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Science and Environment and Sustainability

analyze all of this information.Some are very low-tech and have been around for hundreds of years. For example, you can test soil’s water infiltration rate by driving a tube into the ground, pouring in an amount of water, and measuring howmuch of thewater has drained over a certain time period.More complicated tests are usually done in a lab by trained chemists. The recent trend toward organic farm- ing in many parts of the world has led to new considerations in soil testing. Organic farming depends on the natural release of nutrients already within the soil.To understand how these nutrients cycle,more frequent testing is necessary. Organic farming also uses nutrient-rich compost to aid growth. Since too many nutrients candamagewater quality, tests must be done to see howmany nutrients are released.

Portable Testing

In some of the poorest regions of Africa, farmers lack the tools to adequately test their soil. This makes it difficult for them to max- imize their food production. When University of Maryland soil scientist Ray Weil was working in Africa, he conceived of the idea of a portable soil testing kit that could help farm- ers diagnose their cropland. With researchers from Columbia Univer- sity, he designed a kit that contains battery-operated instruments and other testing equipment. Trained agents use the kit to test soils out in the field. They send the results via cell phone to a central website. The site runs the calculations and pro- vides information to the farmers on the amount of nutrients and organic matter in the soil.

One new development in soil testing is the use of synchrotron [SINK-roh-tron] technology. A synchrotron is a machine that accelerates particles, often electrons, to nearly the speed of light. As the electrons pass through different types of magnets, they create high-powered X-rays.The light from these X-rays is billions of times brighter than that of the sun. The machine can