Swiss scientist soils underpants, wins silly science prize

Franz Bender, a Swiss soil ecologist, and his team of researchers recruited 1,000 citizen scientists across Switzerland and had them bury and dig up underpants to study soils. (Gabriela Braendle/Agroscope)Social SharingLISTEN | Why citizen scientists buried thousands of undies:Quirks and Quarks9:24Why citizen scientists buried thousands of undiesFranz Bender convinced a thousand people to soil their underwear — and he wasn’t asking for bowel movements.

In 2021, the Swiss soil ecologist and his team recruited 1,000 citizen scientists to bury and dig up underwear around Switzerland in an effort to better understand soil and soil health. In September, the research won an Ig Nobel Prize, which is awarded annually for research that makes people laugh and then think.

The effort yielded some surprising results for the researchers — and the participants when they unearthed their underwear, which the hungry underground microbes had often consumed down to almost nothing.

“I think this moment when people dig out the underwear and look at it, it was really a revealing moment for many,” Bender, who works at the Agroscope agricultural research centre in Zurich, told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald. 

“It’s fascinating to see that, yeah, soil is really alive, and there’s a lot of life underground that we usually don’t think about.”

The research was published in Plants People Planet in Aug. 2026.

But Bender isn’t the first person to put underwear underground. In fact, the effort has roots in Canada.

The Innovative Farmers Association of Ontario started burying underwear in Ontario fields around 2015, farmer Alan Kruszel said. People had been burying cotton strips called assays for decades, but the farmers decided underwear was more fun.

It was so much fun, in fact, that Kruszel suggested taking it national. So, in 2017, the national “Soil Your Undies” campaign was born.

“It was just a marvelous hit,” Kruszel, a board member with the Soil Conservation Council of Canada, told Quirks & Quarks. 

“It was to get people to think about soil as a living, breathing ecosystem, and to raise awareness of the importance about soil and soil health.”

And it wasn’t just farmers and soil researchers who wanted to put what normally goes under our pants into the earth underneath our feet.

“I buried undies with all kinds of different people. We did it with senators, we did it with deans of universities, school kids, the Canadian Ag Museum in Ottawa did it with us,” Kruszel said.

“Garden clubs … you have no idea how much fun a group of little old ladies had with holding up soiled undies.”

A colleague of Bender's took notice, and suggested trying it in Switzerland. They hosted a small event where families buried underwear in the soil.

“The Swiss media just loved it. It was all over the place in the media,” Bender said. “Then another collaborator approached us [and said] ‘Hey, why don’t we start a citizen science project out of this and do something really big with it?’”

Results of underwear buried in soil in arable land, lawns, and gardens on display in Switzerland. Soil ecologist Franz Bender said the study showed the underwear had the most decomposition in gardens and the least in lawns, with arable fields and grasslands in between. (Prisca Koller/Agroscope)Bender and his research team needed 1,000 citizen scientists, but they got around 1,400 applications, so they had to select for geographically balanced distribution around Switzerland. Bender and his team shipped the volunteers two pairs of size small organic, cotton underwear, 12 teabags for comparison with the underwear, and some detailed instructions.

“So we drew clear pictures how they should be inserted in the soil, to which depth, and where the teabags should be placed,” Bender said.

The team also developed a smartphone app where participants could add additional information, such as pictures and geographical data, and answer questions about the land, such as whether it's fertilized or whether pesticides were used.

The citizen scientists dug up one pair of underwear and one set of teabags out after four weeks, and the second set of underwear and the rest of the teabags after eight weeks.

Underwear doesn’t sound like an appetizing meal, but for the microbes and other life in fertile, biologically active soil, it was delicious. Uncovered from other kinds of soil, though, the uncovered underwear looked almost wearable.

“In some instances, there was only the synthetic threads at the waist band left. The underwear was completely eaten,” Bender said. “And in other cases, the underwear still looked like almost new.”

Generally, the underwear saw the greatest decomposition in private gardens and flowerbeds, and the least decomposition in lawns. Arable fields and grasslands were somewhere in between.

Bender explained that gardens often have a lot of compost and potentially also irrigation, which create soil conditions that have a lot of nutrients, organic matter and moisture. This promotes soil biological activity, which — in turn — leads to mangled underwear.

Lawns, in contrast, don’t have much species diversity above ground, and also get cut often. The soil system under lawns therefore isn’t nearly as alive and active as it is in gardens, and the result is that some underwear buried under lawns looks more dirty than consumed.

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There were some unexpected results, though. Bender said he was surprised by how high the nutrient contents were in private gardens, and also how little the underwear decomposed in farm soil compared to his expectations.

Bender also cautions that more active, fertile soil isn't necessarily "healthier." It can be, for example, harmful to biodiversity in a forest or nature reserve.

Bender said he hopes people understand how important soil is to us, especially as human activity such as chemical use affects it in uncertain ways.

"Soil is really important to keep the cycle of life going, and we all depend on soil," he said. "When we don't know enough about soil, it's also difficult to protect it."

Asim Biswas, a professor and Canada Research Chair in digital agriculture at the University of Guelph, said that while the study is scientifically sound, its greatest value is the awareness it's brought to soil.

“It got major [media] coverage in 25 countries — that’s huge,” he said.

“The reason I feel like this was a very, very nice way of advocacy for soil, is that it’s something funny, and people tend to remember these sort of things."

Biswas seconds Bender's caution that more active, fertile soil isn't necessarily healthier, and adds there's a lot of research still to be done on the subject.

Soil scientists say burying and digging up underwear can be an effective method to measure the biological activity of soil, and it's also been an effective way of getting people interested in soil. (Gabriela Braendle/Agroscope)Joann Whalen, a professor at McGill University who studies soil, said the underwear method is a simpler, quicker and less costly alternative to chemical lab tests.

“We might see situations where somebody is interested in their soil, but they’ve never actually taken the time or had the opportunity to test it,” she said.

“With a visual test like this one, and you can just see the disintegration of the undies, you get a pretty quick idea of what’s going on in your soil."

The Soil Conservation Council of Canada also encourages it, and provides instructions.

And the exhumed Swiss underwear will see new life. Bender and his team have collaborated with a fashion designer who's already made a dress out of some of them.

"There will be more fashion items coming out of this," Bender said.