Hill Laboratories announced a new commercially available soil test for earthworm eDNA this year. The new quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) test quantifies the amount of earthworm eDNA for the New Zealand’s most common earthworm species, Aporrectodea caliginosa.
The current approach to assessing earthworms is through field visual assessments, which can be labour intensive and requires expert knowledge in identifying species. The new test provides a convenient and efficient alternative for earthworm testing.
The soil test has been calibrated for 7.5 cm soil depth in pastoral settings, rather than the 15 cm depth which is the standard depth for horticultural and arable soil tests.
We have been working with Dr Nicole Schon at AgResearch, who helped to develop the test, and Hill Laboratories to better understand how the test might be relevant within a cropping context.
This month, we completed our six-monthly Visual Soil Assessments in the Carbon Positive plots. As part of this process we sent all earthworms found to Nicole for identification, and soil samples to Hills to test for A. caliginosa eDNA. We hope that these samples will help to strengthen the understanding of the soil test taken to 15 cm depth.
Check out Alex and Nicole’s article in the latest NZ Grower magazine (pg. 48-50) for more discussion, or the Hills technical note for more details.