With soil knives, scorecards, and endless enthusiasm, college students from across the country compete for the Stanley Cup of soils—and learn how to protect an increasingly threatened resource.
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With soil knives, scorecards, and endless enthusiasm, college students from across the country compete for the Stanley Cup of soils—and learn how to protect an increasingly threatened resource.
June 24, 2025
The annual National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest is a place for aspiring soil scientists to gather before they head into the job market. This year, that market is less certain, as a major employer—the federal government—is cutting positions. (Photo: Getty Images)
On an early spring morning in central Wisconsin, the hills were still and serene under a frosty grey sky. Then the fight songs began. More than 200 students from 27 colleges and universities across the U.S. had converged in Portage County for an unlikely competition. Their arena was not a court, a field, or a pool, but a pit dug five feet into the sandy red earth. Shouts of “Go Terps!” and “Hail Purdue!” erupted as the competitors fired themselves up to walk into the underbelly of the world.
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Each year at the National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest, students gather to classify soils based on their color, texture, and structure. The team whose analyses most closely match those of professional soil scientists return to campus with a gleaming 3-foot trophy, the coveted Stanley Cup of soils.
There is more than school pride at stake, however. This competition teaches the next generation of soil scientists how to manage the soils used to grow our food and support our agricultural infrastructure. Their work helps farmers produce more nutritious crops, combat erosion, and capture and store carbon underground. As the Trump administration’s budget cuts put the field of soil science on shaky ground, students here remain committed to treating soil as the life-giving—and downright competition-worthy—resource that it is.
Students receive instructions ahead of soil-judging. The national competition has taken place every year since 1961, including one virtual contest during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo: Emma Loewe)
Prepping for the Contest
The first National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest was held in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1961 to give students more hands-on experience analyzing soils. It has occurred every year since, although in 2020, during the pandemic, it was virtual. Leading up to the contest, students learn about soil in the classrooms of their respective schools and practice analyzing it in pits around their campuses. Each fall, schools compete at regional competitions that roughly correspond to USDA Soil Survey Regions. The top schools from each region advance to the national competition in the spring, hosted by a different college each year. Teams and their coaches arrive at nationals a week early to familiarize themselves with that area’s unique soil.
“You can imagine how different the soil is in the middle of Utah than it might be in Maine or Florida,” John Galbraith, the longtime coach of Virginia Tech, 2024’s winning team, said in the lead-up to this year’s competition.
Teams can range in size from three students to more than 20. They compete both individually and as a group to most accurately describe the origin and characteristics of five “competition pits” over two days. These pits expose the top five to six “horizons,” or layers, of soil, telling a story of the land.
This year’s contest was held April 27 through May 2 this year. Hosting an outdoor event in spring in Wisconsin is always a gamble, since winter’s chill and precipitation tend to stick around well into April, and on Day One of the contest, Mother Nature dealt a losing hand.
It was 45 degrees and dumping rain as the students and their coaches gathered in the parking lot of a local nature reserve near this year’s host school, the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point (UWSP). From there, they were guided to the competition site, which had been kept a strict secret all week.
Once they arrived at the site, a wooded lakefront property called Lions Camp, students were forbidden from looking up anything about its soils online. “If your cell phone comes out, you will be disqualified,” Bryant Scharenbroch, an associate soil science professor at UWSP and the lead organizer of this year’s competition, bellowed over a loudspeaker. “No warnings!”
The poncho-clad students sloshed nervously towards the soil pits. Over the course of the morning, they would each spend an hour individually “judging” three pits. Judging requires filling in a scorecard with the color, texture, structure, and water retention abilities of each soil horizon, and using this to estimate the soil’s classification, how it formed, and how it can be best managed or utilized.
Students use a color book to determine the exact shade of each soil layer; a triangle to classify soil, based on its mix of clay, silt, and sand; a soil knife to get a feel for the texture of each horizon; and finally, a muffin tin to transport soil samples in and out of the pit. Their hands, though, are their most important tools. Throughout the day, students need to manually squeeze, squash, and smash the soil to get a sense of its composition, down to its exact percentage of clay versus sand.
At 10 a.m., the first timer went off, and the competitors descended into the soaked earth.
The national contest aims to give students hands-on experience evaluating soil. An affinity for soil is apparent in student apparel and tools as they compete. (Photos: Emma Loewe)
Digging Into Wisconsin’s Glacial Soils
The soil horizons in Portage County, Wisconsin, reveal a glacial history. The Laurentide ice sheet advanced and retreated over this region until roughly 11,000 years ago, depositing gravel, sand, and other sediment across the landscape along the way. The resulting soils are sandy and dotted with rocks and tend to have relatively low water retention, making them good candidates for irrigation systems.
Portage County’s glacial soils support an agricultural industry that produces $372 million worth of food (mostly vegetables like potatoes, sweet corn, and peas annually as of the 2022 census. The 951 farms in the county provide 74 percent of the state’s crop sales.
While more than 50 farms in Portage County top 1,000 acres, the typical farm size here is smaller—roughly 287 acres, or two-thirds the national average.
“We have a lot of very small-scale farming, an active farmers’ market, and a lot of local growers,” Scharenbroch said. “It’s something that’s really cool and unique about our area.”
To show students the range of farming styles in the region and how they impacted the soil, Scharenbroch took them to visit a handful of local producers during their practice week. There, students saw how farming practices like machine tilling caused soil layers to be tighter and less permeable, making it harder for water to penetrate. This left soil on the surface vulnerable to blowing away during winds and storms.
Farms that used techniques like compost application and cover cropping had deeper, darker-brown top layers that were better at absorbing moisture and less at risk of erosion. “One of the biggest things is to keep the soil covered,” said Joel Gebhard, a soil scientist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) who helped plan the contest. “If soil is bare, it’s going to get removed somehow.”
At Lions Camp, soggy students wrapped up their analyses of each pit. “Pit monitors”—mostly employees or alums of UWSP—collected their scorecards and walked them inside to a cafeteria where the coaches had gathered for grading. First, they needed to align on the correct answers for each scorecard. In a room full of soil science academics, this was more contentious than you might imagine. Every coach had their own opinion, and matters that may have seemed trivial (say, whether students need to place a dash through empty boxes, or leave them blank) were grounds for impassioned debate.
There was good reason for the pedantics. Because soil varies from state to state, region to region, and even mile to mile, and because there are over 20,000 ways to describe soils in the U.S., having an agreed-upon lexicon was essential. Once the coaches came to an consensus and reviewed (and re-reviewed) each student’s scorecards, the first day’s competition was complete. After hours in the dirt, students dumped their supplies into plastic buckets (some decorated with slogans, like “Loam is Home” and “Loess Lover”), piled into vans and headed back to their hotels to dry off and rest up for the second and final competition day.
Central Wisconsin provided ample soil types for judging as students competed. (Photos: Emma Loewe)
The Role of the Soil Scientist
The analysis these students perform provides practice for future careers in the soil sciences. “People who soil judge have such a big leg-up on anyone else entering soil jobs,” said Nathan Stremcha, a former UWSP soil judger who is now a soil scientist at the NRCS. “The skills directly transfer.”
The NRCS, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is one of the largest employers of soil scientists in the country, though soil scientists also work in the private sector for companies focused on bioremediation, construction, and agricultural research. Originally established in 1935 as the Soil Conservation Service, the agency was created to manage erosion and steward conservation during the Dust Bowl. Today, the NRCS manages the national Web Soil Survey, an essential database for farming, community planning, and beyond. “The database gets a hit at least every second,” Stremcha said.
Many students hope to go into a job at NRCS once they graduate—but now are unsure what will be available, given the recent federal funding cuts. Until recently, the agency was on a hiring spree. Many older employees were retiring, and it needed new soil scientists to help execute its climate-smart agriculture programs, which received $19.5 billion in funding over five years as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
“Farmers trust us, but with that comes an obligation to make sure that you have well-trained employees who are going to be out there on the farms making the best scientific recommendations to make sure we get this conservation on the ground,” NRCS Chief Terry Cosby told the 2023 Trust In Food Symposium after unlocking the IRA funds, noting that the agency was struggling to find candidates qualified to advise farmers on soil conservation.
“They’re sending us even more jobs than we have students,” Scharenbroch said on a call back in October of 2024.
“People who soil judge have such a big leg-up on anyone else entering soil jobs. The skills directly transfer.”
The promise of the field changed, however, once the Trump administration took office this year. Since January, NRCS has reduced its staff by at least 2,400 employees, while a blanket freeze on hiring remains in place across the government. The USDA has erased information on federal loans and technical assistance for climate-smart agriculture from its website (although, after a lawsuit on behalf of farmers, it now plans to restore it) and cancelled many grants that had been made through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program. In response to the USDA’s 2026 budget request, Congress is proposing $45 million in cuts to NRCS conservation operations. These moves have left farmers in limbo and federal soil science hiring at a standstill.
Coaches worry about what these cuts will mean for their students and the future of soil science at large. “My fear with having potentially fewer soil scientists around is that we’re going to have more environmental disasters and agricultural disasters that we’re not prepared to respond to appropriately,” said Jaclyn Fiola, an assistant professor of soil and environmental science at Delaware Valley University and coach of the school’s soil judging team, on a call with Civil Eats.
The job market may be fluctuating, but the next generation’s commitment to soils remains steadfast.
“Where people live, where agricultural and economic power is, how people form culture . . . It’s all based on the soil,” Sky Reinhart, a junior at the University of Idaho, said during competition weekend. “Once you learn to see the soil . . . It makes all the difference for everything.”
The Significance of Soil Surveys
Conducting a soil survey is often the first step in assigning value to a piece of land and designating its most effective and efficient use. Different types of soils are suitable for different crops, so these surveys can be instrumental for agricultural planning. Soil scientists can also work with farmers or ranchers to help them better manage soil health to reduce erosion, maximize water infiltration, and improve nutrient cycling, increasing yield.
Beyond the farm, the surveys provide information on which soils can best support infrastructure like septic systems and roads. Sometimes, they can even inform where to bury animals affected by disease outbreaks, like during the recent avian flu. Increasingly, they have important climate implications as well.
“A lot of our carbon sequestration models are based on numbers that were collected by soil surveyors,” Fiola said. “That’s a really important reason that we need these maps to be accurate.”
The climate applications of soil attract many of today’s students to the field. “Almost 50 percent of the students I interact with are coming into soil science because they want to make an impact on climate-change issues,” Scharenbroch said.
As a result, some regional and national contests now ask students to describe soil indicators like salinization from sea level rise, identify functioning wetlands, or calculate a soil’s carbon-storage potential.
Digging Deep, Despite an Uncertain Future
On Day Two of the contest, the unpredictable weather continued. Rain fell in fits and spurts over Scharenbroch’s home, which is near a glacial moraine and littered with unique deposits. (Rumor has it the Web Soil Survey played a role in his house hunting.) “These soils are really interesting,” Gebhard said, motioning to the two massive pits excavated in the front yard. “They’re messy because they’re right on this edge where glaciers went back and forth.”
During group judging day, each school analyzes pits together, aligning on a scorecard as a team. A few teams are assigned to a pit at a time, and they alternate between spending 10 minutes underground and 10 minutes above it.
Once the timer began at Scharenbroch’s, each team split off to stake their claim to a spot on the pit’s perimeter, setting up a tight circle to keep discussions out of earshot of the competition.
“Once you learn to see the soil . . . It makes all the difference for everything.”
“You texture, I color?,” Sean Cary, a sophomore at the University of Rhode Island, confirmed with his two teammates (the smallest team of the competition—fitting, they joked, as the smallest state). By splitting up tasks, the team could spend more time on each analysis and double-check each other’s work at the end. Rhode Island’s time in the pit was spent scanning the horizons closely, as if searching for a rare library book. Outside of it, they quietly deliberated on the soil’s properties and perhaps more importantly, its practical uses.
“Having the knowledge of what soils can do and how we can fix them and use them in the correct way is one of the main reasons I’m doing this,” said Cary, who is majoring in agriculture and food systems. “It’s not something that should be taken lightly, because the future of soil can affect the future of society.”
The pit monitors gave a two-minute warning to the final set of teams. Then, the contest students had spent months preparing for was over. Cary and his teammates dumped out their muffin tins, turned in their scorecards, and swished their hands in a water cup like used paintbrushes. When asked if they were happy that soil judging was over for the year, they said they’d miss it.
The winning team, from the University of Idaho, from left: Hannah Poland, Daniel Middelhoven, Tegan Macy, Sky Reinhardt, Coach Paul Tietz, Logan Mann, Jacob Flick, Coach MaryBeth Gavin. (Photo: Emma Loewe)
Crowning a Winner
All that was left was the awards ceremony. This would take place under a park pavilion in Steven’s Point later that afternoon, leaving students ample opportunity to get nervous about the results. Some distracted themselves by tossing a Frisbee around the pavilion’s perimeter; others sang old sea shanties as they waited. The trophy that every school was after sat up front: the Bidwell-Reisig, a two-handed behemoth nearly as old as the competition itself, named after its designers—a Kansas State soil professor and one of his students. Engraved with the winners of the past, the trophy’s 2025 spot lay blank in waiting.
At long last, Scharenbroch asked the group to gather round. Many students remained standing at the pavilion’s edge, too antsy to sit down.
First came the individual results: “In first place, with 852 points,” Scharenbroch announced to a rapt audience, “JosiLee Scott!”
The pindrop-quiet pavilion exploded in cheers. The West Virginia University senior walked stoically to accept her prize—a plaque and, naturally, some local cheese curds. She quickly ushered her coach up for a big bear hug and a photo as a well-earned smile spread across her face.
The grand prize, which went to the school with the highest combined group and individual scores, went to The University of Idaho—the Vandal’s first win in over 35 years of competing. Six Idaho students and their two coaches looked at each other in disbelief as they ambled up to accept the trophy. Some shed tears as they hoisted it high, the applause of their fellow soil enthusiasts filling the misty air.
The University of Delaware and The University of Maryland rounded out the top three schools, bringing the 2025 contest to a close. Some students were already planning for the next one. For others, this was the last competition of their scholastic careers. And what came next was as uncertain as the weather of a Wisconsin spring.
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