[AT] Off topic---soil sampler

[Francis Robinson]

	I still have the sampling tool my father made back in the 1940's. He made 
a "T" handle out of 3/8" ID galvanized pipe and welded a 1" wood auger bit 
into the bottom of it. It looked much like the larger dynamite auger we 
had. You just screwed it into the ground about 8" and pulled it back 
straight up. The dirt stayed in the bit and you held it over the bucket an 
and with your fingers in the flutes of the bit turned it backward to strip 
the dirt out of them. I also have one or two of those tube type but they 
can rattle your teeth if you shove it quickly into soft ground and hit a 
rock halfway down.   :-)
	I was always taught to kick the top 1" out of the way with my heel before 
pulling a sample to avoid anomalies from critter poop etc. That is kind of 
hard to do if you are riding around on an ATV and not getting off to pull 
the sample. I never pulled samples from the worst soil in the field and 
also avoided those small areas of almost super soil that fields sometimes 
have. As I sampled I tried to pull most from average soil for that field 
and if I leaned to one side I wanted to lean toward the weaker soils.
	I did let the fertilizer dealer do the analysis most of the time but tried 
to balance it between what they wanted to sell and what I wanted to 
spend...   :-)   That is one advantage to using a county extension test 
through the universities. They don't have something to sell. I thought that 
it was interesting that the one year that Terra International tried the ag 
lime business here along with the fertilizer was the only year out of many 
that my soil test said that I needed to lime...   :-)  Not before or 
since... I have no idea what the neighbor that now cash rents my grain 
ground does. I haven't seen him nor a dealer pulling samples but then since 
I retired from that part of farming I'm not home as much and could have 
well missed seeing them. I do know that he does a good job of farming in 
general and since he raises mostly food grade corn that he has to stay on 
top of such things. I need to talk to him this year to see if we do need to 
lime a bit. I do want to lime some hay ground this year.




--
"farmer"


Francis Robinson
Central Indiana, USA
Robinson at svs.net