The Sprout Report: A Scientific Journey to End Food Insecurity

 Well Hello, Senior year is off to a great start. I love my new teachers, I’m making new friends, but I can already feel how fast it’s all going by :( . Honestly, there’s a little sadness in knowing how soon it will be over. But on a brighter note, I want to share one of the newest ventures of my nonprofit. In my food systems class, I learned just how much waste comes out of meat processing, bones, scraps, things that never make it to the table. It got me thinking: what if we could take some of that “waste” and use it to strengthen our community gardens and fight food insecurity? So I started calling around to local butcher shops, asking what they did with leftover bones. Most said they didn’t have much to give, either they sold prime rib and cuts with bones still in them, or they only bought boneless meat to begin with. After 10–15 calls, we finally found a family-owned butcher, Cajun Meat Co., who agreed to give us 60 pounds of chicken bones every Friday. At first, it felt overwh...

My Eagle Scout Project: Bugs, Poop, and 95-Degree Heat This summer, while I was at UGA doing research, I was also working on my Eagle Scout project: something I wanted to be meaningful, not just another "build-a-bench-in-a-random-park" kind of thing. No offense to the bench-builders! I wanted to create something that aligned with my interests and would make a real difference. What started as an idea about bees turned into a full-blown two-part project involving both pollinators and compost. Here's the full journey. Summer 2024 – The Idea is Born Back in the summer of 2024, I started brainstorming project ideas. I was focused on how to boost garden efficiency, and bees felt like the perfect fit; they can improve pollination and plant growth significantly (by up to 30–50%, according to some studies). I started learning about beekeeping, planning out how to build a bee box, and even created a video guide to explain the plan. I emailed a bunch of local gardens offering a free...

Hello again It’s been a very busy few weeks. I spent most of May and June participating in the Young Scholars Program, a college-level research initiative hosted by the University of Georgia. The program gives high school students the chance to dive into real research across UGA’s campuses. I was based at the Griffin campus, working under the mentorship of Dr. Jesperson in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences. My research focused on turfgrass plant physiology, specifically how ethylene, a plant hormone, affects turfgrass greenness during flooding stress. This is a growing issue in Georgia, where frequent storms (not necessarily bigger ones, just more of them) are putting increased pressure on the turf used in places like parks and stadiums. When turfgrass floods repeatedly, it turns yellow, which isn’t great if you’re trying to maintain a professional football field. So, I spent my summer trying to understand why turf yellows under flood stress and how to stop it. The Science Behin...

So…I have good and bad news today. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. We’ve been running into some small but noticeable issues with growth across all of our test plants. After a bit of digging (no pun intended), we think we’ve figured out the root cause: an oversight during soil sterilization. When we autoclaved our soil, we didn’t account for how that would impact its water retention. Soil retention is in part determined by something called soil aggregates — clumps of soil held together by organic matter, microorganisms, and a few other minor factors. When we autoclave, we’re basically pressure-cooking the soil. It’s meant to kill off bacteria using high heat and steam, and we bag up the soil before putting it in. But this process also evaporates all the moisture, breaks apart organic matter, and wipes out the microbes that help maintain those aggregates. What we’re left with is dense, compacted soil that holds onto water way more than it should. At the start of the experime...

It’s been about a month since my last blog post, and—unsurprisingly—a lot has happened. After placing our order through the University of Ohio’s Bacillus Genetics Stock Center, I got in touch with a professor at Georgia Tech. He generously agreed to let me use his lab to culture the bacteria. When the sample arrived, we quickly realized that the shipping method wasn't sterile. Because of that, we had to plate the contents on petri dishes and subculture the dominant colony to isolate our Bacillus strain. A few days later, we had a successful OB broth culture. To keep our testing conditions as controlled as possible, we autoclaved the soil beforehand. Our procedure began with soaking the seeds in hydrogen peroxide, then rinsing them with distilled water. After that, we soaked the seeds in the diluted Bacillus broth for 15 minutes. Immediately following the soak, we planted the seeds in soil and watered them with 20 mL of sterile water. Right now, we're in the process of analyzing...

After deciding to use seed coating with Bacillus subtilis , the next step was to choose a specific strain. After extensive research and searching for a supplier that could provide the exact strain we needed(shocking, nobody wants to sell bacteria to high schoolers), we ultimately selected Bacillus subtilis OKB105.This specific strain produces spermidine, a compound made up of two or more amino groups, which plays two important roles in plant growth. The first being promoting the production of Expansin, a protein which makes cell walls less rigid. Increased fluidity allows for an increase in turgor pressure, enabling cells to expand and grow. Once a cell reaches a certain size, it hits a threshold, which signals cell division. The second benefit of OKB105 is its ability to reduce ethylene production. Ethylene is a hormone associated with plant stress, fruit ripening, and aging. High ethylene levels prevent root elongation, while lower levels promote an increase in vegetation. In my pre...