An open letter to the Army Corps

[XemaSab]

Hi, Army Corps.

Yes, I know you put a lot of effort into the Arid West supplement, but I have to tell you, it's not working out.

The whole "judging soils based on invisible features, impossible features, and unavailable data" thing, I mean.

In the last 36 hours I have dug about 10 soil pits, and in only two of them were the soils even capable of being in a reduced state. These two soils were totally saturated, and are apparently saturated through enough of the year that the soil material was basically just decayed plant matter, so no, there was no apparent reduced iron or manganese present. Furthermore, there was no oxidized manganese or iron present. All the other soils I looked at had really high chromas of three and four, so even though many of them had obvious redox features, I was stuck looking at the data sheet like a tool wondering how to finesse the soils into a category. Yeah, I checked the fucking histosol box for the sample taken from the bottom of the agricultural runoff ditch. Which was under a foot of water, BRIGHT brown and had a chroma of four. Yeah, I checked the "redox depressions" box for the freshwater marsh with fucking clam shells on the dry soil surface, 'cause I didn't know what the hell else to check.

In short, this is even lamer than the 1987 manual. Okay, sure. Half the soils I have ever looked at, wetland and upland, were wetland soils based on low chroma with redox features, but usually the non-wetlands were excluded from Corps jurisdiction based on hydrology and vegetation. With this update, I'm stuck trying to figure out what the hell to check on every single site, and I've got a damn degree in soils.

What the hell?

Yours in anger,

XemaSab