Brief drying times for soil samples are sometimes necessary, e.g., to halt microbial activity quickly or to estimate the fresh weight of soil needed to provide a particular dry weight for incubation or other experiments. Soil samples ranging from high to low organic content can be dried successfully in microwave ovens within a few minutes, thus achieving the same &thetas; values as when measured by conventional drying techniques. In this study we compared the effects of air, conventional, and microwave drying on soil chemical propertiesSamples of 20 forest soil horizons from New Hampshire were air-dried, dried in a forced draft laboratory oven, or dried in a rotary microwave oven. Levels of exchangeable Ca2+, Mg2+, K+, and Na+and pH of dried soils were compared with values for field moist controls. There were no significant differences between mean values determined for levels of the exchangeable cations or pH for field moist or any of the drying methods. Nor were cation values obtained from samples dried in the microwave oven significantly different from those obtained by drying in a conventional laboratory even