An idea that started in a field in Merlin, Ont. has won the Ig Nobel prize in Switzerland. It is awarded to science that makes a person laugh, then think.
The idea came from Anne Verhallen who was working for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food at the time. She thought burying cotton would measure microbial activity, so the trial was to bury cotton in two fields, one that was conventionally farmed, the other that had cover crops and no till management.\
And the cotton she chose was men’s underwear briefs, prompting farmer Woody Van Arkel to call it the “soil your undies” project.
Two months after they were buried, the one in the conventionally-farmed field was fine, the one in the no-till, cover-crop field was decomposed.
And that became an easy way for farmers to get a measure of their soil health.
The 2026 Ig Nobel soil science award was presented recently 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.”
Their research was simply a larger number of fields and briefs than the first triial 11 years earlier in Chatham-Kent.