Given that you likely have more space in which to free range your chickens, the problem is now reduced to free ranging them away from the house. Arranging this is left as an exercise to the reader :-)
Given that you likely have more space in which to free range your chickens, the problem is now reduced to free ranging them away from the house. Arranging this is left as an exercise to the reader :-)
Spraying lead arsenate as a pesticide on apples was a fairly common practice up until the 60s.
It accumulates in the soil and never goes away.
The scale of the problem isn't spoken about much because there's literally nothing that can be done about it.
Much as crops can be planted to enrich the soil with nitrogen, arsenic hyperaccumulators can pull arsenic out of the soil: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513893/
As I understand it, strategies for lead involve binding it into a mineral form with very low water solubility, such that plants won't accumulate it in the first place, it's not hard to find permaculture folks who will talk your ear off all day about this stuff.
Permaculture people will talk your ear off all day about this stuff, but almost none of them have any clue on the actual application of said concepts beyond backyard urban gardens.
Farm scale permaculture is mostly a fantasy, almost nobody is doing it, except maybe Mark Shepard but in his case the actual profitable business on his farm is an organic market gardening operation and the 'regenerative agriculture', keyline design, permaculture stuff is frankly a side show.
It's one thing to lay down piles of sheet mulch and make nice "food forests" in your urban reclaimed vacant lot or whatever. It's another to do anything similar to that across many many acres. Too much of what they talk about is hand labour focused and not automation friendly.
Also a lot just doesn't work. Like, doesn't produce a crop. Just sounds nice. A whole sub-culture full of opinionated dudes (almost always) regurgitating a lot of pop philosophy and "natural wisdom" without a lot of effective science to show.
I've had just enough experience with larger permaculture projects to recognize the issues you're describing, but they aren't relevant to remediating 10m^2 of topsoil.
Some companies are looking at this for nickel mining: grow trees that leech metals out of the soil and end up with metal concentrations that are competitive with ore!
To take soil from the Australian residential guideline for soils of 300mg/kg to the article recommended 117mg/kg, you need to remove 183mg/kg from the soil.
The average lead content in the eggs was 301µg/kg, so 183mg/301µg = 608. Meaning, for every kg of soil in your backyard, you need the chickens to lay 608 kg of eggs.
This will clearly take many many many years.
What about testing your soil, and if there are high levels of lead then either put in raised beds or don't grow edible things?
You can actually grow edible things, though. Carefully. My understanding is that the metals accumulate in the tissues of the plant but not in its fruits. Depending on the kind of fruit. So actually orchard crops can ironically be safer in these old orchards, as the metals should not accumulate into the fruits. Instead they accumulate in the vascular tissues of the plant (stems, leaves, etc.)
So: * Avoid bare soil, as the metals would be more exposed this way. * Don't eat or be exposed much to the plant tissues growin there (which includes things like making hay or straw) * Could maybe grow fruits, but carefully. * Even mowing could be dangerous, maybe.
There's people who talk about cleanup using fungus, to accumulate then dispose. But I truly wonder about if this would ever be effective.
But, yeah. What a smart species we are.
Also leaded gasoline used to be popular, and would likely have been used for all sorts of things like an accelerant or a degreaser. It doesnt take many incidents like that over 50 years to spread lead all over the place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botany_Bay_Groundwater_Plume
I don't know what's worse 'progress' with known costs and done anyway, or 'progress' done in ignorance (sometimes rather intentionally).
It's the future's problem - not ours. Welcome to said future.
I do wonder about the contribution from leaded piping. If you imagine many decades of garden irrigation, it seems that some accumulation would be expected.
Another consideration is if there were ever any coal plants in the area.
They are usually far from the house and “old farmhouses” aren’t all that common.