Nathaniel S Current Event Post

Building Better, Safer Soil

Article by Kathiann Kowalski on Dec 23, 2015

Post by Nathaniel Snow

Link:https://student.societyforscience.org/article/building-better-safer-soils

During the Geological Society of America meeting on November 2nd through 4th, two groups have shared their findings about making urban farming better and safer. One group being lead by Sara Perl Egendorf, with the Brooklyn College, the University of New York, and the New York City Urban Soil Institute have been working on finding ways for urban farmers to grow better crops than by using everyday supermarket soil. To do this the have using sediments left by the glaciers of the last ice age. But the sediments must also have energy so the team decided to put half of the sediments, and the other half compost consisting of mostly dead plant. The team also used different percentages of these ingredient, but out of all of them the 50/50 one worked out the best and made a much better solution than the others and normal everyday soil.While one team is working on making urban farming better, the other is making urban farming safer. At Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Dan Brabander, has been working to find the best way to get lead out of urban farmed plants. Because urban farms are usually made in big cities there is a lot of lead in the air and thus, the plants have lots of lead. The team has been planting in urban farms to see how much lead is in different soils and see which ones are safer. The two teams shared their projects at the Geological Society of America meeting and hope to eventually combine their projects to make urban farming a great way to farm wherever you are.

This article connected to what we did in class because we just finished up a unit in class about the classification of flowering plants and just started a unit on cells which includes plant cells. This helps science today because it allows us to make healthier fruits and vegetables in vastly different locations so even if we get bigger cities and less farms we can still have farming and in bigger amounts. When I first saw this article I wondered mainly wondered how this would affect farming in general as urban farming is becoming a much bigger thing that hasn’t really been addressed for a while. This caught my attention when I was on student.societyforscience.org/sciencenews-students and I had had seen this one article and really caught my attention because we had just finished up looking at plants so this was a perfect article. After reading this article I was very intrigued because it shows what we have accomplished with urban farming because originally all people in cities had was imported garden foods from far away while but now people can get fresh foods from anywhere. This article to me prove that we are getting to a place where anyone can have a big green thumb.