Fun fact — did you know mustard can be used to measure soil health? I didn’t, until I saw this video.

This is from the Soil Health Alliance for Research & Education (SHARE) field day at the Arlington Research Farm in Madison, Wis., Aug. 7. Research assistant Logan Barr is using a mustard liquid mix to draw out earthworms. Logan, how’s this work?

“It’s just mustard powder, and we mixed about ¼ cup with a gallon of water. The way it works is the mustard oil is an irritant to earthworms. What we’re going to do is add it into the soil, and it’s going to draw up the earthworms. The amount of earthworms we see is going to help us know how healthy our soil is.  

“The field that we’re doing this in is a second-year alfalfa field. It was tilled last year, but it usually has some pretty good soil structure to it, and we’re hoping to see here that there’s quite a few more earthworms in this system than a conventional corn system.”   

 Now, I’ll be thinking about that when I put mustard on my hot dog at the Brewers game this weekend.

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.