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Swiss bury their pants to help plants

Panties on Clothesline
A thousand people are planting identical pairs of pants in vegetable patches, flowerbeds, meadows and farmland across Switzerland
ALAMY

At some point in the next few days an amateur gardener in Geneva will dig a shallow hole in his lawn and inter two pairs of fresh white cotton underpants. He will have to hope they are not late bloomers.

A thousand people are planting identical pairs of pants in vegetable patches, flowerbeds, meadows and farmland across Switzerland in a mass experiment to measure the health of the country’s soil.

A few months later the buried smalls will be unearthed, photographed and scrutinised by scientists at Zurich University for signs of decomposition.

The researchers will also examine the surrounding soil for traces of DNA to work out what microbes are eating away at the underwear.

The underlying idea is serious: the team wants to create a map of what is going on just below the surface of the soil around Switzerland.

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The quality of soil is often roughly estimated by burying teabags — rooibos and green tea from the Netherlands are the modern scientific standard — and checking to see how much they rot over a given time. The more they degrade, as a rule of thumb, the healthier the soil.

The innovation in this case is the pants. “Underwear is widely available,” said Marcel van der Heijden, professor of plant science at Zurich University and head of the plant-soil interactions research group at Agroscope, the Swiss government’s agricultural research centre.

Mature man bending forward to weed vegetable garden
The participants range from an organic-potato farmer near Lake Lucerne to a Zurich resident who grows beans, squashes and sweetcorn in her back garden
ALAMY

“It also helps to visualise soil processes in a funny and inspiring way, as it makes people aware of soil life. Most people don’t realise that up to a quarter of global biodiversity lives underground in the soil. It’s a fascinating world, hidden in the dark.”

Within a few days of announcing the “trial by underpants” project, van der Heijden and his colleagues were overwhelmed with applications. The participants range from an organic- potato farmer near Lake Lucerne to a Zurich resident who grows beans, squashes and sweetcorn in her back garden.

Van der Heijden’s team has previously shown that adding the right kind of fungal spores to the soil beneath a maize crop can boost yields by as much as 40 per cent. The fungi congregate around the roots of the plants and feed them nutrients in exchange for sugars.

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Yet much remains to be understood about the best mix of fungi for each soil type and whether other microbes such as bacteria play a role.

This is where the underpants may make their modest contribution to science. “We are happy and positively surprised that so many people joined up,” van der Heijden said.

“We [can] get a beautiful overview of soil quality in Switzerland. We can assess the factors that determine soil quality, because people also provide us with information about land use and location.”

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