We as a society need to make a rapid and urgent transition.
For the past 150 years we've been basically rining in economic bubble oil.
That bubble is beginning to burst.
It's going to become prohibitively expensive to maintain our current system of food production.
Farms will be servicing the people who live closer to them.
Which means that we're going to have to have farms wherever there's people.
I don't think it's a valid argument to say that cities are too toxic to be growing food in.
I just don't think that's the case and that there's ways to address that.
Philadelphia is known as one of the most contaminated cities in the United States.
The big problem in understanding the ecology of the soil is that many of these industries were destroyed
and the rubble was strewn across the city into various lots.
We don't always know the root of the cause.
All farmers have carried me here.
And the great storm will call me back.
The future farmers wanted to create a framework where people can bring in soil to get sampled
and then also enjoy a bowl of soup.
The information that they can gather here gives them the tools to make the decisions
about what they can do with their soil, whether it's contaminated or not.
I'm rusting with DPA.
We were asked by Region 3 to assist soil kitchen to generate these samples.
Well, catch me a moshnik and that.
Okay, you guys are our heroes.
The first soil kitchen results for sample 1-0X came back with no detected arsenic,
no detected cadmium, and 130 parts per million lead, which is very low.
So that's good.
That came from right there.
I'm hoping that this can be a spark to put pressure on the district to come up with funds
and support to clean the soil.
With the hopes that people in the city would possibly grow food at home or in what are currently called brownfields.
There's a lot of different types of properties that are actually brownfields.
Vacant buildings and abandoned structures be minesguard lands, former meth labs,
and there's different types of properties that are eligible for our grants.
The cities are the counties, the towns, and they can apply for an EPA grant
and hopefully get it cleaned up and turned it into something beautiful that's an asset for the community.
It's taken us, in some cases, a couple hundred years to contaminate our industrial environments
and so a lot of these things can't be solved overnight.
It's our responsibility as citizens to be involved in these things in our neighborhood.
We've got to change the face of urban America and this is a great way to do it.
