Hello fellow hiveans, it’s been a relaxing couple of days cos we’ve been home for vacation and doing pretty much nothing. We started our industrial attachment today as our third trimester activity.

Myself(@zology69) and some of my mates are doing ours at Savannah Agricultural Research Institute(SARI), and we’re testing for soil PH, Conductivity, Salinity and TDS of 4 soil samples.

We started by weighing 10g of the soil test sample on a weighing balance, and adding 25ml of distilled water to the soil sample. We stir with a stirrer for a uniform mixture. After stirring, we clean the stirrer using distilled water and stir the remaining 3 samples. We left the mixture to stand for 30 minutes.

_{Weighing 10g of soil sample on a weighing balance}

_{adding 25ml of distilled water and stirring}

Calibrating and using the pH meter

We’ll be using the pH meter next so we calibrate it using buffer 7 and buffer 4, by inserting the probe of the pH meter into the buffer and waiting for a “ready” notification on the screen.

_{Calibrating the pH meter using buffer 7}

Once the pH meter has been calibrated, we test the pH of the soil samples in turns, starting with sample 507/21. Sample 507/21 had pH of 7.63

_{Testing the pH of sample 507/21}

We cleaned the probe by rinsing with distilled water and tested the pH of sample 508/21 which was found to be 5.71, sample 509/21 was 7.59 and sample 510/21 was 5.58 .

Calibrating and using the conductivity meter

To measure the conductivity, salinity and TDS or the soil samples, we used the conductivity meter. We calibrated the conductivity meter using 0.0746ml of potassium chloride(KCl) in 100ml of distilled water.

_{Calibrating conductivity meter}

We cleaned the probe of the conductivity meter by rinsing with water and we inserted the probe into the soil samples in turns starting with sample 507/21.

Sample 507/21 had conductivity, salinity and TDS to be 746, 762 and 456 respectively. Sample 508/21 had conductivity of 405, salinity of 411 and TDS of 247mg/l. The conductivity, salinity and TDS of sample 509/21 was found to be 201, 202 and 121.6mg/l respectively. And lastly, sample 510 had a conductivity of 89.2, salinity of 90.9 and TDS of 55.0 .

Below is a table of our results