18/05/2025
Lately, there's been growing media attention around PFAS — so-called “forever chemicals” — found in backyard eggs, soil, and homegrown food.
Suddenly, gardeners, homesteaders, and regenerative farmers are being warned that their well-loved, homegrown produce may be “unsafe.”
But is this really something new?
Or is it just a new label on an old problem?
Is it something new to do a soil test for pollution and nutrition before growing, now also for Pfas?
Why only for hobby farmers?
For decades, our soils have contained heavy metals, pesticide residues, lead, industrial runoff, microplastics — especially near cities, roads, and agricultural zones. Urban gardens, schoolyards, and parks have long existed in a toxic legacy. Yet only now, with PFAS, does the warning go viral.
The deeper problem remains the same:
We live in a world where pollution is systemic, yet responsibility is placed on individuals.
Industries and intensive agriculture continue unchecked, while the people growing their own food with love, care, and compost are told to be afraid.
Let’s be clear: yes, environmental pollution is real. Yes, PFAS (so-called "forever chemicals") are persistent and widespread. But this issue does not begin — or end — in the humble backyard garden. It begins in decades of industrial negligence, chemical agriculture, and systems that prioritize profit over planetary health.
The paradox is painful:
While large-scale, chemically intensive farms continue to spray, extract, and export, the warnings are aimed at the people who are actually restoring soil, closing nutrient cycles, and choosing local, organic life. the living soil we restore is a radically healthier path than depleted, chemically-dependent farmland.
Even if trace pollutants exist in backyard eggs or soil-grown vegetables, these foods are still part of a system rooted in living soil, biodiversity, intentionality, and resilience. The alternative — food grown in depleted soils, also with Pfas as they often grow along highways use the same contaminated rainwater for irrigation , sprayed with synthetic inputs, packaged in plastic, and shipped thousands of kilometers — brings its own toxic load, much of which goes unmeasured and unmentioned. Backyards and large farms can both have high or low PFAS levels, depending on their specific history and inputs. But the waring goes out to the more self-sufficient conscious organic grower.
We shouldn’t pretend the world is pure — but we also shouldn’t let the toxic systems that created the mess tell us how to live.
Growing your own food is not a risk — it’s a response.
Soil isn’t just a surface — it’s a living relationship.
And that health isn’t found in sterile control — but in connected, conscious choices.
It is important to do a soil test to see the history and if it's safe to grow or let your chickens play.
Keep trusting the compost beneath your feet, the sun on your leaves, and the wisdom of cycles older than science.
Because in a world of invisible toxins, it is the visible life that will carry us forward.
