001okay hello arms i'm here with uh my name is dr laroche and i am here with andrew laurian who is a local climate change hero uh hi andrew yeah how you doing doctor i'm doing well thank you thanks for joining us today thank you um so i'm student someone just you've had a little bit of an introduction already to andrew's work uh and some of you got to uh do a workshop with andrew this morning but i'm just going to share a little bit about andrew so andrew is part of the northeast organic farming association also known as nofa he works in urban landscapes of springfield to build community and grow healthy food for families dealing with contaminated soil and vacant lots while building community gardens can be expensive and make gardening in the city
002seem almost impossible andrew works closely with two youth programs in springfield to conduct on-site trials of bioremediation techniques where heavy metal contamination and carbon-based pollutants are a concern and are removed from the soil so i think some students got to do that with you this morning andrew is that right yeah we said some microbe traps to uh try to discover what's underneath our feet and introduce ourselves to the worlds of micro mycology fungi awesome thanks so andrew um before we begin i know you have a presentation um i just was hoping that you could tell the students a little bit about what brought you to this work yeah um mostly what brought me to this work is a lifetime of um just feeling for people um loving others and just uh wondering why well why
003is there people that are hungry out there why is there poverty why is there injustices and not really understanding um you know the reasons for it because i see the world as a bounty for a plentiful place um that you know there should be enough food for everybody clean air clean water shelter arable land and a relevant education for everybody to me gardening on a small scale especially here in the city is a good way to tackle those problems at the core you know um there's no better way to see it to do it um than through gardening in my eyes that's what led me here to this work thank you i really appreciate your um connection of the of the work to the community and that's a big part i know of what you're
004going to be presenting and sharing what you have done um and giving students insights to ways that they might be able to also engage in this work it's um incredibly valuable uh teachers who are um with students in classrooms um throughout the presentation if you have questions that you want to type into the chat on youtube go ahead and do that and andrew will make sure that we have time to address them either during the presentation or at the end but go ahead and put them in as they come up so i'm gonna be navigating the slides on my end while andrew is talking so uh at times he might tell me to forward the slide so that's uh we'll have a little bit of that as well all right so andrew i'm gonna go
005ahead and start us up here yeah welcome welcome to our project um so what we're doing is we're taking practical approaches to urban soils health and remediation so in general in a city when we want to farm and think about farming and growing food our space is limited so the space that we do have we want to make sure it's viable to grow in a lot of times we deal with contaminants in the soils like lead from houses um hydrocarbons you know oils gases from cars and traffic so we want to make sure that we're growing um a lettuce or collard green [Music] so what we do is uh when we approach our sites we want to look at them from many ways you can uh go to the internet and get to google and
006see the different maps that they show us uh the different layers as you can see it gives a little contour to our map you can see that there's an old garage broken down there so we already know we have some rubble and some material that we might be concerned about in growing in this space here's our another view of our our lot um as you can see is right next to a housing complex so with this amount of space uh to grow food in it um and to claim it as a space of our own you can see that there's many families that would benefit from this just from the beauty of seeing the flowers outside they're seeing change right now it's an open lot there's signs that say do not enter so the kids
007can't even play ball here or anything so we have to determine what we're going to do with our open spaces in the city that's a this is a video walkthrough we can skip this video it's just uh showing us our plot and we kind of marked it out to give us parameters and um you know focus on where we're going to be doing this work this slide right here i'm going to read it to you the people the place and the way we feel are all a part of this remediation process okay when we're thinking about remediation and fungi and soil science and all this um you know you think about a lot of science things and and research and you you don't realize that this is community you know like the people around us
008what do they want to see here do they even want to see a garden what kind of space do they want to feel you know how do how do we feel working in the space as people are traveling by and seeing us do the work um all of that is very important in a remediation process to get the history of the place you know what has happened here in our field what has happened in this vacant lot previous to us trying to make it into a field of our greens when we're coming into our spaces uh we like to document everything because when we don't want to go and attack just what's wrong or what the problem is we want to look at the healthy function what is healthy on the soil what is working
009uh the weeds and the flowers and the everything we find on our site they're all telling us the story and as you skip through this slide you can see all the different um plants that i bet a lot of you from new england will recognize uh you got the violet there uh you got some i believe there's doc and then we have the garbage you know the the real the realistic um truth about working in the city is you're gonna have people throwing stuff around and it's important to document that too to show change and show the space as um somewhere that we value and people will let be less likely to literally enjoy trash in these spaces andrew we have a question from a student uh wondering what does remediation mean or what does
010bio remediation mean yeah so there's two words there you know we got the the bio and then remediate so what we want to do is uh by naturally um by organic ways take the soil that is contaminated or damaged and remediate it or make it better uh with healthy practices um so instead of what what we can do is just go in with a dump truck and just remove all the soil that's there and contaminated and you know bring it to a another site or a dump but what we're doing is just we're moving our trash somewhere else to be contaminated somewhere else and that's expensive to do that when we're talking about grassroots operations and getting in here and claiming these spaces in between buildings there's not a lot of money to go in
011there and scoop out dirt and to replace it so on by by remediating the soil we're um taking natural methods by using fungi plants and bacteria to uh make the soil more viable and healthy to in i hope that kind of answers it thank you yeah so like we found this rusty pipe in the ground um and it it just brought to my attention that you know the ants made use of it what is it telling us you know there's something to be told about um the creatures in the soil and the spaces they live in fire and um it's very important to document as we're just going through these slides just uh documenting everything um the way it looks the different scenes what what parts of the grass are growing healthy what parts are
012dead um because there's there's a story to be told underneath [Music] so as we're going through our project we also want to take in account that we have a little bit of slope in our lock so um right here we're doing the old uh a squared plus b squared the c square and all these um charts and stuff that i thought i'd never use in school but guess what i was googling it and i had to be um you know brush up on some of this a simple basic man that a lot of us might think is useless so we were able to find like a nine percent slope here and you know we're just thinking about um the rain water and how it could erode um away our natural you know top layer of
013soil like that we're just using pipes and spring we're using a level very simple tools this process and um it's good to have partners and and people to look up to and people to ask questions in this work i've even had experts come and join us on the field and i'll ask them a question um hey what's this plant right here you know what do i do in this uh particular instance and they're moving you know so a lot of um a lot of our our work and research throughout life gardening climate change whatever you're doing in life it is okay to not know the answer and but to know how to find it you know and to research i just wanted to um you know express that to you guys that you know it's
014okay to not know and it's better to even ask to further not okay so we got our site we got our pictures familiar with what's going on we see our healthy functions we see our problems now it's time to dig in okay when we're digging in we're using these protocols that um nofa mass had put together to uh observe the biology in the soil so we simply just take like a hula hoop place it down anywhere random in the soil and then go ahead and take a closer look at that okay so when we're looking in there we can see that there's some dead grass in there there's a little bit of newly planted grass maybe on some the the larger ones are maybe some crab grass we see a dandelion which we know has
015a long tap root so we're um just soaking it all in and then as we keep going in our slides we'll see that we're going to make a hole and then when we make this hole we're checking for root depth we're checking for earthworm counts we're checking for soil aggregation um we're talking how far down the deep the deepest roots go uh just to get a measure of compaction and as you see this here this is a clump of soil and we're looking for aggregates now aggregates is the parts of the soil that will clump together and hold together and you see that that stuff's just falling apart so and you see also the root system here so there's important to know the different root systems some have long roots some have shallow roots and
016the role that they play that's purslane right there so i'm just shooting things at you i'm excited about this work okay guys so purslane is a plant that's found as a weed all around the gardens and it's edible so you'll find um in your garden there's actually many things that people pull out to plant other things in which could have been harvested and eaten we do a texture by field procedure where we'll take the soil into our hands and we'll like kind of rub it in like a little ribbon just to see if it sticks together if it's clay or if it's sandy and we document everything we we can come up with to kind of get a whole story of what our soil is like we'll even do a slate test where we'll take
017a ball of aggregates which is the soil clump together held together by roots and biology and we'll put it into the this water and see how much of it will fall to the bottom now if a lot of it is falling to the bottom and your water is really cloudy and that means we got on the poor soil if the water stays more clear and the clump stays together that means we got a real strong system of aggregates that are sticking together we check for infiltration we um put a ring down into the soil hammer it in a little bit then we fill it with water and we time it to see how long it takes for that water to seep through the ground now a good soil you know it'll go right through here
018and here's a demonstration on our project partner carol rozelle has uh demonstrated to us uh like runoff and um what it is to have a healthy aggregate versus a poor aggregate and as you see one plate has flour in it and one plate has a bread in it now the bread is the healthy soil with all the aggregates and all the ingredients the starch everything that's keeping it together where the flour is the poor soil and it's missing some ingredients in it now when that rain water hits that flower it's spreading all around it's getting messy uh it it's just it doesn't hold together and all your nutrients that you would have had in there all spreading all around there's uh josh and bernard they uh help us out in our project in springfield uh
019they're great guys yeah so um what was that last slide again uh did i finish that thought yeah so she oh yeah so just well it was just about the aggregates and just making the bread when you pull the water on the bread that's going to stick together and you'll see you know explanation of what it is to have poor soil which is loose and a healthy soil which is i love that demonstration with the flour and the bread it really helps you to understand it it's really great sorry that you just advanced past it before early there was a question before about um about cover on the on the ground a question about was that local cover or just a regular cover crop that we saw earlier yeah so i don't think we got
020to the cover crops yet okay this grass is just um you know what what they had in their lawn and they come in and they maintain it with their mowers but cover crops is definitely part of our remediation process as it is important to keep the soil covered um right here um we're measuring compaction and um dash is taking this uh instrument and shove it in the ground oh no so what we're doing is we're not measuring compaction per se we found out that it's compacted by using this tool but um we're taking cores and we're sending these off to our soil lab so we have we use the soil lab at umass page laboratory and we also use uh connecticut yukon's laboratory and they they do good with giving us an analysis on our
021soil to let us know our organic matter um any heavy trace minerals i mean our metals that might be in our soil and um magnesium contents you know different phosphorus contents and things like that yeah so if you can um get a sample out of whatever plot you're working on and get it to the lab it costs about fifteen dollars if you send it to umass and they'll get it back to you uh pretty promptly this tool right here is a pentrometer and this is the tool that we'll use to measure compaction and it just has like a tip on the end of it um and you press it down into the soil and it'll measure uh pounds per square foot i believe um to tell you how compacted the soil is and um in
022some places we couldn't even get that thing in the ground the soil was so bad all of those protocols we had just went through you can find them on nofo mass website uh they are the soil carbon grower protocols so and and they have a video of how to do the test that we had just went through if you're interested in you know gauging what kind of land you're you'll be working with compost um i was fortunate enough to have a truck and um we went and we got a yard of compost for about 40 bucks now i say that to highlight the fact that when you make your own compost you're saving a trip to the place to get it you don't have to pay for the gas you're not having this bulldozer you
023know do the work we're we're doing the work ourselves we're taking care of our waste and that's what we want that's what our goal is but for now we bought some compost and that was our first um advice that we had gotten from our project partners is to compost the entire plot we also once we got the compost in there we use the broad fork to kind of incorporate into the soil so you shove the broad fork into the soil and pull it back just to kind of break it up a little bit uh that's better than using a tiller because a tiller on a machine as the blades roll that bottom where you know the blades are hitting it creates a compaction layer which is we don't want andrew we have a question from
024the chat what are some of the negatives of heavy metals in the soil so why do we not want them in there yeah um one of the most common um heavy metals that we deal with is that we find in our soil is lead um and i'm not um a complete expert on you know the effects of of lead and heavy metals but i do know that we should only be taking in but so much um heavy metals consuming them and you know they're not it's not made for us to ingest and um particularly here in the city a lot of our houses uh earlier on were painted with lead paint so um you know that's that's something that we just don't want to ingest um i think that i need to do some further
025research to completely understand you know the heavy metals but just um you know thinking about it is i don't want to eat that stuff you know thank you yeah and there was another question about how composting helps yeah so composting is a great uh way to add organic matter to your soil so um it's filled with all kinds of microbial life in it it has um some carbon in it from you know the wood chips and the browns that we put in our compost piles so um adding the compost to the soil will help enrich it and add some nutrients and bacteria into the soil are you still you because can you still hear me sorry i apologize that was me um i was just saying that we do have a couple minutes left um
026if if there are more questions folks want to put in the chat and i can also go through the slides a little more yeah i'm down for some questions i love questions so let's see what there were some we got through the ones that are in there so if teachers or students want to add anything more to the chat they can we'll i'll go ahead and push through the slides a little bit as well yep yeah here's our team again we had just laid the compost i think i'm coming up with uh we had um some cover crop coming up bernard uh there's anthony he's our photographer he takes really good pictures which is also you know everybody's a part of this team so it'll have a role here's one of his great photos so
027you know it goes a long way when you can see yourself doing the work and you can feel proud about what it is that you do which is another reason why we document everything beginning to end is our team some of you guys will meet sister hannah a little later today so here's our cover crop we got this um mix from nofa it's a winter kale mix um there's different seeds in there we have a question from the chat um andrew how long did it take to complete the garden okay so um as far as it being complete it's a working progress but um within a few weeks we had gotten a lot of the testing done um the results had gotten back and we were able to share our results um as far as
028our photos on what's the healthy functions um what what did we learn from umass and from contest labs and we were able to send that to our project partners who who then helped us design our garden so um since then we had installed about 30 to 50 plants um ranging from we gave them a plant list of things we wanted to see grown and from that plant list she chose uh which plants would work together well um some having different that occupied space underground some that keeps high space above ground um in different ways um to create an environment that will help the soil become more healthy steve a more personal question what's your favorite plant species and why oh man plant species um i have a love with cucurbits uh so i'm saying that
029right so like the family where the cucumbers and the melons and and um the squashes are in because and those are the ones that always have the like those yellow flowers that real bright they attract a lot of pests now you would wonder why they're my favorite and they attract pests but it's because i think there's um something to learn there you know about inter planting um crop rotation and um beneficial pests and bugs and insects so it allows me a better space to you know once those beetles and bugs start moving on in um how do we deal with this problem you know how do we move forward and how do we mitigate the risk for next season i think you're on mute dr druch thank you i keep clicking the button and then
030it unclicks on me so uh thanks for that so we just i'm going to do a couple more questions because we um started a few minutes late um we do have a question about how many projects you have going on at once okay so we have um the bioremediation project has two sites that we're working on and then um i also work at gtc which is garden in the community and we're doing um like a total makeover on one of the sites uh to really get it into production state and then um on my own i i just do personal gardeners and whoever will allow me to in space you know like as a farmer in the city and i'm telling you um i don't have acres and i have acreage so each plot each
031backyard that i'm allowed to grow in you know it could be simply a friend saying hey you can use my space to grow now i'll go in there and grow food and now hopefully the neighbor will see me doing it they're asking questions they want to do it the kid's coming outside he's eating tomatoes that he says he doesn't like now he likes you know so um that's my favorite part of my work is being able to um take advantage of spaces like you should see the amount of food i grow in the space you can park a car like that little like like four by eight almost kind of space you can really pack it in and get a lot accomplished thank you um so one follow-up question how many of the gardens have
032you done you may i don't know if you kept count yeah so um i i continuously i'm only working on about five right now i had to i'm not spread myself so thin um but i think we established 10 12 like 10 to 12 gardens something like that and it's beautiful because in those gardens like i'm saying the neighborhood now he's garden now he's got a space and you know like so it spreads it's like fire great more more practical question um is there a compost that's best certain material yeah um is there a compost that's best i would say there's kind of a two-part thing because first of all you want to use um uh what you got and you want to get rid of what you have in a conscious smart way so
033i mean your food specs your yard waste that will usually go to the curb and a truck's gonna pick up your bags of leaves um so all of these ingredients are very good ingredients for the compost and you also want to keep a balance you want to keep about 70 of browns and you want to keep 30 green we're uh we have our some of our math and science teachers have been texting about how excited they are about how much of what what they teach is connected to your work so i think we could just kind of wrap up with um what's your favorite part of your job and what's your advice to students yeah all right so i think that's like one answer right there and my favorite part of the job and my
034advice to students is is to not be afraid to learn like seriously um i get myself into even like doing these presentations like i i don't have a lot of experience doing these presentations but the only way to get that experience is to do it you know and i think um getting through these humps and the feelings of being nervous or um unaware or maybe feeling not um completely knowledgeable like it's kind of intimidating being in this field knowing that there's an expert out there somewhere on um microbe traps who might be able to offer a little bit more but the important part and my favorite part is to teach and to learn thank you so much andrew i do appreciate so students we're going to go ahead and and teachers we're going to say
035um thank you to andrew laurian our our local climate change hero and uh i certainly made a few mistakes andrew in our in our presentation today with my mute button um but i appreciate your efforts and um and patience with me on that um and most importantly um thank you for uh inspiring our students to make the connections um and knowing they can make a difference um taking what they're learning in school and and applying it to help their community absolutely thank you guys for having me and um i appreciate i have some conversation with some of you out there and you guys are you get it so um just keep on getting it just keep on getting thanks andrew take care thank you