with procedures and scoring guidelines.

posted by spamandkimchi (14 comments total)

From the first link:

Our classification system in the United States is called soil taxonomy, and so we’re classifying down to, I believe, the great group. So think of it like if you’re classifying a lion or something, we have a kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus species, so we’re classifying down to essentially the genus of the soil. So an example would be– one that we get a lot here in Virginia would be like a hapludult. So it sounds like a made-up word, but I swear it’s not.

And so it’s broken down. Yeah, it’s broken down into three parts. So there’s haplu, which is the first part of the word. It means simple, so it’s a pretty generic version of this type of soil. And then ud stands for udic, or the soil moisture regime. And there are different soil moisture regimes across the US, but in Virginia, it’s udic. And then the end of the word is ult, which stands for ultisols, and those are highly leached soils. Think those really rich red Piedmont soils that we get in the Southeast. So the whole word would be a hapludult, and that’s an example of a soil taxonomic class.

posted by spamandkimchi at 10:28 AM on April 30 [3 favorites]

I'd really love to know if they get into more granular detail than the state level when it comes to soil analysis. Because New York State may have one kind of soil ("Honeoye", the site claims), which is supposed to have a good mix of silt/loam and clay, but in most NYC community gardens the soil might include that plus whatever random rubbish was lurking under the topsoil from when the garden was established.

We've all found old bricks in our plots in my community garden, and that's even after 20 years of it going as a garden. One of the founders is still a member and talks about how they used to find old wood and ashes and asbestos from when the building on the site originally burned down. (Most of the paving in the paths is made from bricks salvaged from the rubble.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:56 AM on April 30

this is somewhat relevant to my interests. Now that I've travelled more over the US over the past decade, I've begun to appreciate the different soil qualities, that I did not when growing up first in the (notional) salad bowl of the world in Salinas, CA and then the #1 ag county in the nation in the San Joaquin Valley, with its depth to bedrock a mile or so down.

When in Idaho I noticed that the Snake River region is like just a greened-up lava field like Maui (courtesy of the Yellowstone Hot Spot moving through I guess). When traveling up I-5 to Portland I found a similar somewhat dodgy surface soil vs. what I grew up and around in California.

On my trip to Texas earlier this month I drove through the high desert that started east of the Tehachipis out of Bakersfield, then northern Arizona & New Mexico (Colorado Plateau lavas) and Texas from Amarillo to the outskirts of Dallas was pretty sparse ranch land with not a lot of ag going on, again compared to California.

The 600-mile drive from Dallas to El Paso was interesting as it started verdant and ended in the desert but I didn't really notice the transition.
posted by torokunai at 11:02 AM on April 30 [1 favorite]

I mess around with our county's GIS maps a lot, and discovered they include soil ratings and classifications. I was shocked to see there are dozens of different soil types here in Summit County alone!
posted by slogger at 11:15 AM on April 30 [1 favorite]

I think student contests like these are super interesting and I always like reading about them -- especially the assessment grids for how they are scored. This one was a little too technical and out of my field for me to follow easily, but I loved this set of acceptable adjectives:
Modifiers for Coarse Fragments
Gravelly GR Cobbly CB Stony ST Bouldery BD
Channery CH Flaggy FL Very* V Extremely* X

Law schools have a ton of student competition -- mock trials and moots, as you might expect, but also mediation and negotiations competitions, client interview competitions, and patent drafting competitions. In law school, competing in them is a tremendous opportunity to get feedback from really esteemed people in the field -- like, one of my mooting coaches was a retired supreme court justice (they retire at 75 in Canada, not wait until death) -- and to meet people who study the same things at other schools.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:16 AM on April 30 [4 favorites]

Yeaaaah, the rules say they're still using Munsell pages. Brings me back to my fieldwork days.

(No one could afford the whole book so you'd just get the soil color pages.)
posted by cobaltnine at 11:54 AM on April 30 [3 favorites]

Every state has many different types of soil. Many states also apparently have a legislatively designated State Soil, like they have a State Bird or State Flower. Here's a map of NY state soils. Note that they leave the entirety of NYC as unclassified soils - urban land.
posted by mollweide at 12:26 PM on April 30 [2 favorites]

My favorite actual soil type name is 'muck.' Like peat, but wetter.
posted by theclaw at 12:29 PM on April 30

Metafilter: it sounds like a made-up word, but I swear it’s not.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:01 PM on April 30 [1 favorite]

I recently finished the book Rancher, Farmer Fisherman. Referenced was the no till method for the rancher Justin Knopf, who would be my pick for the "do you know your soils?" phone a friend. Recommended for how much you don't really know category on Jeopardy.
posted by brent at 2:36 PM on April 30 [1 favorite]

My alma mater used to be among the nation's top universities in these agricultural competitions such as soil judging, livestock judging, and such. (I wasn't involved in agriculture but my older brother got a degree in something called Range Science*.) That Ag Dept is a shadow of its former self now.

*I go to Nevada's Black Rock Desert every autumn (no, not for that, for the other thing). Every 2-3 years I listen to the audiobook of John McPhee's Basin and Range during the drive. So the concept of range is big in me. Fast forward to a couple years ago. I'm in the local college's science library and in the bound periodicals there's a row labelled "Open Range". My heart lept ... until I realized it was just a row that empty because of re-arranging. Now, of course, all the bound journals are gone, like tears in rain.
posted by neuron at 3:49 PM on April 30 [2 favorites]

I work at a land-grant university in the United States. The original set of land-grant universities were charged to include a focus on agriculture and support of the state's farmers - that's why some universities are still named " A&M University" - the "A" stands for "agricultural" (and some who used to have that in their name have since changed their name). There was a subsequent set of laws that strengthened this mission and provided additional funding (and regulations and requirements), particularly through "extension" services that provide direct services to farmers, gardeners, and others who have questions about agriculture. They're often the ones who are experts in things like soil and not only conduct research into these topics but also provide a lot of publicly available information and services. For example, the article linked in the OP talks with students at Virginia Tech University, a land-grant university, who are enrolled in the university's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

I've had some contact with the faculty, staff, and students who do this work at my university and they're really cool people. In addition to the intellectual interest and drive that are found across the university, these folks have a very strong sense of purpose and identity - and those are usually centered on public service. It's really easy to be jaded about US higher education, especially right now, but it's very refreshing and rewarding to work with these particular folks. I enjoy working with colleagues across my large, complex university but I'm open about proclaiming our agriculture college as my favorite college.
posted by ElKevbo at 4:12 PM on April 30 [6 favorites]

In Florida, middle and high school students in FFA (future farmers of America) do soil judging as well, and it mostly takes place at dairies. I’ve been told this is because dairies are pretty big chunks of land that have widely spaced areas of relatively undisturbed soil in relatively different habitats that they don’t mind digging a bunch of deep pits into, although pretty much all of it involves deep sand and limestone. I look forward to the upcoming post on timber cruising.
posted by toodleydoodley at 7:21 AM on May 1 [1 favorite]

In Florida, middle and high school students in FFA (future farmers of America) do soil judging as well, and it mostly takes place at dairies.

In my rural high school, we had students who participated in soil, grass, and meat judging competitions through FFA.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:13 AM on May 1 [1 favorite]