'Soiled' underwear: French farmer's experiment to test soil health

Tribune Web Desk

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Chandigarh, June 11

When a French farmer received a new white pair of underwear with the instructions to bury them in his land, to anyone else it would have seemed an April Fools’ Day prank.

A French farmer measured the health of his soil by burying a pair of white briefs pic.twitter.com/opApqsQQ3Q

— Reuters (@Reuters) June 12, 2020

However, Jerome Leduc did exactly what was asked of him. “At the end of 2019, I joined a group called Farming for the Preservation of Soil, and at the start of April, we received a nice shiny white pair of briefs,” said Leduc of Saint-Viaud, about 50 km from Nantes in Western France.

“The idea was to bury them, about 20 centimetres down, to try and evaluate, to measure, the quality of life in the soil.”

After two months underground, bugs worms and fungus had shredded them, proving there was life in the soil.