David, a soil scientist with a molecular biology PhD from Stanford, described a soil test that many farmers use: “You take a pair of tighty-whities, you bury them in the field at the beginning of the season, and you can measure the biotic life in the soil by how degraded the tighty-whities are at the end of the season.” He had learned about this low-tech soil test during a sales meeting with “pretty old-school farmers” while working for a Silicon Valley start-up that develops AI-based soil sensors and diagnostic tests. In recounting this story, he expressed admiration for the farmers’ scrappy ingenuity mixed with a sense of bewilderment. As he recalled, “We had developed this sophisticated set of models with eight or so PhDs and some very impressive tech. But our test really couldn’t beat the tighty-whities test, and it also cost the farmer a bunch of money.”

He expressed some humility in sharing the tighty-whities story with me, but ultimately, he believed that innovation in agricultural technology would soon make this “classic farmer hack” obsolete. In the meantime, the tighty-whities test provided a yardstick for David and his team to develop a product that could rival underwear in its utility and cost. To do this, they mobilized the promise of precision, something the underwear could never provide.

David is one of many engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs worldwide working on technology for agricultural production, at times referred to as AgTech or “precision agriculture.” In the context of increasingly unpredictable climate patterns and rising demand for food and biofuels, emerging agricultural technologies aim to help growers maximize crop yields, reduce synthetic inputs, and conserve water and land through digital tools. This vision of a digital revolution in agriculture requires a sensory infrastructure of networked devices—such as drones, robots, and in-ground sensors—to provide real-time data on agricultural conditions, often using machine learning and artificial intelligence.

For industry actors, the underwear test is both an object of concern and a quintessential “other” against which to define the aspirations of AgTech. Tighty-whities cannot stream real-time information, nor can they connect to a mobile app. They require neither special expertise, nor sophisticated lab instruments to translate their findings. Yet growers read the underwear for valuable data that informs their decision-making. Even as the imperatives of precision and prediction drive mainstream AgTech, the underwear test exposes competing assumptions—about how farmers can best know the farm, what counts as valuable data, and how or by whom decisions about the farm should be made. Therefore, underwear is an unlikely but revealing object for exploring the tensions raised by AgTech, and for showing how claims of obsolescence are interwoven with discourses of innovation. Digital technology increasingly mediates agricultural practices, often proposing to disrupt or revolutionize the agricultural sector with claims of increased efficiency, higher yields, and more sustainable practices. Critical questions then surface about the role of farmers, and about what kinds of farming futures are being brought into being.

A Brief History

Cotton briefs, later termed “tighty-whities,” were designed by Arthur Kneibler, who was inspired by the tight fit of a French swimsuit, as well as by the design of the jockstrap. First introduced as “jockey shorts” in 1935 by the Cooper Underwear Company, now known as Jockey, they sold out quickly at the Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago. Made of one hundred percent cotton with an elastic waistband, they had a snug, legless fit and a front Y-seam. The briefs were embraced as a revolutionary design. In the decades that followed, marketing campaigns highlighted their sex appeal. No longer a modest, invisible undergarment, they were rebranded as an article of clothing worthy of attention.

At some point, farmers transformed these undergarments into instruments of agricultural revelation. A quick internet search yields dozens of news articles and blog posts showing farmers standing in their fields, proudly holding up unearthed underwear stretched between their hands. (In the ideal scenario, only the elastic waistband remains, demonstrating abundant biotic life in the soil.) Initiatives led by agricultural research institutes, extension services, and university soil scientists have encouraged hundreds of underwear tests. Cheeky campaigns like #SoilMyUndies, shared via social media platforms and associated with regional farming networks, have spread across the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, emphasizing the importance of soil health, and encouraging no-till and reduced tillage practices.

The origins of the tighty-whities test are difficult to pin down. One California-based campaign facilitator jokingly suggested that loincloths were buried beneath the soil of the Fertile Crescent. A clearer connection can be traced to the British textile industry in the 1940s, when strips of cloth were buried in soil to measure the effectiveness of fungicides. A standardized cotton strip test was developed in the Netherlands in the 1960s and updated in the UK in the 1970s to study cellulose decomposition.¹ Although originally intended to study the properties of fabrics, it was eventually reversed to study soils. The International Biological Program used the cotton strip test to investigate decomposition cycles in various ecosystems around the world, and is often credited for the widespread adoption of the cotton strip test among environmental scientists. How exactly this practice got taken up by farmers remains a mystery, although it’s not difficult to imagine resourceful farmers using an old pair of briefs to replicate the test in their own fields.

This would not even be the first time that underwear made its way into agricultural fields. In the days when most clothing was made of natural fibers and leather, old textiles were removed from cities in Europe and added to farm fields along with sewage and manure. This practice ended during the industrial revolution, when cotton rags became valuable as material for making paper. Later on, in several European countries, the burial of natural textiles was again taken up between the great wars to build soil fertility. An even deeper history implicates underwear with the violent and racialized labor history of cotton production, the first global commodity sustained by the transatlantic slave trade. Far from being a neutral tool, the threads of cotton that make the tighty-whities test relevant to soil measurement are entangled in a long, brutal history of global industrialized capitalism and technological innovation. Even an apparently simple hack has complex roots.

Sensing with Underwear

Given advancements in science and technology that promise more complex soil assessments, what makes the tighty-whities test so persistent? Underwear is cheap and easy to acquire. The elastic waistband makes it easy to locate the decomposed underwear at the end of the experiment since it can’t degrade. In contrast to the definitive analytics produced through many mainstream AgTech evaluations, the underwear test encourages a dialogic and open-ended analysis. The farmer can interpret the underwear in context to gain valuable insights, making connections between countless interacting variables that shape the soil’s ecology.

The underwear also offers a welcome antidote to the disempowering doom-and-gloom narratives about the current state of food production. With extensive topsoil erosion, herbicide toxicity, biodiversity loss, and acute and chronic human health impacts caused by corporate-driven agricultural production, it can be overwhelming to find a way forward. It can also be easy to take soil for granted and thus forget the importance of good stewardship. As a citizen science project, the underwear test offers a playful encounter with soil and community, in contrast to the expert-dominated and often inaccessible language of climate and agronomic sciences. Journalists have leaned into the rakish quality of the test, using titles like “I see London, I see France, Farmers Buried Underpants” and “Bury Your Briefs” to bring attention to the cause. Without diminishing the severity of the challenges at play, underwear invites a wide array of people to actively engage with soil as an essential part of life.

Rethinking Innovation

Some AgTech industry professionals describe farmers as “stuck in their old ways” or “too old” to appreciate the value of adopting innovative technologies. But my conversations with growers reveal a more complex set of considerations. Most farmers don’t operate according to binaries of high versus low technology. Rather, they mix and match technologies and practices that support their needs, often embracing hybrid approaches. The underwear test coexists alongside multiple ways of knowing the soil, which can also include mailing a soil sample to a laboratory, or comparing notes with other farmers in the region.

Farmers often describe a desire for autonomy and agency in making decisions about the tools they use and how they use them. Rejecting the role of adopters of technologies developed by others, many farmers prioritize active participation in technology development, including managing and sharing data collected about their farms on their own terms. Several grassroots collaborations have emerged across the globe to support this mission, bringing farmers and engineers together to build alternatives to business-as-usual corporate technology development. Innovations range from bicycle-powered threshers to open-source digital applications that enable farmers to manage and share data about their operations.

In December 2023, I visited a farmer in California who had been testing prototypes of small soil sensors designed by a venture capital-funded technology start-up. When I asked about the sensors, he laughed, admitting that he had recently driven over them with his tractor while preparing his fields for planting. Climbing out of the tractor to remove each sensor from the ground felt like a waste of time and energy. The promise of the prototype had been superseded by the immediate imperatives of farm work. Shoved into the ground and broken, those sensors’ plastic parts were destined to leach into the soil and waterways over ages. Yet a pair of buried tighty-whities might have survived the tractor work, passing its days below ground, and slowly decomposing with the biotic life of the soil.

Perhaps this encounter demonstrates the enduring quality of “outdated” or “simplistic” technology in the face of supposedly superior digital technology. The underwear test also reveals a more subtle dynamic at play. Rather than marking a wholesale rejection of digital technology, the persistence of the tighty-whities test unsettles the entrenched ideas of progress that are often tied up in technological innovation, including the idea that other modes of knowing will inevitably become obsolete. Even in its most rudimentary form, reading unearthed underwear for insights about soil requires a careful practice of sensing and knowing the land. Farmers and soil scientists alike suggest that considerations such as time of year, location, and depth of underwear burial affect the readings, which shows how even a supposedly simple method involves complexity.

AgTech’s claims about obsolescence also extend to farmers who are told they will become obsolete if they don’t embrace the latest digital technology—autonomous and remote sensing tools that redefine the role of the farmer. The idealized future farmer no longer needs to walk the fields daily or even live near the farm. The underwear points to a different way forward, where the farmer remains integral to the practice of soil stewardship, incorporating real-time sensing with historical and embodied knowledge. Instead of moving decision-making away from the farm, the underwear test encourages farmers to become even more intimate with their soils.

AgTech aims to make the underwear test obsolete through digital innovation, while employing a strategy of planned obsolescence for its own products. Farmers are expected to continually adopt the latest digital tools to stay relevant. Claims about obsolescence are often mobilized to benefit corporations rather than farmers or the soils they care for. In stark contrast, the underwear test relies on an everyday object that gets repurposed. It offers an alternative, perhaps more ecological paradigm of durability—one based on transformation and decomposition.

Let’s not romanticize underwear as a silver bullet or an ingenious hack. This would perpetuate the misguided solutionism that characterizes mainstream technological innovation. Rather, the underwear can be celebrated for its capacity to shape knowledge and practice—a capacity which resists the current order of expert-driven soil science and profit-motivated technology design, in favor of a more accessible, participatory, farmer-led approach to knowing soils. From its origins in the cotton plant, fashioned into a garment, repurposed into a soil test, and finally decomposing back into the earth, the tighty-whities destabilize modern assumptions about what makes an effective technology. ■

1. P. M. Latter and D. W. H. Walton, “The Cotton Strip Assay for Cellulose Decomposition Studies in Soil: History of the Assay and Development,” in Cotton Strip Assay: An Index of Decompostion in Soils, eds. A. F. Harrison, P. M. Latter, and D. W. H. Walton (Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, 1988), 7–10. ↩︎
2. Debankur Sanyal, Johnathon Wolthuizen, and Anthony Bly, “Cotton Strip Soil Test: Rapid Assessment of Soil Microbial Activity and Diversity in the Field,” South Dakota State University Extension, updated November 17, 2020, extension.sdstate.edu/cotton-strip-soil-test-rapid-assessment-soil-microbial-activity-and-diversity-field. ↩︎