I get up early and the guys are
ready by 6:30 for our 7:00 am departure, then I see a team leaving and remember
that we have to be at the NRCS office at 7:00, so we gather up all and leave at
7:45. Without much traffic we still
arrive in time. We travel for 30 minutes
to a farm about 13 miles from our meeting place.
The contest starts under cloudy, dark skies
with the radar showing rain on the way. The first site is completed in the dry and
after 50 minutes the teams change places.
Minnesota does a great job on this site and scores 286/294 for 93%, At the next site that has a Btx1 and Btx2 the
rain begins and the team has to work under an umbrella. They still are able to collect their samples
but their coloring suffers along with determining the brittleness of the Btx
horizons.
At ten we are headed back to the motel to clean up and wait for the
contest awards which are scheduled for 2 pm.
We have some lunch, then stop for coffee and fill out post cards that
will be sent to the donors who helped support our trip. We arrive at the school at 2:00 and here the
awards will now be at 3. At three
nothing happens and eventually at 4:10 the Awards start. Virginia Tech is first, Maryland second and
Iowa State was third. We don’t see the placing’s
but do know we did not make the top 10 team or total and no Minnesotan broke
into the top 10. I guess we won’t know our placing’s until he sends us a
copy. At 4:30 we are on the road to Minnesota.
The trip home is long. We find two road construction areas going
north in to Pennsylvania and waste and hour.
We finally get off the freeway and cut through Washington Penn., and
connect with 74 west. We have to detour
around Indianapolis around 11 pm as they are having a very bad
thunderstorm. We stop for gas and driver
changes. Nora has a close call as a guy
misses his off ramp and comes back onto the freeway and almost hits us in the
side.
Tom and Blair take us across Ill
and Wisconsin from midnight to 6:30 when we stop at the Norske Nook in Osseo
Wisconsin. I have eggs, taters and
blueberry crumble pie. All have a good
breakfast and some take a piece of pie for later. We arrive at the soils barn, unload and I
take the kids home to their appartments. We have completed a very successful
National Soil Judging trip to West Virginia.
We have learned a lot and had a good time visiting with students and
professors from other campuses. I
learned that next year the National will be at Plattville Wisconsin.
Results: Minnesota finishes in 15th place at the
National Soil Judging Contest, hosted by West Virginia University in Morgantown
West Virginia. Team members this spring
were the same five students that competed at the regional in South Dakota in
October 2011. The
team members were Melissa Collins-Rutter
who lives in Minneapolis and is a Global Studies major with a minor in
Sustainable Agriculture. Thomas Bolas
is a senior in ESPM living in St. Paul.
Kate Edmond is a Senior in ESPM and is from Hopkins, Minnesota. Blair Bollig, an ESPM senior, is also from
Hopkins/Minnentonka area of the Twin Cities.
Nora Newsom an ESPM senior is from Chicago and New Hampshire, and also
calls Northern Minnesota home. The team
finished 15th place in the team judging, but were in 3rd
place after the first site where they only missed 9 points out of 243. However, at team pit 2 the rain started in
the 40 degree temperatures and the fragipan that was in horizon 4 and 5 was
missed by the Minnesotans. They just
don’t see very many in the home state,
especially in the rain which made the brittle properties of the fragipan less
than brittle and more like mud. In the individual
three pits, Nora finished in 15th
place out of the 84 contestants. Virginia Tech was 1st, Maryland 2nd
and Iowa State was 3rd.
A
great learning experience was enjoyed by all the contestants from the 21 teams
that traveled to West Virginia. Next
year the National is in Platteville Wisconsin.
