 My name is Jenny. And our project is soil remediation techniques in urban agriculture. So I met Katie, the partner of Farm that we worked with. She does vegetables in Chicago. A couple of years ago, she's pretty significant in Chicago's urban agriculture. She grows vegetables. And she was building out a new farm site in Garfield Park, which is close to the conservatory. And you guys hope they're in Chicago. And they kind of had the farm divided up into two parts. She knew that she wanted to have her portion of the farm where they had vegetables, and then also a small part dedicated to flowers. They have a lot of topsoil available in Chicago from excavated sites that's free and available. And they're not really sure where to put it. So on places like Craigslist or Hordetmouth, they'll say free topsoil or like, this is available. And it's a lot more like available to access cheaper than having clean soil frayed in from other places. So she ended up having topsoil trucked in to this parking lot, which you'll see the before and after pictures. And I think it ended up being a little bit more than anticipated. It was close to six tons, actually. It ended up coming up to, well, at first it was like, wow, when we leveled it and ended up being probably around like waist high and the growing area that we weren't like, the topsoil farm was about 300 by 60 feet. But at first it was just this unmanageable mountain full of weeds. And we were like, what do we do? So yeah. Yeah, so we knew that the soil was contaminated. And we had a rough idea that it was bad to grow food and soil with lead because that might end up in, as you mentioned, in the lettuce or in the tomato that you were growing. But as we were trying to dig deeper into. So what actually are the limits that you can grow crops in? And we realized that there actually is no national or international standard for a safe soil to grow in. So anyone can grow vegetables in a soil with heavy metals and there's no regulatory body or oversight saying you cannot do that. There are advised levels, but nothing set in stone. And there's actually a lot of gray area around safe levels of soil contaminants. And so a lot of what we know about lead comes from lead paint or when lead was in gasoline, both have since been phased out. But can cause cognitive damage and brain development, hindering and behavioral disorders. And another heavy metal that is common is a toxin is arsenic. And we know a lot about that from drinking water. So there is legislation around safe water and clean air as we have the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. But soil is also a major sink for industrial toxins. As the world keeps growing and developing and urban farming is gaining popularity. So the understanding around this is quite limited as this EU report mentioned. And so as Casey and I dug deeper into this grant, we started to have a lot of questions like why don't we know about this? And why isn't there more information around what levels of lead are toxic? A standard for bare soil. Yeah, so if a child is playing on an empty lot, it has to have less than 400 parts per million. But for like it's not a lot is known about how much is taken up into the plant and what it would be safe to grow in. So we started brainstorming a few different solutions. We found expensive ways like excavating different sites. This would be like as if we were to enter into a new lot, such as we were talking about for if we're going to start a community garden or start a new farm. Like if this were the native soil, I know this wasn't. But just in theory or by remediation. But we wanted to find like in our minds a solution as if we were starting a new farm, knew that this was probably a barrier to entry for a lot of urban agriculture growers. And we were like there has to be an answer. So some of the things that we started thinking about were raised beds, compost, spider remediation, and pints. We also looked at a couple of other things that we rolled out like micro remediation and vermi remediation. But we'll get to these a little bit more in detail in the next few slides. We narrowed it down to these because they just kind of fit in our budget and in our growing space. Yeah, so the first one that we thought might be a feasible option for us was building raised beds and applying top dressing with compost to dilute the soil and hopefully have a less high concentration of the heavy metals that we're persisting. Because heavy metals also do not degrade. They just change forms over time. So if you have a pile of soil with a heavy metal, it will continue to have that heavy metal forever, which is a tricky thing about having it in your soil. So we had this six tons of soil and it was sitting on the site and we didn't want to just put fresh, beautiful, new compost on top. Like trucking in compost into Chicago can cost anywhere $35 to $55 per cubic foot. And that's not even including freight, which can be hundreds of dollars on top of that. So I worked on other urban farms in the city that have incurred thousands of dollars in compost cost alone. So by having already soil that we knew was contaminated and putting beautiful, clean compost on top, we risk contaminating the compost and not even fixing the problem. And we decided that the cost benefit was too high for us to gamble with that because we weren't sure. And we also weren't going to like, so this is a common style of raised beds for community gardens and small backyard gardens. And this is one that I built out for a restaurant. And you can have more control over what you put in them. But because of the size and scale of farming we wanted to do, this also wasn't practical for us. And even if you have such a controlled environment, there are studies that say, within four years of growing in an urban environment, just due to ambient particles, soil can get recontaminated. So it's really important to stay on top of what you are growing in. And finally, Chicago, I don't know about every city, but has pretty strict ordinances around composting. So there are a few tiers that you can apply for permits. And the first one is you can't compost any organic waste. So you can only compost wood chips and wood. And the second is 10% organic waste. And then the third one is a permit that costs a couple hundred dollars. And you can compost organic waste, but it has to be 150 feet away from any building. And we were in a parking lot of a powder coating factory. So there was no feasible way for us to produce our own compost. So that is another reason why we ruled this out. So the next option we looked at was spider remediation. The place we chose to have our small urban farm, or that Katie did, was in a brownfield. So spider remediation made sets using plants to clean the soil and put this green matter in this area made sets. Spider remediation is the use of plants that removed a grain or stabilized undesirable substances, such as toxic metals. So a subcategory of that is spider extraction. These plants use their roots to pull up the metals and toxins and then store it in their biomass. And then once you harvest them, that kind of pulls out the toxins and metals from the soil. And then those plants are known as hyper accumulators. So the first plants that we kind of found or came across in our initial research were Chinese grapefruits. They're known for remediating arsenic, which was very high in our soil. They're between $20 and $30, depending on the size of the funds that we purchase. And their spacing is 36 to 48 inches. So they were mediated in a pretty large area. They can store up to 2.3% of arsenic in their biomass. And we wanted to explore multiple crops to test their efficacy side by side. So we also chose to look at Panicon, which was a weed that was growing in our soil already. Brasses are really needed to the Midwest. So this made a lot of sense to us. I'm sorry. Panicon, let me guess, chromium. And it was really cheap, $16.35 from Johnny's. And then mustard greens, we bought a pound at $25 from Johnny's. These we seeded really heavily. And they bring up lead, and nickel, chromium, copper, and zinc. And then marigolds and sunflower also bring up arsenic. And so phyto remediation was one of the methods we tried. But we also settled on the phosphate-induced metal stabilization method, also known as PIMS. And that's using a product called appetite 2, which is a form of phosphate made from fish bones from an Alaskan fishery. And so the way this works is that the appetite 2 is applied to a bed. As you can see, as Beth mentioned, a lot of sergrants go to people working on the ground to get these projects done. So we're really grateful for that. So Casey and I, these are the bags on the end of the beds of the farm. And you can see the train tracks in the background. And that is applying the appetite to the bed. So after it is applied with the addition of water, creates a new compound called pyromorphite. So the appetite binds with the lead, changing the bioavailability of the lead. So as mentioned before, lead does not degrade, but it can change compounds depending on and bioavailability depending on pH of the soil and other compounds it can bind to. So it creates pyromorphite, which is a less bioavailable form of metal. So if you eat of lead, so if you eat something that has pyromorphite instead of this lead, your body does not absorb it, making the heavy of the compound less toxic. And it's quite, it is an expensive method of doing this at $25 to $30 per cubic yard. So the larger your farm, the larger the investment. But we wanted to try out a method that plays around with bioavailability in addition to the phyto remediation. And I thought that this would be a worthy try and spoke with our partner farm about it. And they had also been thinking about experimenting with PIMS as well. So we had the lack of, so we had the opportunity to set up the farm with this project before anything was built out. So luckily, it was a blank slate. We had the soil, and we didn't have any beds built yet. It was useful because we didn't want all the beds of the same type concrete in the same area. When she flips to the soil sample slide, you'll see heavy metals are tricky because in some areas they'll be really dense, and then others you won't find any at all. So luckily, we could put some of the beds, the appetite in some areas, some in another. And then we just took all of the samples as a collective sampling of each bed. So we did 13 total PIMS beds because that's what our budget constraints allowed. And then we did six total beds involving hydro obstruction while doing 12 control beds. And then after the grant cycle, we attend to treat the control beds with the most successful method of remediation and then cycle the soil to the vegetable farm. So we had to get some baselines of our soil and to see what we were working with to know what was going on after these amendments were added. So at the beginning of the season we took, this is just a snapshot. This isn't all the samples that we took, but these are five of them. And getting, we paid for a heavy metals test. So normally in farming, I feel like you get your macronutrients tested, your MPK, the CON micronutrients. And heavy metals tests aren't common for farmers to get or to that frequently to think about. And so they can also be quite expensive, which is another barrier to getting it tested. But we used a local university, Loyola University, and they have an environmental testing laboratory that can conduct an array of soil tests in addition to the bioavailability test, which is separate from the heavy metals test, an additional $100. So because we were testing the bioavailability with the PIMS method, we wanted to see get bioavailability tests done on the beds we were applying PIMS to. So this is just a snapshot. And pulling some information from that, our average lead of our soil samples was 552 parts per million, which going back to the 400 parts per million listed are mentioned that that's bare soil. People should not play on bare soil with 400 parts per million. We felt like our gut reaction was to say growing crops in 552 parts per million soil seems pretty, or edible crops seems pretty risky. So we wouldn't do it. But again, there is no one saying that you can't. And so the average arsenic was 70.2. And both of them are naturally occurring in the environment through rock weathering and other processes. But between part like 10 and 30, so these are 10 and 40. So these are definitely elevated. And going back to taking soil samples from many sites on the farm, levels of heavy metals can vary so widely from even this to the meat to the table. So getting those sampling was very important, because in copper, one sample tested 848 parts per million. But then the average was around 35, which is the natural amount that occurs in the environment. So yeah, soil samples to get a baseline of the soil you're working with. The bioavailability test was actually pretty challenging. Surprisingly, not a lot of places offer that. It's kind of surprising. But yeah. So as far as our community interaction, we're finding that a lot of people are exploring the same topic as us. We have a post on our website and then on Instagram. A couple of different people have reached out with similar projects. We're speaking with someone from Detroit, actually, who's exploring micro remediation, which is interesting, because it's not something that we ended up pursuing, but definitely was one of the more. And someone in Chicago actually was doing. Yeah, so the University of Illinois is doing a lead map of Chicago based off of there's been a lead mapping done in New Orleans to see the range of contaminants across the city. So they're partnering with farms and backyard growers or anyone that would like to have a test plot to see how much lead do crops actually take up. And so we've linked up with them, and they also are partnering with a local urban agriculture organization to accomplish this. So it's really through this project, we've realized that there's a lot of people working on these issues. And I think that it's important to come together. And put our heads together, because I feel like this is a huge untouched area. And through this project alone, Casey and I have realized there's so much that can be explored and already thinking about new ideas and what we could have done differently. And we've got some information already existing. And then over there is field day that we're going to continue to have field days of the Chicago Public School. And then once we have more information, we can have the conference in Chicago. Yeah, because we'll do the soil sampling again at the end of our grant cycle. So we're one year into it. So yeah, year one, kind of establishing the baselines of soil health and figuring out how we wanted to set this up and design it. And with any farming season, I feel like there's always challenges and surprises that you weren't anticipating. So overcoming some roadblocks, such as sourcing of the ferns, because they're native to Florida. And so then moving forward into year two, replicating the trial that we accomplished and continuing on with our community engagement events. And then key takeaways, kind of how to touch down on soil can be a big problem. And then there's a lot of solutions. And we have a lot of work to do in this area as an agricultural community, and especially for urban agriculture. We'd like to thank Sarah for giving us an opportunity to add this as a facet of our farm as we are growing and building it out. It was really cool.