Each year at the National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest, students gather to classify soils based on their color, texture, and structure. The team whose analyses most closely match those of professional soil scientists return to campus with a gleaming 3-foot trophy, the coveted Stanley Cup of soils.
There is more than school pride at stake, however. This competition teaches the next generation of soil scientists how to manage the soils used to grow our food and support our agricultural infrastructure. Their work helps farmers produce more nutritious crops, combat erosion, and capture and store carbon underground. As the Trump administration’s budget cuts put the field of soil science on shaky ground, students here remain committed to treating soil as the life-giving—and downright competition-worthy—resource that it is.
Students receive instructions ahead of soil-judging. The national competition has taken place every year since 1961, including one virtual contest during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo: Emma Loewe)
The first National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest was held in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1961 to give students more hands-on experience analyzing soils. It has occurred every year since, although in 2020, during the pandemic, it was virtual. Leading up to the contest, students learn about soil in the classrooms of their respective schools and practice analyzing it in pits around their campuses. Each fall, schools compete at regional competitions that roughly correspond to USDA Soil Survey Regions. The top schools from each region advance to the national competition in the spring, hosted by a different college each year. Teams and their coaches arrive at nationals a week early to familiarize themselves with that area’s unique soil.
“You can imagine how different the soil is in the middle of Utah than it might be in Maine or Florida,” John Galbraith, the longtime coach of Virginia Tech, 2024’s winning team, said in the lead-up to this year’s competition.
Teams can range in size from three students to more than 20. They compete both individually and as a group to most accurately describe the origin and characteristics of five “competition pits” over two days. These pits expose the top five to six “horizons,” or layers, of soil, telling a story of the land.
This year’s contest was held April 27 through May 2 this year. Hosting an outdoor event in spring in Wisconsin is always a gamble, since winter’s chill and precipitation tend to stick around well into April, and on Day One of the contest, Mother Nature dealt a losing hand.
It was 45 degrees and dumping rain as the students and their coaches gathered in the parking lot of a local nature reserve near this year’s host school, the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point (UWSP). From there, they were guided to the competition site, which had been kept a strict secret all week.
Once they arrived at the site, a wooded lakefront property called Lions Camp, students were forbidden from looking up anything about its soils online. “If your cell phone comes out, you will be disqualified,” Bryant Scharenbroch, an associate soil science professor at UWSP and the lead organizer of this year’s competition, bellowed over a loudspeaker. “No warnings!”
The poncho-clad students sloshed nervously towards the soil pits. Over the course of the morning, they would each spend an hour individually “judging” three pits. Judging requires filling in a scorecard with the color, texture, structure, and water retention abilities of each soil horizon, and using this to estimate the soil’s classification, how it formed, and how it can be best managed or utilized.
Students use a color book to determine the exact shade of each soil layer; a triangle to classify soil, based on its mix of clay, silt, and sand; a soil knife to get a feel for the texture of each horizon; and finally, a muffin tin to transport soil samples in and out of the pit. Their hands, though, are their most important tools. Throughout the day, students need to manually squeeze, squash, and smash the soil to get a sense of its composition, down to its exact percentage of clay versus sand.
At 10 a.m., the first timer went off, and the competitors descended into the soaked earth.
