I was hoping to hear the results from the farmer who has inherited the land back to several generations. I hope the results were good healthy soil and that what he has been doing is working.
i've buried old cotton clothes to see what happens and then dug up the area and found very little other than tags/threads - but it was longer than a month.
for very poor people in the tropics i heard of a technique to capture and prevent topsoil from running off where they would take old clothes and use rocks to hold them in a line which is an adaptation of the method of just using rock lines to hold back the surface flows for as long as possible.
you can see the lines when you zoom in on this location, they are working on a place which has been stripped of topsoil by the weather and people removing the trees. it's changed a lot since they started (you can see the difference by the area around it):