Group Contest Day & Drive back

 We have come to the last day of the competition! Our team was SO excited for the group pits; we established a really strong team bond and dynamic and were excited to see what we could do. We competed with lots of other teams from around the Midwest for the group pits since they were also coming from far away. 

Starting the day with a team stretch.

Then it was off to the races! We were on a private farm, and got to see great examples of colluvium and residuum in these pits. UMN has a tradition of going barefoot in the group pits at competitions. It might not look like it from the pictures, but we did our best! We were navigating through many cow piles, if you know what I mean, but still kept the tradition alive. The first pit we have was classified as rhodic, which means that it has very deep red colors.

The judgers discussing the pit.

Texture team focusing in

Color team working hard

Look at this beautiful rhodic soil! 

Our last pit of the contest was colluvium over residuum in the beautiful Piedmont. There were very strong clays and gorgeous colors.

 

We ended by packing up into our cars and beginning the trek home. Since having done the ride before, we were able to shave off a couple hours off the drive time (safely of course). We made it back to St. Paul Campus on Saturday morning. We were all glad to be home, but sad that such a fun journey had ended. We placed 15th in the competition at the end of the day. We are so happy and proud. I think I speak for everyone when I say we had the absolute time of our lives and an amazing adventure. 

A massive thank you to everyone who has supported the team!! From the bottom of our hearts, thank you, thank you, thank you! We would not have been able to do this without you. Thank you for helping us see amazing soil, learn so much, and be a part of the soil community. 

Don’t log off quite yet this year! We have a fantastic team traveling to the NACTA competition in Normal, IL this month. They will do amazing, we know it! We are also planning field days for more students to see pits, so stay tuned! 

 

Individual Contest Day

 For individual contest day, we were HYPED! One of the most fun things about individual competitions is that we have no idea where we are going! We met in a Bass Pro parking lot and started off the day with team stretches and cheers!

Forming the UMN! We then followed the caravan to an educational forest. We were ready to go!

The site was amazing; there was a mix of coastal plain sediment and piedmont soils as we moved down the hill. We got to see great examples of plinthite, discontinuities between depositional events, and stratified structures (indicating low pedogenic development). Please enjoy these sneaky pictures of our judgers hard at work during the competition!

Sampling from the pit face

One really cool thing about this competition is that while not all of our judgers could go to the individual pits, the rest of our competitors got to compete in group judging! We formed a team with Texas A&M and had a lot of fun getting to know them and learning from each other as we completed pits together.

Some of the pit faces from the group competition!

After the competition, we all came back together and enjoyed some delicious catered barbeque. Because we were in an educational forest, we decided to go on a hike around the area! There were so many signs explaining the trees (which many of our judgers were able to guess before seeing the sign), farming equipment, and other ecological scientific research (including the bug trap to monitor population change pictured here). We ended the day with a trip to Waffle House since we don’t have those in Minnesota. It was then off to bed to prepare for the group competition the next day! Here are pictures from the educational forest!

 

We love our assistant coaches!! 

 

Day 4: Last Practice Day!

 Crazy times it’s the last day of practice pits and it’s team flannel day! Team flannel day is a competition tradition, and you bet we were out there rocking it. 

Yay flannels!

Started off the day with 1 pit and 2 parent materials then human transported material in the next! 

You can see the sediment at the bottom as geogenic structure, indicating low development (some kind of a transition or C horizon)

During lunch break Nic showed us his stash……. Of rock cores!! To prepare use for a true Cr horizon in the next pit. They are now treasured possessions. We love rocks, and even seeing how the rocks had been formed through high stress was so cool!

This pit contained an A and C horizon on top of an A horizon due to human transport. This is a heavily used site for teaching.   

This pit was so carved out from the Cr horizon that we could sit in it!

We love team pits!!

We ended the day with a group pit on a very steep slope (18%!!)

Back at our Air BNB, we reminisced on all the teams who had come before us, and what pride we took in being UMN soil judgers. We are so glad to be a part of the soil legacy!

Day 3: BBP and ICE CREAM

 Today was the day we saw alluvium in a drainage way AND a floodplain, you could see the stratification of different depositional events! 

Pit BBP3: crazy cross-stratification in alluvium from drainage way

Pit BBP4: First glimpse of a buried A horizon in a floodplain of a stream

Look at that gleyed color!

The judgers discussing the pit 

Then we saw a teaching pit and experienced fire ants for the first time! Only a little sting. Ended strong with a group pit with forested soil and ice cream with NC State Howling creamery! All us Midwesterners were happy to see so much dairy in one place. We spent the night practicing our textures and adjusting to the kaolinitic clays. Team meeting is always the best way to end the night! 

Practice Day #2

 On practice day #2, we got to see some absolutely beautiful soils. We saw soil near a drainage way that was composed of all colluvium (soil that had gone down a slope and ended up forming a profile). You can see the beautiful red colors! 

This next pit was one of our favorites. It was deemed “The Joker” for its large almost “smile” of rock fragments (called a stone line). A large rock line is indicative of colluvium over another material from a lag in deposition as rocks moved down a slope. 

The soil was also sparkly! The mica in the rocks that formed these soils had beautiful shine, and left our hands looking like we had dipped them in glitter! 

We love soil!

This day we got to see some extra pits that NCSU had dug and shared a team pit with a few other schools. It has been really fun getting to know the other teams! Ended the day with a full catena of a hillslope colluvium on piedmont residuum!

Practice Day #1

We were very excited for the first practice day! We started out the day on coastal plain sediments, which are located in the Eastern part of the state. The colors on these soils differ from those in the Piedmont, as they are generally yellower. 

Judgers looking at soil samples from the pitInvestigating in muddy conditions!

We also were practicing diagnosing plinthite in our soil horizons. Plinthite is a mix of clay, quartz and other materials. It is often characterized by stratified, red redox colors. For a true plinthite test, you would need to pull out chunks of the soil, let it dry for two days, and then slake it (put in water and see what dissolves). Plinthite should irreversibly harden when exposed to oxygen. However, in an hour-long contest, this is not possible. We had to practice identifying pieces that were harder than the others, but might still break under great pressure. 

Here are some redox concentrations with plinthite!

The judgers learning about plinthite!

We also saw very sandy soils! The picture above is a sandy soil characterized as “grossarenic”, meaning it had over 100cm of sandy material at the top! The E horizon (where the clay has eluviated) is also very prominent.
This led us to be very curious about all the new things we would see this week! We ended the day with a team meal and recap of the soils.

 

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.