US (WI): Testing homegrown vegetables for lead

Harris Lowell Byers grew up in Georgia loving science and agriculture. Today, he lives in Glendale, remediates brownfields, and is the father of two children. Byers says the scientist and dad in him wanted to find out how much lead might be making its way from the urban soils into vegetables; so he headed back to school to earn a PhD at UW-Milwaukee's geosciences department to try to come up with answers.

“If you have a child who is already at high risk, that’s already living in certain conditions that place that child at high risk for lead exposure, could eating vegetables that have lead in them add to that cumulative exposure?,” Byers asks.

So, to learn more, Byers has been growing vegetables on a UWM rooftop.

He grows in three different types of soils. “This is from the (former) foundry. Those are from residential gardens and the one behind me is from Home Depot. So if you step back you don’t visually get the sense that this beet is being grown in soil that’s got about 5,000 parts per million lead, which is really high, certainly not a soil you would want to have a child exposed to,” Byers says.

Read more at WUWM