Olivia Barfield Grant Story
Olivia Barfield Grant Story
Conducting Research: Analyzing the Heavy Metal Content of Soil
The funding I received from the NTC Grand Program was crucial in helping me to complete my honors thesis project. Through my honors thesis, I analyzed the heavy metal content of soil in community gardens in the New Orleans area, and to what extent vegetables from the gardens absorb the metals from the soil. The samples came from 5 community gardens started by Dr. Jelagat Cheruiyot that serve the Salvation Army, the Mid-City neighborhood, the Broadmoor neighborhood, and the Broadmoor food pantry.
It is incredibly important to understand the concentration of heavy metals present in the soil of New Orleans’ community gardens and the food they produce because heavy metals are non-biodegradable and toxic at certain levels. Dangerous metals enter the food chain as they transfer from soil to plant, which we eventually consume. Because heavy metals don’t break down, they remain in soil, water, air, and individuals for a very long time after consumption. The issue of heavy metal contamination is even more relevant in urban areas, where there are more emissions from cars, more waste to be disposed of, and more coal combustion. The abundance of warnings regarding the effects of a city’s pollution on urban gardening has led to a wary attitude towards produce grown in urban areas.
The results of my thesis have clarified the current state of the soil and vegetables in some of New Orleans’ community gardens. Having this knowledge through the assistance of the NTC grant, my next steps are to contextualize this information to communicate the safety of our soils and vegetables. This work truly could not have been done without this financial assistance. Dr. Cheruiyot had some funding from another grant, but it was not enough to fully cover the expensive cost of analysis and materials needed along the way.
With the additional funding from NTC, we were able to analyze all our samples using Tulane’s own Coordinated Instrumentation Facility, which houses an ICP-MS machine. This machine is able to tell us the concentrations of each heavy metal in the samples, so it was crucial to use for our analysis. This highly complex machine is also very costly to operate, so in the end the funding from NTC helped us to complete the fall crops sample analysis. Unfortunately, we were unable to analyze the spring crops due to how much more time and money we needed. Thankfully, we now have a procedure in place, and new undergraduate students are taking interest in the project. I am confident that the NTC Grants Program will have the opportunity to support this important, community-focused project in the future as Dr. Cheruiyot expand testing to more gardens.
