Every day on Detroit’s east side, air filled with toxic chemicals from the automotive behemoth Stellantis settles on rooftops, yards and gardens.
Now, a local urban farm about a mile from the auto plant will track how that pollution affects its operation.
Sanctuary Farms, a small, organic farm and composter, has installed a solar-powered air monitor on its property in response to the roughly 225,000 pounds of toxic chemicals Stellantis emits each year. The company has received eight air quality violations since 2021.
“We’re tracking the air because we…want to show what the [expletive] Stellantis is doing,” said Jon Kent, co-founder of Sanctuary Farms. Pollution from smokestacks can travel tens or even hundreds of miles away.
Kent is working with the nonprofit Ecology Center to collect and analyze data to publish for the public, not just from his own farm, but farms around the city.
They’re building a network of Detroit farmers monitoring the air, with six farms on board so far: Three Sisters, Sanctuary Farms, Featherstone, East Canfield Pavillion Park, Feedom Freedom, and Georgia Street Community Collective. Research has found that air pollution negatively impacts plants and may result in reduced economic yield in agricultural systems.
“The goal is to make sure we can track all the different emissions being pushed out around us,” Kent said.
Despite its violations, Stellantis officials maintain that “there was never a problem with the air” and that it is safe for the community to breathe.
The monitors are part of an effort to empower residents living in frontline communities with their own data.
“We live around a lot of environmental injustices. Farming and composting plays a role in helping combat that,” Kent said.
Jeff Gearhart, research director at the Ecology Center, said it’s important to do air monitoring in all parts of the city, but interest from Detroit farms drove this partnership.
“By their nature, urban farmers have an interest to understand what’s going on in the natural environment on the farm,” Gearhart said, “that includes everything from soil to water to air quality.”
The partnership comes amid a proliferation of air quality monitoring projects across the city powered by low-cost sensor technology, including projects being set up by the city, Wayne County and nonprofits like the Ecology Center. But some community experts contend that more air quality data won’t necessarily lead to improvements without community organizing alongside it.
Georgia Street Community Collective, a farm on Georgia and Vinton streets, was the first of the network’s farms to get an air monitor. The farm is in a heavy industrial area that hosts the hazardous waste facility US Ecology North.
Mark Covington, founder of Georgia Street Collective, said state and federal officials dismissed community concerns over air quality.
“There was no monitoring being done,” he said. So he decided to arm himself with data.
Jill Greenberg, spokesperson for the state’s air quality division said air monitors like Covington’s are not as robust as those used by state officials for regulatory purposes, but can be useful for education.
“Low-cost sensor technology can be useful for public awareness as it compares to the Air Quality Index (AQI) which communicates data using the color-coded scale,” Greenberg said.
Covington said the monitor at his farm shows the air quality is similar to the air right by Stellantis, located two miles away, where there is also a monitor with real-time online data.
Gearhart said that it can take a while to see trends in the data. The data from Covington’s monitor are published in real-time through Purple Air, a network of low-cost air monitors.
The area around Georgia Street has gotten even more industrial in recent years, with expansions or new buildings from Flex-N-Gate, Dakotta, Universal Logistics, and Lear Corporation. In 2020, the state approved a permit for US Ecology North to expand ninefold, despite opposition from neighbors, including Covington.
Covington hopes to compare air data from his monitor from several years ago to now to see if the increased industry has impacted local air quality.
Gearhart said air monitors cost around $3,000. Sanctuary Farms received a mini-grant from Community Action to Promote Healthy Environments, or CAPHE, to install its monitor in the spring of 2023.
The air data from Sanctuary Farms isn’t online yet, but Kent said it’s a priority to “democratize” the data by making it accessible to the public.
“We want to make sure that folks in the community have access to that data,” he said.
Eventually, all of the air monitors in the network will be connected to a single public platform to give residents direct access to the data.
“This is a project that is about environmental concerns at its core, but the second point is there needs to be fair access and equitable sharing of data and ownership to the very people that it’s supposedly helping,” Kent said.
Kent and Gearhart hope to build a network of a dozen Detroit farms with air monitors.
“We really need to establish and keep monitors in place for periods of years to actually understand trends,” Gearhart said.
Farms interested in joining can contact Jeff Gearhart at the Ecology Center or Jon Kent at Sanctuary Farms.
Other Detroit residents and community groups interested in taking action on air quality can apply for CAPHE’s grant of $5,000. Applications are due Jan. 31.