India, Oct. 28 -- What if a pair of white cotton underwear could reveal whether a farm's soil was biologically active? For Ontario farmer Blake Vince, that idea became the basis of an unconventional soil-health experiment. By burying cotton briefs for about two months and then digging them up, Vince and other farmers behind the "Soil Your Undies" campaign created a simple visual test for biological activity. In healthier, biologically active soil, microorganisms break down the cotton more rapidly, leaving less fabric behind.

John Deere's The Furrow later reported that underwear buried in no-till fields with cover crops in southwestern Ontario typically had about 47% of the fabric missing, compared with about 2% in conventionally tilled f...