Soil & Earthworms Jackie Stroud Research Fellow/Senior Lecturer in Farming Systems at SRUC (LEAF Innovation Centre) jacqueline.stroud@sruc.ac.uk or @wormscience on Twitter
Earthworms are obviously involved in soil biological health, so I wondered why people aren’t already earthworm surveying. What’s stopping them? Worms are common, known for their roles in soil fertility, and associated with good soils management – what are the main obstacles? The answer came back: <60 minutes method and dynamic interpretation support was needed. I continue to focus on removing the obstacles and to date our science-farming partnership has led to 31, 930 worms being studied. This month alone I’ve been helping people from NZ, Australia and the USA who want to know how we’ve had this unprecedented success. It has certainly been a learning curve!
Spring and Autumn worm sampling It is not a lecture, nor a marketing campaign – the aim is to stimulate small group discussions. Scientists and farmers don’t normally interact much, but the seasonal survey creates opportunities to tackle questions as they arise. To leverage the knowledge of each other then we need to record our observations in the same way (same method, timepoint). It is impossible to be helpful when people know earthworms in terms of bird numbers when ploughing! Digging five holes per field is a small ask, considering that it puts us all on the same page.
