Pictures from the URI Soil Judging teams trip to Oklahoma. Photo Courtesy of: Matt Bauer
The University of Rhode Island’s Soil Judging Team traveled to Oklahoma for a week-long soil judging competition the week of March 27 and came in third place overall, with one student coming in first place for the individual competition.
Matt Bauer, a graduate student studying environmental science and management at URI and a member of the soil judging team, said that the term “soil judging” is misleading. According to him, more of what the team does is soil identification.
“We have what are called soil pits, so they dug a hole in the ground, and typically it’s about four feet, maybe up to five feet, deep,” Mark Stolt, professor in the department of natural resources science and faculty advisor for the team, said. “Depending on where you are in the landscape, the soils are different. So the soil in Oklahoma is much different than they are here.”
Of the soil in the soil pits, the team of students only classified about 150 centimeters of soil, Stalt said.
The team fills out a card with all of the different ways to identify the soil, and then the card is compared to that of a professional, and whichever team’s card is the most similar to the professional’s card and has the most correct answers, wins the competition, according to Bauer.
“You’re identifying the different horizons, which are different layers of soil, and then you have to color each horizon, like say what color the soil is and what texture it is, like if it’s sand, silt or clay, and then there’s another section for like how easy it would be to install things like a septic system or for a house with a basement,” Bauer said.
The team of students from URI competes in two soil judging competitions throughout the course of each school year, one a regional competition and one a national competition, according to Stolt. The regional competition consists of nine other schools in the Northeast region and was hosted at Bloomsburg State University in Pennsylvania this year.
The teams that place in the regional competition are the teams who move on to compete at nationals, Stolt said. This past fall, the URI team placed second at the regional competition, landing them a spot to travel to Oklahoma for nationals this spring.
Each university is allowed to bring 10 students on their team to the regional competition each year, Stolt said, but for the national competition, they’re only allowed to bring four. The team consists of students in Stolt’s NRS 351: Soil Morphology Practicum class, which runs in the fall semester.
The national competition consists of individual judging, where each student judges the soil alone and fills out their own identification card and group judging, where the four students from each school get to work together to fill out one identification card, Stolt said. It is a combination of each individual score and the group score that determines the places in the overall category of the competition.
This year, URI placed third in the overall category, and one URI student, Braden Fleming, came in first out of 150 students for the individual category.
Stolt called the soil judging competitions a “really good experience” for the students, as they get to essentially mimic what professionals do.
“Someone that’s interested in this type of profession, if they are on the soil judging team, they usually have a step up on other students in getting jobs, because professionals already know that they’re out here in the field practicing,” Stolt said.