By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.
Cornell students won the National Championship of Soil Judging held April 26 at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Okla., scoring 2,060 points, beating second-place University of Wisconsin-Platteville, which scored 2,032. Third place went to Kansas State, followed by Texas Tech and Texas A&M universities.
The national championship featured 17 collegiate teams. Cornell's Ulrika Rinman, an exchange student from Sweden, took first place and Patricia Gossett placed eighth in the individual competition.
Sponsored by the Department of Soil, Crop and Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the Cornell soil-judging team had previously won national championships in 1982 and 1962.
The contest required members of the team to describe soil layers to a depth of 1 meter, classify them, measure their qualities for agriculture, describe their landscape setting and identify possible limitations for uses in an urban development.
Team members, all undergraduates, and their hometowns are: Ulrika Rinman, junior, Vârmdô, Sweden; Johanna Taylor, senior, Lawtons, N.Y.; Steve Dadio, senior, Bryn Mawr, Pa.; Joe Anderson, sophomore, Atchison, Kan.; Patricia Gossett, junior, Aberdeen, N.J.; and Amy Martin, junior, Kettering, Ohio.
"We were regional champions last fall, but going into this contest, we really had no expectation," said John Galbraith, coach of the team and a research support specialist in the Department of Soil, Crop and Atmospheric Sciences.
"We practiced hard, but this year we went to enjoy the trip and we seemed more relaxed than normal. It just all came together. Being relaxed was the key," Galbraith said.
Considering there are more than 18,000 soil series in the United States, soil judging is an exacting and challenging science, he said. Students also identified soil color, texture, structure and water table indicators.