2026 National Soil Judging Contest - Day 0 : The Virginia Piedmont

On Friday, March 20th, we visited the property of Scott and Shea Bambu near Halifax Virginia in the Virginia Piedmont region. We learned about their goat operation, the challenges of crop and pasture production on Piedmont Ultisols, and dug and described two beautiful soil pits. For many team members this was the first time describing soil colors on the 2.5YR and 10R pages, and feeling very fine-textured, kaolinitic soil materials that by hand texture are very different from our Midwestern mixed mineralogy soils!

A classic Piedmont Ultisol formed in residuum from metamorphic rocks

The team with Scott and Shea Bambu, with a representation of several soil profiles from their property and Starbuck the goat on the left.

2026 National Soil Judging Contest - Day -1!

 The first order of business for the 2026 National Soil Judging contest was traveling from Borlaug Hall to Clarksville, VA. The drove in shifts to complete the ~18 hour journey from Minnesota to Virginia. This took us across some familiar and not so familiar landscapes! The glaciated north central plains and Prairie Peninsula Region, the Alleghany Plateau, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and finally to the Virginia Piedmont, where we rested prior to an amazing Day 0 field day at Scott and Shea Bambu's property near Halifax, Virginia.

The team just prior to leaving Borlaug Hall on March 18th. Snow on the ground but a beautiful spring day!

Our journey from Minnesota to Virginia!

Give to the Max Day 2025!

 Hello again! 

The team has been working hard this semester to develop our judging skills. Through weekly meetings and field days on the weekends, we practice texturing, coloring, and information from past profiles in competitions to practice key classification skills. Since many classifications can influence a lot about a profile, especially texture, such as water-holding capacity, suitability for building applications (like road implementation), and the defining of soil layers, we make this a key part of our meetings! Additionally, we have been learning more about our locations and geological development for two competitions this spring: Soil Judging Nationals, hosted by North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC, and the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture (NACTA) competition hosted by Illinois State University in Normal, IL. 

This is where we need your help! In order to get there, we need your support today, 11/20/2025 on Give to the Max today. Contests are amazing learning opportunities and a chance to apply what we have practiced. However, they are expensive. If you are able, please help us get to North Carolina and Illinois by donating through this link: https://crowdfund.umn.edu/participants/soil-judging. 

Thank you for your support of the team, and we will continue to keep you updated on our activities all year! 

Signing off, 

Cecily

Competition Day, Regionals 2025

We could not have asked for better weather on competition day in Omaha! Dressed in all-out maroon and gold, we met in the parking lot of a hotel to join the convoy of cars headed to the competition site, and get excited to compete!

The team ready to rumble! 

The team listening to pre-contest words of wisdom from head coach Nic.

Continuing the team tradition of painting buckets before each contest, all with soil themes, of course!

After seeing some mollisols in uplands, floodplains, and various hillslope positions, the team placed fourth with team judging! Gabrielle placed 7th and Jake placed 4th as individuals! Overall, we placed 4th at the competition, securing our spot to compete in the National Soil Judging Competition in North Carolina in the spring! We are so proud of our team, and could not have done it without the hard work of everyone, those traveling and not, as well as our amazing coaches (Nora Pearson, Nate Lund, Anna Windels, and Nic Jelinski) and supporters. We are so excited for nationals this spring and to see where our team can go! Go Gophers!

Signing off,

Cecily Greblo

Regional Competition Practice Days

This September 27-October 3, we participated in the Region V Soil Judging Contest, hosted by the University of Nebraska-Omaha. We started our travels by visiting the University of Minnesota Research Center in Lamberton, MN. They kindly dug two pits for us, where we practiced both our team and individual pit skills and saw some classic Minnesota mollisols in corn fields. After practice, we made a delicious group dinner and explored some of the landscape in preparation for understanding what to look for in the competition. 

Judgers discussing the profile of the first pit. 

On Day 1 of practice, we saw some new soil structures we calibrated to, including a geogenic structure that looks like stratified soil in a pit.

A stratified soil ped.

Soil Judgers working on a team pit in a footslope (low slope)!

Wading through the pit in a floodplain! 

We learned a lot this day about classifying aquic soils - not just by looking at redox features, but by considering how those features work together with the hillslope position to define an aquic soil!

On day 2, we saw an amazing argiaboll - I think we all gasped when we saw this soil. This soil had a leached albic horizon (the light white layer) that results from the leaching of clay and nutrients like iron into a lower layer, causing a large change in texture between layers.

On Day 2 we also got to see some paleoterrace soils, which are soils at least partially formed on old terraces that used to have rivers flowing through.

Judgers hard at work!

On Day 3, we had the infamous flannel day!

We also saw loess puppies/puppens, soft calcium carbonate concretions, formed in wind-blown silty soil from calcium carbonates that had moved down into the profile and reprecipitated as these chunks. 

For the first time in the competition, we saw some sandy soils formed on floodplains; these soils were so sandy that it was difficult to get samples out!

Listening to Head Coach Nic talk about this floodplain soil. 

A profile from one of the floodplain soils, where we can see a developed “A” horizon, and stratification in the sandy, less developed horizons. 

We also got to talk about colluviated soils (soil moving down a slope to form soils at the bottom) and to differentiate parent materials from colluviated events.

Competition day is next!

Signing off,

Cecily Greblo (co-captain)

September Field Days!

 Hi Everyone! We are so excited to be back and practicing our soil skills. We had our first field day earlier this September at Chuck Clanton’s farm, a former UMN BBE professor and advocate for sustainable farming practices. He dug us two pits along a hillslope in SE MN, and we practiced describing the soil pits while simulating competition timing, completing one pit as individuals and one in teams. We had a delicious team lunch with food
brought by our head coach, Nic, and learned more about the history of the farm and sustainable agricultural management from Chuck. 

The farm uses a 10-year rotation method, with corn and soybeans planted each year between perennial ground cover. This helps restore organic matter and fertility (including planting nitrogen-fixing legumes) in the soil, while reducing resources and inputs needed for the annual crops. These soils were so much fun to look at because we saw some really cool features! The dark circles pictured are crotovinas, where animals have dug into and mixed organic material deeper into the soil (like gophers!). We also saw beautiful mollisols (soils with a thick and dark top horizon). 

The hillslope positions of our two pits. 

Upper backslope pit. We saw a typic hapludoll with lots of krotovinas and worm channels.

At the toeslope, we saw an endoaquoll with a thick, dark, mollic epipedon. The biopores (here, vertical worm channels) were amazing sights to see so deep in the soil!

Hydrology in action! It was a wet end to summer and start of fall, and it rained right before we visited the soil pits. Thank you to Chuck for pumping water out of the pits so we could see more of the soil profile!

Our second field day was at Jake Olson’s house (soil judging co-captain!), whose dad dug us a pit at their family farm west of the Twin Cities. We completed this pit in teams in the same competition style to practice completing a card in the time allotted for a competition, which is one hour. We got to see another gorgeous mollisol (these types cover a large area of Minnesota) with some calcium carbonate deposits, showing where calcium carbonates had leached down over time to create visible white streaks. The best part about finding these is watching them fizz when you pour weak hydrochloric acid over them. A bonus of being on Jake’s farm was seeing their resident peacocks and raiding their apple trees! 

Getting out to see pits early in the season is very important for our team so we can get out into some pits before the ground freezes. Thank you so much to Chuck, Matt Lundberg (NRCS District Conservationist), and Bailey (soil judging coach) for organizing this day. Thank you to Jake and his family for digging us a pit and providing us with so much food. Stay tuned for our Regional Competition update! 

Signing off, 

Cecily Greblo (co-captain)

2025 Nationals: Contest Days + Results!

We had wrapped up our fourth day of practice, with some classic outwash plain soils

(great for potato farming) and some complicated pits in moraine landscapes, one in a

depression with a buried soil!

The team on flannel day! Back row, L to R: Cecily Greblo, Nate Lund (assistant coach),

Nic Jelinski (coach), Jake Olson, Finn Porter, Bailey Tangen (assistant coach).

Front row, L to R: Katrina Nelson (assistant coach), Dustin Brooks, Annika Selstad,

Jenna Christenson, Amital Shaver (captain), Anna Windels.

On Thursday, we were off to the races with the individual contest! It was a soggy day of

competition in the forest, but the team stayed strong and our bright spirits brought us

through the day. It's the Minnesota way!

Muddy conditions in the contest pits, but soil judgers are determined.

Soil judger Anna (right) getting in her time at the control face.

After getting warm and dry, the team rested up to prepare for team contest day on

Friday. Our school spirit was strong and the team pits were a highlight for everyone,

as usual! The weather held up a bit better, which was a relief. 

Pit crew deciding horizon depths.

All hands on deck to finish classification and interpretations on the back of the card.

The team was in high spirits after finishing the last pit of the contest. Go Gophs!

Grading wrapped up and we headed to the awards ceremony. We are excited to

announce that the University of Minnesota scored sixth overall and eighth in

group judging! This is the second best overall finish that the Gophers have earned

in a National Contest! The team is ecstatic. 

We are proud of all of the work and dedication that went into this contest–on the

part of the contest organizers, sponsors, our coaches, and our soil judgers. It has truly

been a fantastic contest, with a commitment to learning and team cohesion. We are so

grateful to all of the donors that made this experience possible. Gophers love soil, and

we are thankful for the opportunity to immerse ourselves in soil science with an

incredible group of people. Go Gophs!!!