University of Maryland students dig deep in soil judging competition.
Image Credit: Jaclyn Fiola
Ten University of Maryland students got their hands dirty for a big win this month, topping the ranks in a regional soil-judging competition.
Two teams from this university beat out 11 teams from seven other universities to earn first and second place Oct. 16 at the Northeast Regional Soil Judging Competition in Wooster, Ohio.
The six-person UMD A Team took home first place, while the four-member UMD B Team won second, both besting third-place Pennsylvania State University. Six university students also earned top-10 individual finishes.
“I’m really excited; I’m really proud of everyone,” said junior environmental science and technology major Victoria Monsaint-Queeney.
In the competition, team members entered soil pits about five feet deep for an hour to measure and judge the characteristics of soil horizons, or layers in the ground. Each team member judged two pits individually, then the whole team judged two pits together.
Officials compared each team’s results with results from local experts to determine the winners.
The regional results secured both teams’ entry into the national competition in Kansas in April, in what team coach Martin Rabenhorst, an environmental science and technology professor, called “the NCAA of soil-judging competitions.”
About 20 teams will be pitted against one another at nationals in the spring, he said.
The win comes as a redemption for returning team members, who did not qualify for this year’s nationals. This university won the national championship in 2013.
Rabenhorst, who judged soil during his time at this university in the 1970s, said the teams’ performances at regionals were fantastic.
In the individual rankings, environmental science and technology major Chris Seitz took first overall, while senior plant science major Jaclyn Fiola earned second place and Monsaint-Queeney ranked third.
The terrain in Ohio came with a few challenges for this university's team. Fiola said Ohio soil varies greatly from what they are used to in their home turf, mainly due to the influence of glaciers.
“Basically we had to learn everything about Ohio soil in two days,” Fiola said, “to learn those terms and learn about glacial landscapes.”
The team traveled to Ohio two days early to practice judging pits before the actual competition.
“That’s part of the great thing about soil judging, is students get a chance to travel and see places they’ve never seen before,” Rabenhorst said.
Rabenhorst accompanies the team on daylong soil judging practices on Saturdays in the fall.
“We’re allowed to argue with our coach,” Monsaint-Queeney said. “[Soil judging]’s a little bit of an art because you don’t know exactly how the soil forms.”
Without a definitive right answer describing the soil, scores depend on their similarity to the results of more experienced judges.
“We have a lot of agency with it,” Monsaint-Queeney said. “It teaches you to trust yourself.”
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