Category — Soil

“We need to ask more questions of our food supply, both urban and rural.”

By Eli Zigas
Grist
13 Sept 2011

Excerpt:

As someone who works on urban agricultural policy, I’m often asked, “Is city-grown food safe?” The question comes from aspiring urban gardeners and concerned eaters alike. And it seems to stem from both a fear of the known and a fear of the unknown.

First, the fear of the known: Common urban contaminants include lead, arsenic, and other heavy metals leaked into soil from old paint, leaded gasoline, modern car exhaust, and industrial land-use.

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Volunteers from City Slicker Farms helped install raised beds in Laura Blakeney’s yard to avoid contaminated soil. Photo by Nate Seltenrich.

Urban farming has become hugely popular in the East Bay, but lead and other heavy metals in the soil pose potential health risks. Meanwhile, there’s little consensus on what to do about it.

By Nate Seltenrich
East Bay Express
Aug 3, 2011

Excerpt:

These are the dilemmas that cities and urban gardeners now face. Yet organizations like City Slicker Farms are working hard to develop safe, practical solutions to soil contamination. Since 2005 the organization has set up 170 backyard gardens, including about 140 in West Oakland, all at no cost to the recipients. The initial step is always a soil test. While few lots exhibit truly dangerous levels, most are elevated and require some form of remediation — typically, covering the soil with mulch and growing vegetables in raised beds.

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Looking at the soil in a vacant lot

By Melissa Iverson M.Sc. (Soil Science)
University of British Columbia – Faculty of Lands and Food Systems
2010, 39 pages

Introduction – How to Use This Guide

Have you ever walked by that vacant lot near your home, work, or school, and thought “I would love to make this place a garden!” If so, then this guide is for you!

The purpose of this guide is to help you answer some of the big questions about the environmental quality of your site. Questions like:

How can I find out if the soil is contaminated?
Is the soil deep enough for my plants to have healthy root systems?
Are there enough nutrients in the soil?
Is the site too shady for a garden?

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Workers trucked in hundreds of meters of organic soil to build the raised beds at Vancouver’s SOLEfood farm. Photo courtesy of SOLEfood. Contributed by Luke Brocki

“We’re giving them the land for nothing, We certainly haven’t set aside a budget for cleaning up this land.”

By Luke Brocki
Open File
February 18, 2011

Excerpt:

The trouble with land is that it’s practically impossible to make more of it. Despite the City of Vancouver’s plans to see its flagship urban farm expand to new locations, SOLEfood farm is getting a hard lesson in real estate: the city’s few empty lots are either slated for development or are long-abandoned and contaminated industrial sites.

“Unfortunately the soils are not usable,” says seasoned farmer and author Michael Ableman, the man in charge of growing food at the social enterprise in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. “We cannot move forward and allow people to grow edible crops in soil that’s going to essentially poison those crops,” he says.

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Urban Certified Organic?

Researchers from the Department of Geophysical Science working in the area of Food and Environment at The University of Chicago are currently evaluating the application of the National Organic Standards to Urban Agriculture. The U of C team of Geoponicuns are working in collaboration with several national and international organizations, to determine and address the inherent challenges of preserving organic integrity on urban farms.

By Julia Govis:
For questions and/or comments, contact:
Email: govis@geosci.uchicago.edu

Consumer demand for organic food continues to climb according to a 2009 press release by the Organic Trade Association.(1) Growing concerns over food safety and chemical usage in conventionally raised farm products are some of the reasons cited by consumers choosing to purchase certified organic food.

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Implications for contaminated land risk assessment and risk management?

By Jonathan R Leake 1 , Andrew Adam-Bradford 2 and Janette E Rigby 3
1 Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
2 Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
3 National Centre for Geocomputation, National University of Ireland Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland
Environmental Health
Published: 21 December 2009

Excerpts:

Abstract

Compelling evidence of major health benefits of fruit and vegetable consumption, physical activity, and outdoor interaction with ‘greenspace’ have emerged in the past decade – all of which combine to give major potential health benefits from ‘grow-your-own’ (GYO) in urban areas. However, neither current risk assessment models nor risk management strategies for GYO in allotments and gardens give any consideration to these health benefits, despite their potential often to more than fully compensate the risks. Although urban environments are more contaminated by heavy metals, arsenic, polyaromatic hydrocarbons and dioxins than most rural agricultural areas, evidence is lacking for adverse health outcomes of GYO in UK urban areas.

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A Cabbage Patch for City Hall. Last year, Baltimore City Hall replaced its traditional flower gardens with vegetable beds to help serve a local soup kitchen. But not all went as planned. Anne Marie Chaker reports on lessons learned and plans for this year’s crop.

Attack of the Rotten Tomatoes

By Anne Marie Chaker
Wall Street Journal
March 10, 2010

Excerpt:

The city of Baltimore replaced its flower beds in front of city hall with vegetables last year. The goal, says designer Angela Treadwell-Palmer, was to show that vegetable gardens could be attractive and to grow harvests to donate to a local soup kitchen. But the local charity reported that some crops—particularly beets, kohlrabi and eggplant—weren’t appetizing to people.

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Photo by Jim Richardson, National Geographic.

By Charles C. Mann
September 2008
National Geographic

By 2030, when today’s toddlers have toddlers of their own, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth; to feed them, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, farmers will have to grow almost 30 percent more grain than they do now.

“With eight billion people, we’re going to have to start getting interested in soil,” he said. “We’re simply not going to be able to keep treating it like dirt.”

See the complete article and photos here.

“The tests were performed as part of the health department’s analysis of soil samples from all of Montreal’s nearly 100 community gardens. Beausoleil said about 30 gardens city-wide are contaminated. However, only 11 gardens have been closed – nine of them last year. The other affected gardens will be made public this year by the boroughs in which they are located, Beausoleil said.

“We can tell you right now, there is no worry for your health as a result of eating vegetables from this soil,” Monique Beausoleil, a toxicologist with the department — She explained that most of the contaminants were found in soil lower than the roots that most typical vegetables grow, so their absorption rate was very low.”

Montréal Gazette article, April 1, 2008.

Links to official tests and reports.

Montréal’s community gardening program – description, 14 page PDF.

Paper produced for the Department of Geography, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria (4731 words)
Email: mansurdawaki@hotmail.com

“— a system of land use that is being practiced in metropolitan Kano will be considered. This system of land use that has been going on for centuries involves the use of stream water to irrigate land at the banks. Principal of these streams are Challawa, Getsi, Jakara and Salanta. The main objective is to produce fruits and vegetables for the consumption of the city dwellers. This system of land use has been called by Binns et al (2003), by the name urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA).”

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