BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00
Hello, everybody, and welcome to We Measure The World, a podcast produced by scientists for scientists…

PAUL TIETZ 0:05
When it’s up to you, you’re the only one sitting there in the soil pit filling out this description card, and you’ve got fifteen minutes left in the dedicated hour. You have a choice to make. You can turn your sheet in. You can go inside, warm up, and dry off, or you can tough it out. You can stay miserable for one day if that means you’re a champion for life. That’s the message we gave our judges before the judging started. Miserable for a day, you could be a champion for life. They sat there, they grinded it out, they toughed it out, and they brought it home.

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:47
That’s just a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil plant atmosphere continuum. Today’s guests are MaryBeth Gavin and Paul Tietz. MaryBeth Gavin graduated from Penn State with a bachelor’s in environmental resource management and is currently a soil chemistry master’s student at the University of Idaho, where she researches selenium biogeochemistry of biochar amended soils reclaimed from phosphate mines. Paul Tietz obtained his bachelor’s in environmental science from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, completed a master’s in soil science at the University of Idaho, and is currently a soil science PhD student at the University of Idaho, investigating long term effects of biochar amendments on forest soils. And today, we’ve invited them here to help us dig into the world of collegiate soil judging. Both Paul and MaryBeth got their start in soil judging during their undergraduate years, and Paul went on to reestablish the University of Idaho soil judging team in twenty twenty two and plans to continue coaching as part of a teaching focused career in academia. MaryBeth joined as co coach in twenty twenty four, and together they helped lead their team to victory at the twenty twenty five National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest earlier this year. So MaryBeth and Paul, thanks so much for being here.

PAUL TIETZ 2:25
For having us, Brad, all the way ten miles from our home campus at the University of Idaho here at METER headquarters.

BRAD NEWBOLD 2:31
It was a long trip. Thank you for making that trip. Very awesome. Appreciate that. Yeah. All right. So let’s start with a little bit of background. We wanna know what got you into soil science and how that led into soil judging. So I don’t know, Paul, if you wanna go first with that one.

PAUL TIETZ 2:51
Right, soil judging was my introduction to soil science. When I was an undergraduate, I took my first soil science introductory course, happened to be taught by the same professor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls for soil science, was our soil judging team coached there. And very quickly, I got recruited in and converted to, the most one of the most passionate, soil judges all around. And I graduated from undergrad in, twenty twenty, the COVID semester, and it was sad to have all the, the graduation postponed and canceled. But, what really did it for me was not having soil judging that senior season. So from that moment on, I knew that, soil judging was absolutely the career for me and something I needed to be involved in. So when I was looking at graduate programs, came out here to the University of Idaho, I was very much looking forward to getting involved in soil judging again. Once contests started happening again in twenty twenty two, was around the time it happened. Got the team started, recruited some students in, built this team up from a complete turnover back then.

BRAD NEWBOLD 4:00
MaryBeth, how about you? How did you get involved in soil chemistry and how does soil judging come into play?

MARYBETH GAVIN 4:08
Soil chemistry was actually not what I imagined myself doing post grad. I had a really good AmeriCorps position in rangeland management, and I had done a lot of work with nutrient management. So I was really curious about managing phosphorus because we’re really not that good at managing phosphorus. And that kind of led me down this path of reaching out to professors that studied phosphorus and its management, which led me to Doctor. Strahan. And he had this really cool project studying selenium on reclaimed mines in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest in partnership with the Forest Service. And he was like, this would be perfect for you. You love working on public lands. It was meant to be. And soil judging, how it fits into that is the University of Idaho really wasn’t on my radar as a university I was interested in attending prior to going to the national competition in Oklahoma in twenty twenty three, which is the semester I graduated. It’s where I met Paul for the first time. And I actually walked right up to him and I was like, oh my gosh, my parents just moved to Idaho. It’s really cool to see a team from Idaho. And that’s kinda how Idaho just was on my radar. And it was really lucky to be able to step into that role my first semester as co coach with Paul and go to Iowa in spring of twenty twenty four with the team. Yeah, soil judging really kinda all it all came together with soil chemistry and judging.

BRAD NEWBOLD 5:48
For our listeners who might not be as familiar with soil judging, can you give us your elevator pitch for what soil judging is and its importance?

PAUL TIETZ 5:57
Right. Soil judging is an academic competition. The students are the one doing the judging. It’s not the other way around. We’re not bringing soil to be judged. We’re not trying to find soil for others to judge. It’s an academic competition that takes place in soil pits. So imagine a hole in the ground. It’s about five feet deep that shows a nice profile of all the the layers of the soil or horizons. It’s up to the students to enter the pit to identify those different layers, the A horizon, B horizon, C horizon, or others, and then make a wide range of soil assessments. So the soil texture, the amount of sand, silt, and clay in the in the soil, the structure, how those, soil particles are arranged into larger aggregates, the soil color according to the Munsell system, redoximorphic features, so indicators of prolonged wetness in the soil, and many more for all of those different layers. From there, they go on to interpret those features into how water will be stored in the soil profile, how the soil profile formed, what the geologic origins are, what the taxonomic classification is, and then some practical interpretations such as, could you build a house with a basement here? Could you use this location for a septic tank? Could you use the soil as road fill material? These are all very essential skills for any soil scientist. And beyond that, agronomists, environmental scientists, even into some engineering disciplines, these are very marketable skills that employers are looking for, and there’s no better way of learning it than by participating in soil judging because you’re getting really strong hands on experience in a variety of environments as well as a really intensive practice regimen leading up to a competition. There’s really no better way of learning it.

BRAD NEWBOLD 8:05
So Paul, you mentioned that you reestablished the team there at the University of Idaho. Can you talk to us a little bit about that process? What motivated you to bring it back and kind of what was it like getting it off the ground?

PAUL TIETZ 8:18
Right. The soil judging team at the University of Idaho had been taught by, a faculty member, a pedologist, for many, many years until his retirement in around twenty seventeen. And since then, it’s usually been graduate students that, take the mantle of, coaching at the University of Idaho. There was a coach, a couple grad students were coaching, but this COVID era turnover kinda broke that chain. So we had no returning judges, no returning coaching experience. I had come in really fresh out of undergrad myself still at that point. But I just reflected on how valuable the experience of soil judging was for me, how it really developed this passion for soil science, and how beneficial that is for the soil science education for undergrads at a university, land grant university like the U of I. I was really motivated to to offer that opportunity and give students the same chance to fall in love with soil like I had.

BRAD NEWBOLD 9:15
And MaryBeth, for you, since you came in as coach starting last year, how’s that been stepping into that role?

MARYBETH GAVIN 9:23
Oh, it’s been really interesting. Personally, I had no idea how much work went into something like this. Paul is laughing at me, but it’s true. It was certainly a transition going from working into grad school plus coaching, but it’s definitely been a learning experience. I don’t think I would ever be in, like, a teaching role, especially fresh out of undergrad, like Paul mentioned, like, yeah, it’s been a learning experience. I didn’t expect to be in such a strong teaching position out the gate with people who are not much younger than myself. It’s been really valuable. I’ve really enjoyed the experience and it’s been really informative for how to go about these kinds of things.

BRAD NEWBOLD 10:07
So Paul, you mentioned that grad students are kind of running the show. Is that right? Is that typical? Mean, I know that teams have faculty advisors and other things like that. Yeah. Is it typical that grad students are the main coaches of the teams?

PAUL TIETZ 10:22
There’s a couple others out there with graduate students who just have the passion to coach up students and take them to competitions. But by far more common is that like a tenured faculty member will have this as part of their job description and provide a little more long term stability for a team, I think. I’ve really appreciated this opportunity to be involved, to have as much authority as I do with the team as a head coach, as a graduate student. But I do wonder how to ensure it it the soil judging at the U of I lives on after I graduate in the future.

MARYBETH GAVIN 10:58
Yeah. And it’s it’s very interesting. Like, you’re standing next to these people who are the leading pedologists in the field almost as a peer. You appear when you’re sitting next to each other and grading, that’s for sure. But it’s a really interesting experience and a really cool way to interact with them for sure.

BRAD NEWBOLD 11:18
And one thing that really stands out about your team is the diversity of the team members. I mean, you have people coming from backgrounds in soil science, but also crop science, and even mechanical engineering, and other things like that. Can you talk to us a little bit about about that diversity? How does that play in kind of the cohesiveness of the team? How do you train somebody and say, for instance, someone who comes from a background in mechanical engineering into becoming a a soil judge?

MARYBETH GAVIN 11:48
Soil judging is like training for a job at its core, but it is an enriching way of viewing the world as well. Soil judging is teaching you about what’s under your feet many different places, which I think is a helpful insight to many fields, but also helpful insight to just being a person connected to the world around you. So for example, like Jacob, he was a mechanical engineering student. He grew up on a farm in Gooding. He’s interfaced with soil his whole life. So I think that soil judging was an enriching experience for him to learn more. And now that he’s on to graduate school in agricultural engineering, it’s certainly been job training as well. But teaching them how to do soil judging, at its core, it’s a competition and knowing what words to write down for what thing is something that we work on a lot prior to the competition. Since it’s so tactile and so visual, I think anybody can learn to do soil judging no matter how much they know about soil.

PAUL TIETZ 12:47
All it takes is a little curiosity and, the motivation to work hard to learn it. Just in the few short years that the two of us have been coaching, we’ve had students in entomology, finance. We had a finance major on the team. The passion for soil science can come from anywhere and we don’t wanna limit participation in this really great learning experience to students who can say for sure at the age of eighteen that they wanna be a soil scientist for their life. We leave it open. Want as many students to get this experience as they can. And some of the best students around the country are gonna go on to soil science careers, but a lot of them aren’t. And your major, your coursework experience doesn’t always determine your ability at soil judging.

BRAD NEWBOLD 13:35
Talk to us a little bit about the ins and outs of training for the competition, for the contest. Is this you guys are getting together weekly? Do you guys go out and do your own excursions? Do you have your own test pits that you’re working in? All of the above. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

PAUL TIETZ 13:55
We do. The road to the national contest is long and it starts in the summer. So every fall semester, there’s a regional contest. There’s seven regional contests that take place around the country where soil judging teams gather to, to do this competitive description of soil science. To prepare for a regional contest, we have weekly meetings. Right? We operate like a club where we’ll do some hands on practice with our collection of soil texture samples. We know the amount of sand, silt, and clay in these samples, so the students are practicing those fundamental hand texturing skills. We also need to train them, need to familiarize our students with the soils and the geology of the region that we’re going to be judging for the contest. So we usually prepare a lecture Well, a short lecture.

MARYBETH GAVIN 14:47
A short lecture?

PAUL TIETZ 14:48
So bad. Whenever we’re lecturing for about thirty minutes, the beginning of practice, after they were just in lecture all day.

MARYBETH GAVIN 14:56
We’ll usually start with a little bit of hand texturing to start our day. As people kinda filter in, they they do their weekly textures. Sometimes we have a little bit of a leaderboard going, with some, you know, merch promised at the end of the semester if they win. And then we kind of launch into this short lecture. We try to keep it short, thirty minutes. People don’t like to be lectured at after being in lecture all day. And then we have usually some kind of worksheet almost. Either it’s like guided notes or more often than not, it’s a practice series. So whenever we look at the soil survey, soils are grouped into series of soils that are kinda similar to each other, similar in the region. Right. So all of that’s written down for us. Thank you, NRCS. We’ll look at the soil maps for the contest region and identify some representative or interesting soils that we can start to familiarize ourselves with, kinda work through some of these classifications or assessments on on soil information from the local region to try to prepare our students for doing it in person as best we can.

PAUL TIETZ 15:57
And typically, we go module by module in the soil descriptions sheet. We have, like, soil morphology. We start off right off the bat because that’s quite a few points on your scorecard, and it informs the rest of your scorecard as well. Then we move into some of the more tabular interpretations of that, specifically related to water most of the time. Then really jumping into the local geology, what are these soils made of? How were they made? On the back of the card, then your classification, which usually takes us the longest because it’s a lot of gibberish to most people.

MARYBETH GAVIN 16:35
It’s a lot of gibberish. It’s a lot of information to retain. So Yeah. We the best thing we can do is make our students familiar with all these separate pieces of classification of evaluation.

PAUL TIETZ 16:48
But really, once we get to the competition, they get their their boots on the ground and their hands on the soil, that’s when it all comes together. So thankfully, at a competition, there’s multiple practice days leading up to it where, we are, given locations, coordinates, or addresses for a soil pit that’s been prepared for us, and an answer key has also been prepared. So the contest organizer, the host of the contest, and like NRCS, professional soil scientists will write out an answer key description for the soil profile that the coaches will use to help teach it, to help get the students familiar over the course of three or four practice pits per day with an hour, hour and a half maybe at each for multiple days leading up to a contest. Then we will get to the judging, which happens individually. Students get one hour to complete the full soil classification, soil description. Usually, it’s three separate pits. Then there will be a team competition. Some regions do this, incorporate this for their regional contests, others don’t, where all the students from one team, they work together to fill out a single soil description. So it’s a really collaborative effort with the same time constraint. After that, the coaches will collect the description, the sheets or the scorecards that the students fill out with these interpretations and grade them according to the answer key. Points are tallied up and a winner is declared.

BRAD NEWBOLD 18:20
For this past year, regionals were here in your own backyard at the University of Idaho. Is there such thing as home field advantage when it comes to soil judging?

MARYBETH GAVIN 18:30
So we do our best to mitigate that. That’s the benefit of having two coaches. So Paul put on the regional competition this year, which was a massive effort. He found some very beautiful soil to show off both the Palouse and also the Andic soil that we have in the mountains towards Moscow. And a saw soil judging. He found some really great pits and put on a really good competition. He also incorporated jumbled judging, which was a really big thing in his undergrad.

PAUL TIETZ 19:06
That’s a new developing aspect of soil judging where students are made into teams from different universities. So you’ll be paired up with members of other teams to work together on a collaborative soil description. It’s a little more on the progressive side of soil judging, not fully adopted yet across the country. But, yes, we we hosted our regional contest. I was the contest coordinator. MaryBeth was the coach for our team. We had Colorado State, Utah State, and newly minted soil judging team Washington State join us. It was so fun, showing everybody. We have a really, extensive monolith collection on campus. Soil monoliths, if you’re not familiar are, I mean, it’s essentially the whole soil profile pasted onto a board on the wall. It’s really incredible. And we have a huge collection. So we did like a soil monolith scavenger hunt. We had baked potatoes for our team meeting.

MARYBETH GAVIN 20:06
Give the people what they want when they come to Idaho.

PAUL TIETZ 20:10
Yeah. It was really it was so fun. But, you’d be surprised. The home field advantage sometimes works out, sometimes doesn’t. It’s not a guarantee that the home team wins a regional contest. At the national scale, however, when your team is hosting the national contest, you are not allowed participate. That’s a little too much of a home field advantage, I would say. But at these regional contests, it’s the top three teams that place there or sometimes more if you have a really large region. But the regional contest is where you punch your ticket to the spring national contest.

BRAD NEWBOLD 20:53
So we’re gonna get into the postgame news conference section of our questions here. So first question, you’ve led Idaho now to multiple regional championships here in twenty twenty five, a national championship in Wisconsin. What do you think has made these teams successful?

PAUL TIETZ 21:11
I think our success is in spite of a lot of things. It’s in spite of having a small team. We only bring six students to soil judging contests, kind of limited by my own capacity for supervising students on cross country field trips. Also, traveling, affording to bring students on cross country road trips. We don’t have the same geographic privilege that a lot of other maybe Midwestern, East Coast teams have that they can drive to a lot of other soil judging schools with a short road trip. We have to fly to a lot of competitions from our location here in the Northwest. So we have a small team. I’ve only been coaching for a handful of years now, and I started out brand new. So in spite of our collective lack of experience being early in our careers, our standing as graduate students rather than faculty members. But what we do have is the passion. The passion to invest the hours and the research and the planning and the preparation for our soil activities and getting to know our own familiarity with the contest region and making sure the students have fun and they realize the effort that the coaches are putting in. They match with their own effort and investment, and they buy in just as much as we do. So you’ll see this passion on every team. Soil judging unites so many passionate students and soil scientists that I can’t really say our passion is unique, but it’s the only thing that I can point to for what sets our team apart is just how much we care, how much we invest, and just how much it means to us.

BRAD NEWBOLD 22:41
The national contest included teams from twenty seven schools, nearly two hundred students. Idaho not only won the overall team title, but had multiple top ten individual finishers, and did it with the smallest team in recent history, and was the first team from the Northwest region to win the competition. Lots of fun accolades there. Right? I don’t wanna ask a general question about like, how did you manage that? Or what are those those kinds of things. I did wanna ask a little bit about the team makeup. But that note there about having a small team, what are the advantages or disadvantages of having a a smaller team compared to a potentially larger one?

MARYBETH GAVIN 23:21
I think when it comes to group judging, having a smaller team is certainly an advantage. Having six people working on one card versus twelve is far more manageable. And I think the familiarity that our students have with each other because it is a smaller team is really a driving force in how well we did in group judging this year. I think we placed second just behind Delaware and there is some advantages and they, you know, get quite a bit of team bonding. They take their own minivan everywhere. But, yeah, I mean, it is challenging with six students.

PAUL TIETZ 23:59
With larger teams, there’s more opportunities for students to work together to help each other out. You’ll have a wider range of experienced seniors and incoming freshmen that might ensure a little more continuity across the teams year over year. But I really, in my limited experience, have a strong preference for the relatively small team size because it keeps things more cohesive, more organized, just easier logistically. Every team that attends for the individual judging to control for the differences in team size, if you show up with four students or if you show up with fourteen, the coaches for each team select the four individual judgers that they think give them the best chance to accumulate the most points, that those four go on to participate in the individual judging contest. So when you have fourteen or more students to choose from, that’s a much harder decision than it is to narrow down eight or six students. I have a strong preference for the team of six personally.

BRAD NEWBOLD 24:59
Can you walk us through the contest this year at Wisconsin? I heard that weather was not on your side at all. And maybe just a little bit into how that affects things when you’re dealing with sunny, dry conditions versus cold and wet that you experienced there. What were some of the challenging or surprising pits or sites that you had to deal with?

PAUL TIETZ 25:20
Right. Anyone can learn to texture soil when you’re inside at room temperature. Not everyone can texture soil when it’s an hour after sunrise in the beating wind and rain.

MARYBETH GAVIN 25:32
I used to make them hand texture outside because we would it gets pretty dark pretty early here. You know, we’re pretty far up north. So it’d be pretty cold by the time we were practicing. So last spring I had them hand texture outside, which they hated. We did not bring that back. Sorry. That’s just the funniest thing to me. They they were so mad.

PAUL TIETZ 25:55
At the Wisconsin competition, we had four days for practice to really orient and familiarize ourselves with really sandy soils. Here at the University of Idaho, we have really silty soils. We’re silt loam on the Palouse Hills. We had never seen sand to the extent that we were we were up to our necks in it in Wisconsin. It was just sand. Everybody was putting ninety five percent sand, five percent clay, all the way down their scorecards because, I mean, that’s what we were seeing.

MARYBETH GAVIN 26:30
We do usually, like, a semesterly field trip. We drove all the way down to Lewiston to try to find any sand, which is a bit further than we usually go for field trips, but we were committed to finding some sand for them, even, like, coarse fragments. We’re on loess hills here. They don’t have to estimate how many rocks are in this, but they did in Wisconsin, so we wanted to do that. Thankfully, found a site in Lewiston. But, yeah, it was really unfamiliar territory.

PAUL TIETZ 27:05
We had generally good weather for the Midwest in the spring for those practice days. When the individual contest rolled around though, we had a constant driving cold forty degree rain all morning for the individual contest. So imagine being soaked through your soil judging gear before you even start.

MARYBETH GAVIN 27:25
Prior to the individual competition starting, the coaches usually walk the pits to just get a little familiarity with what they’re grading. And in the hour that I was walking the pits, my rain jacket, which I hadn’t treated this year, was soaked through. I was sopping wet all day long grading these papers inside, and I couldn’t imagine what it was like for them. It’s really, it takes some grit to soil judge through weather like that. I felt so bad when they got back.

PAUL TIETZ 28:00
When it’s when it’s up to you, you’re the only one sitting there in the soil pit filling out this description card and you’ve got fifteen minutes left in the dedicated hour, you have a choice to make. You can turn your sheet in, you can go inside, warm up, and dry off, Or you can tough it out. You can double check your answers. You can go back in that pit. You can use all the time you have left. You can sit there and you can stay miserable. You can stay miserable for one day if that means you’re a champion for life. That’s what we that’s the message we gave our judges before the judging started. Miserable for a day. You could be a champion for life. They sat there. They grinded it out. They toughed it out, and they brought it home.

BRAD NEWBOLD 29:00
Do you train for competition pressure? Do you train for the mental side of the game there at all?

MARYBETH GAVIN 29:07
We try to keep it pretty casual while we’re on campus, but once we get to the competition site and are at those practice pits specifically, we do try to integrate in some of the timing. So they’re used to filtering in and out of the pits in a timely manner and used to how much time they’re gonna have. But I think we don’t wanna psych them out usually. So we don’t wanna really apply a lot of pressure practice days.

PAUL TIETZ 29:35
It depends on the students. It depends on the coaches. Me being brought up in the world of soil science through soil judging and being a competitive person, I wanna do what it takes. I wanna prepare my students for the competition aspect. Not every coach does, and not every student is in it for the the intensity of competition the way others might be. So it’s important to respond to the students. Some are in it for the learning experience and the the travel opportunity and the hands on soil description rather than the rather than the competition aspect. But for those students who are who are committed, they wanna do what it takes to judge at the at a championship level. I wanna make sure I’m able to, to meet them where they’re at and provide them the experience that they are looking for.

BRAD NEWBOLD 30:26
Paul, personally for you, was it fun to be back in Wisconsin? I know a different part of the state, but being able to be back in Wisconsin and and, become a champion on your old stomping grounds.

PAUL TIETZ 30:39
It was years ago when I first learned that UW-Stevens Point was gonna host the national contest far away in the year twenty twenty five. That was before I’d even started coaching the team at my first contest. So participating in a soil judging contest in Wisconsin sounded like a dream come true to me. Not only to participate, not only to be there coaching students, but to win the national championship there in Wisconsin so far beyond anything I could have imagined possible, realistic, a dream come true, a total bucket list item for me.

MARYBETH GAVIN 31:17
Oh, and I think it might have been a deciding factor. We had some insider information of what landforms looked like, and Paul had all these books to show us photos of all these landforms he’s been talking about forever. So it was really cool to see them in person with somebody who loves rolling hill moraines in Wisconsin as much as he does.

PAUL TIETZ 31:39
Love me an ice walled lake plain, what can I say?

MARYBETH GAVIN 31:43
Oh my gosh. That was that was really cool though. Yeah. I think it was a really cool experience. And we got to stay with Paul’s parents on the way down.

BRAD NEWBOLD 31:52
Really?

MARYBETH GAVIN 31:53
We made a paid on the whole visit. Yep.

PAUL TIETZ 31:57
Saved us one night of lodging. It was great.

BRAD NEWBOLD 32:01
You also mentioned going back to the competition itself. You talked about the, the grading itself. Can you get talk to us a little bit about that about that process? So it’s it’s the coaches from the different teams that get together and are grading these collectively. How does that play out?

PAUL TIETZ 32:18
Right. The first thing to recognize with soil description is that while it’s not arbitrary, there is a little bit of subjectivity to it. What might be strong, granular structure to me might be more medium to somebody else. What might be what are the other kind of controversial ones we might have?

MARYBETH GAVIN 32:39
I think the whole morphology section can be very controversial.

PAUL TIETZ 32:44
Sometimes there’s a little bit of subjectivity or controversy of the decision of what is correct for a soil judging answer key. So a lot of times, there will be a coaching discussion. What is correct? What alternate answers may be acceptable? What flexibility will we allow, what scores points, what doesn’t. We really try to avoid partial points for anything. So we have to really clearly establish these guidelines for grading before the grading and the assignment of points actually begins.

MARYBETH GAVIN 33:17
Those arguments between the leading pedologists of the nation, when you put them all together in one room, sound a little bit more like a big argument sometimes.

PAUL TIETZ 33:27
It’s passionate. Soil judging really gets people going and I mean, even with soil description in general, you can have two soil scientists go into a pit and five descriptions come out of it. I think that a lot of soil scientists will come out of a soil profile description with a lot of different answers. So deciding on one correct answer sometimes can be a challenge. We had some contextual information for these soil pits from the contest organizer, Bryant Scharenbroch, at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. And he would be straight up sometimes if they had five professional soil scientists writing the answer key. Sometimes it was a three two split. They would vote on what the correct answer is, and it’d be a split down the middle almost. And you’ll have pretty reliably sixty percent of the students might say this majority answer, but forty percent say this minority answer. And when it’s all or nothing for the assignment of points, sometimes that’s a little it could be a little controversial. It could really swing swing the points and the outcome one way or the other. But then again, is it is one side truly correct over the other? That’s something that’s A perspective I’ve gained perhaps since winning the competition is that have we raised the nation’s premier, most talented, most amazing soil judgers in the world? Maybe. I would tell them that. Yeah. But have we also just learned to write the same interpretations as the person who happened to be writing The Answer Key that day? Maybe some of that too.

MARYBETH GAVIN 35:06
I think there’s two perspectives. Some people believe in raising the absolute best soil scientists, and some people believe in raising good soil scientists who win a competition.

BRAD NEWBOLD 35:19
This is the coaching perspective?

MARYBETH GAVIN 35:21
This is a coaching perspective. Some coaches favor hedging points. You know how I was talking about writing ninety five percent sand, five percent clay all the way down the pit card instead of hand texturing all of your textures. When you’re given a plus or minus five percent range for both of those numbers, that’s a good way to cover your bases.

PAUL TIETZ 35:45
Yeah. So I think there’s kind of two mindsets, but I think they both come together and say, you wanna raise people who know how to do this correctly. But a lot of the competition also just comes down to, are you writing the right thing down? Are you writing what you mean down as well? Writing a g for granular is not necessarily the same as writing g r for granular, which is what you’re supposed to be writing. So there’s always contention about like the mechanics of the competition and what you’re writing on the scorecard. But, it’s all about the fundamentals. Some things don’t change. Some things make it a lot easier. If you’re able to, while your hands are shivering and you’re covered in mud, are you able to still write clearly for yourself and others to read later on this description sheet? Takeaways like that are, I think, underrated outcomes of soil judging for students.

BRAD NEWBOLD 36:41
That’s true. I hadn’t even thought of that part about, yeah, having to write in the cold. I’ve had to do that in the past and it sucks.

MARYBETH GAVIN 36:50
Well, and it was pouring. All of these cards we got back were sopping wet. They were like set out to dry. Somebody would like set them out on this like flat area to dry every single time. And we would still be like writing in pen and tearing them up. It was horrible. So I couldn’t imagine in the field what it was like writing in pencil on these sheets.

PAUL TIETZ 37:17
I have a photo of one of our judges, Skye. He had a two gallon bag over his clipboard and he had his hand inside writing so that he could get his answers down and not destroy his paper in the process. We’ll give students a bag. We’ll give students, like, page protector, anything anything we can think of to keep the paper a little bit dry. But this contest has been planned for probably years in the making. The date sets. You have hundreds of students here. There’s no flexibility if the weather doesn’t cooperate and you’re here to do a job. And I think that that translates to from soil judging onto student careers of when there’s a job that needs to be done, you gotta take care of it no matter what the conditions are and how do you respond?

BRAD NEWBOLD 38:10
Yeah. They certainly have an answer for that job interview question of like, when have you had to do something in really tough conditions? They’ve got a great answer for that. Right. Well, was gonna say, and this leads into my next question is that from what I’ve read and heard is that the folks that want to go into soil science, soil judging really does give them a leg up in the competition when it comes to, especially with potentially diminishing jobs out there, having that experience as a soil judge. Along with that, I wanted to to ask with all of this, the the soil judging and the team that you’ve put together, it builds technical skills, it’s built, you know, builds other skills, you know, teamwork, work in the field, resilience. How has this experience helped you in your own research? And along with that, how do you feel that it does or can help these other students prepare for, yeah, again, careers in environmental science, ag, and other things?

MARYBETH GAVIN 39:08
Well, I can speak from experience that this is a network that’s gonna follow you. I remember working briefly after undergrad and I was in the middle of nowhere in North Central Montana. The host site that I was at for AmeriCorps hosted a training and what do you know, two people I met in Oklahoma that spring in soil judging showed up. This is the middle of nowhere. It was crazy. One from Arkansas, one from Wisconsin. So these are people you’re gonna keep running into. The next generation of natural resource environmental professionals. And your peers also. A lot of people don’t realize that this is a great way to meet other people who are doing what you want to be doing. And they’re such a great resource. But I mean, I came to U of I partially because of soil judging. You know, I wouldn’t be doing the research that I do or my role as a graduate student would not be the same without soil judging, location wise or research wise?

PAUL TIETZ 40:08
I would say effect that soil judging has had on my experience as a researcher and graduate student. What soil judging instilled in me is a sense that all soils tell a story. That if you get in a pit, you can learn about the geologic history, how the soil came to be, what it means for the present and also maybe the future of the soil. But when I went on to graduate school and started reading papers of soil science research, I felt I really needed to know taxonomic classification, maybe get a description of the profile of the parent material in order to understand what’s going on. And what I found in the research nowadays is a lot of published studies might say, We did this study on mollisols, or The soil wasn’t oxisol. And that’s a start, but I feel like there’s so much missing context and background for a soil, why it behaves a certain way, why the data may turn out a certain way, why these processes are happening or not happening. There’s so much more important information in that story that I have an awareness of and appreciation for with my soil judging background that I feel like people that aren’t involved in soil judging or they come into soil science from a different discipline that have a different perspective on.

BRAD NEWBOLD 41:20
What’s next for the University of Idaho soil judging team? Is there no rest for the weary? Are you guys right back at it? I mean, you mentioned it starts, the season starts or training for the season starts in the summer. You’ve got, again, regionals in the fall. Are you guys right back at it? Do you have any time to rest and relax?

PAUL TIETZ 41:42
That’s what we’ve been doing this summer. It’s been really fun since we came home from Wisconsin with the traveling trophy for the Soil Judging National Championship. We spent the summer visiting each of our students to share that moment, share it with their families the same way that I was able to with my parents after, the night that the contest ended. But that’s been fun. That’s been us enjoying the moment. But as soon as the semester starts coming up, we are gonna be right back at it. We have a a regional contest win streak going on. We’re gonna be seeking our fourth straight regional championship this fall in Grand Junction, Colorado, where Colorado State University is going to be hosting our regional contest. Then it’s on to North Carolina State University, hopefully, this spring for the twenty twenty six National Soil Judging Contest. From there, twenty twenty six is a special year for soil judging. It lines up with the World Congress of Soil Science International meeting where they have an international soil judging contest. Twenty twenty six is a soil judging Olympic year. So the top finishers at the twenty twenty six national contest will be representing team USA soil judging at the World Congress for Soil Science meeting in China for soil judging next June.

BRAD NEWBOLD 43:00
That’s wild. Actually, was my next question, was asking if there’s international competition. So that’s pretty wild, that’s cool that you can be able to travel internationally to be able to participate in soil judging.

PAUL TIETZ 43:14
Once every four years. So in a four year undergraduate career, you get one shot at international contest. That’s like we were discussing before. How do you handle the pressure and the intense competition of soil judging? That’s gonna be something that we think about. We got a lot of seniors this year who’ve been judging for four years, who know this is this is on the line. I think that’s gonna really inspire a lot of our our off season practice, our preparations leading up to the contest. We’re gonna keep that in the back of our minds, not only to hopefully defend our national championship, but with a little more international experience on the line.

BRAD NEWBOLD 43:55
That would be fun being able to see the geology of China there. Check out some karst topography, head out to the Gobi Desert.

MARYBETH GAVIN 44:04
Yeah, I think it’s in Nanjing.

PAUL TIETZ 44:08
Who’s to say what they’ve got in store for us there?

MARYBETH GAVIN 44:11
Yeah, I I think they’ll do it up. I think it’ll be really cool.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:16
Cool. Paul, as we mentioned in the intro, you’ve said that you’re you’ve been interested or that you are interested in continuing on with a teaching focused career in academia. Talk about how coaching has shaped your perspective about education and about teaching other students.

PAUL TIETZ 44:35
Wow, I gotta say it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve probably ever done is take something that I’m really passionate about and really motivated to learn and explore, and to be able to share that with my students and see them respond with just the same enthusiasm and passion for it and commitment for this thing called soil judging that we love so much. So I think that as soon as I had that first taste of taking students to travel to get this hands on experience and knowing and hearing and seeing what that does for their learning, knowing that it’s exactly what I experienced as a student and here I am now providing that for others was all the motivation and that was all the evidence that I needed to know that this is the path for me. This is exactly where I belong, and this is what I need to do for my career to be happy. I don’t see myself being happy doing anything else. When the spring rolls around and I see pictures on social media of the national contest happening, that fear of missing out is gonna hit me so hard if I’m not there. So I’m convinced this is exactly the path for me.

MARYBETH GAVIN 45:42
Paul’s being a bit humble as well. He does teach the senior level pedology class, which is the class that teaches you soil morphology and soil taxonomy. And we have more students than ever from our soil judging team enrolled in it. I think they’re hooked.

PAUL TIETZ 45:59
Between coaching the soil judging team, yeah, and teaching our pedology class, it’s really been the best experience possible at the University of Idaho to set me up for that career. So I’m really thankful for all the opportunities and the freedom and the flexibility and the fact that I’m able to do all this really cool stuff as a graduate student, I’m really thankful for.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:24
Where do you see your experience with soil judging being able to help out in future career? Wherever that takes you.

MARYBETH GAVIN 46:32
Soil judging has taught me how to teach. And I think that’s gonna be a very valuable tool in my career, particularly as I transitioned from an early career professional into maybe just a normal professional. But it’s really taught me that I do like teaching. I do like interacting with students, and maybe hopefully that’s part of my career, but I’m not really sure where I’m headed right now.

BRAD NEWBOLD 47:00
Would you say that even if soil judging itself isn’t always a part of your life, that soil and a passion for the soil beneath your feet always will be?

MARYBETH GAVIN 47:10
Oh, certainly. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Soil science is definitely where I’m supposed to be.

BRAD NEWBOLD 47:18
Awesome. Well, I think that’s a great place to end there. Anything else that you would like to share with our audience about soil judging, about the University of Idaho’s team, about anything along those lines?

PAUL TIETZ 47:32
Before we go, I just wanna thank the hosts of the twenty twenty five National Collegiate Soil Judging Competition who gave us a chance, a stage to perform on and bring home the trophy. Really, heartfelt thank you to Bryant Scharenbroch, and everybody else involved in the twenty twenty five contest. If listeners wanna learn more about soil judging, I would say choose your favorite, usually, land grant university. Maybe you’re an alum. Maybe you’re a former judger yourself. Reach out if you have a contact or just look up University of Idaho soil judging team, wherever university. And a lot of these teams are self funded. So in addition to preparing, putting in the work and the hours of learning about soil judging, we also have to pay for the travel and the participation and the equipment that we use. So, a lot of teams are funded by donations, including the University of Idaho. If you are interested in learning about your own soil and you have connections to the university or wanna get in we are always looking for field trip soil pit field trip destinations, and I’m sure other teams are as well, to bring these students out, give them this hands on experience, especially teams that have more students interested in participating in judging than they can afford or are able to bring. Having that local soil pit description experience, is the next best thing to participating in a soil judging contest. So reach out, get involved. You can either donate, you can donate financially, donate your soil, really help prepare the next generation of soil judges.

BRAD NEWBOLD 49:03
All right. Well, thank you again. That’s gonna wrap it up for us. MaryBeth, Paul, it’s been a fun discussion. Congratulations again on your national title, and hopefully there’ll be many more in the future.

MARYBETH GAVIN 49:16
Thank you. Go Vandals.

BRAD NEWBOLD 49:19
And if you in the audience have any questions about this topic or want to hear more, feel free to contact us at METER Group dot com or reach out to us on X at meter_env. And you can also view the full transcript from today in the podcast description. That’s all for now, and we’ll catch you next time on We Measure the World.