Cornell University 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 at 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.

Team members, all undergraduates, and their hometowns are: Ulrika Rinman, junior, V‰rmd™, 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 Cornell's Soil, Crop and Atmospheric Sciences department. (Galbraith graduated from Churchill High School, San Antonio, Texas, in 1973. He also is a graduate of Texas Tech in Lubbock.) "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." The contest required team members to describe soil layers to a depth of 1 meter, classify it, measure its qualities for agriculture, describe its landscape setting and identify possible limitations for use in an urban development. Their answers were compared with a key developed by a panel of professional soil scientists.

Considering there are more than 18,000 different soil series in the United States, soil judging is an exacting and challenging science, Galbraith said. Students also identified soil color, texture, structure, and water table indicators. Working toward winning the contest serves as a practical application for undergraduate studies, said Galbraith. These students are the future soil scientists who will determine whether soil will be good for crops, wetlands, forests or urban land.