High school science project finds cabbage farmers may be polluting the air

A science project by two teenage high school students has raised concerns in a small farming town about the possibility that cabbage farmers may be polluting the air with pesticides.

Alex Lowe and ReAnna Greene, both 17, are two high school seniors who decided to do a project involving pesticides for their advanced placement science class.

These two students were prompted to do this project at the urging of their teacher, Karen Ford, because Alex and ReAnna's original project about sea grass fell through. Ms.Ford suggested the project after hearing a presentation by Susan Kegley, a researcher at the Pesticide Action Network North America or PANNA. PANNA is against using pesticides. Before they began their project, Ford and Greene were sent to California for training by PANNA in the use of pesticide collecting equipment.

For the pesticide project, Greene and Ford wanted to test the air at their high school, Pedro Menendez High School, but school administrators would not allow them to set up the pesticide collection equipment on school grounds. These student then decided to contact Sarah Baker who owns a home about one-third of a mile from South Woods Elementary where her daughter attends school.

South Woods Elementary is located in the farming town of Hastings, FL, and sits in the middle of cabbages fields. This has 598 students, 72 teachers and opened in August of 2005. Hastings produces about half of Florida’s cabbage crop. Potatoes for the chip industry are also grown in Hastings.

To collect their samples, Lowe and Greene used a drift catcher - tubing attached to a small pump pulls in air and traps it in a resin. Once a day, the tubes were placed in ice and sent off for analysis paid for by PANNA. The girls and Ford say the wind generally blew toward the school, so they believe their sample is similar to what would be found at South Woods.

According to the girls, the results showed the pesticides diazinon and trifluralin and the herbicide endosulfin are in the air near the school. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decided in 2000 to phase out residential use of diazinon to reduce risk to children and others. Endosulfin can affect hormones that regulate growth and development, the agency says. Trifluralin is a possible carcinogen.

School officials are upset about these results, and state the results are invalid because this test was done prior to the school being built on the site that was tested.

Mark Mossler, a University of Florida pesticides expert, said he doubts the validity of the testing and said the chemicals are needed to protect the state's valuable agricultural industry.

Ray Chavira, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency researcher, said the drift catcher is sound technology - if the girls used it properly.

While there is still much debate about the validity regarding the findings in Greene and Ford's science project, the St.Johns County School District went ahead and hired a firm from Jacksonville,FL to perform more studies to confirm, or deny, the pesticides levels at South Woods Elementary.

Learn more about this subject at jacksonville.com.