Tea Tales – a tool to assess soil health.

How much can buried tea bags teach us about the climate and the earth? Plenty! In the Tea Tales project VA, together with researchers at Umeå University and the Housekeeping Society, developed a new tool to assess soil health.

The tea bag index (TBI) is a way of measuring the soil’s ability to break down organic material.

The method is simple: You simply bury tea bags in the ground, let them lie for a few months, and then dig them up again. By weighing the tea bags before and after being buried in the soil, it is possible to draw conclusions about how quickly organic material (in this case green and red tea) breaks down in this particular location.

With the help of thousands of volunteers, the researchers behind the TBI method have created a world map of the earth’s degradability through citizen research, see for example ForskarFredag’s mass experiment 2015 – The tea bag experiment.

In the new Tea Tales project, the map will be developed into a powerful tool that farmers, gardeners, recreational growers and policy makers can use to assess soil health and make research-based decisions about how best to use and care for the land. The tool will also be able to be used in teaching about the function of the soil.

The tool and associated website will be developed in close collaboration with and co-created with teachers, farmers and gardeners. The work also includes creating a lesson plan and film clips where people share their experiences of the tea bag experiment and soil health.

Tea Tales runs from December 2021 to August 2023 and is a collaboration between  Umeå universitet, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet (SLU), Hushållningssällskapet and VA. The project is financed by Formas.