What does "per-pathway" mean for contamination?

Different contamination types travel different ways. Road runoff follows the road and the slope. Industrial air emissions travel downwind, so the direction of the prevailing wind matters. Underground plumes travel with groundwater, which follows terrain and aquifer geometry, not the surface road. The same nearby site can be high risk on one side of your parcel and low risk on the other. Patent-pending work on this is what powers the directional view in Growable Ground.

Growing Guide

How to check if your property is contaminated for gardening

Sources: EPA FRS, EPA Superfund, EPA Brownfield, EPA UST Finder, EPA TRI, USGS NWIS, USDA NRCS, NOAA wind climatology

The federal government tracks roughly 1.9M contamination sites — Superfund, brownfield, underground storage tanks, industrial releases, mining, CAFO, nitrate, pesticide, PFAS. The records are public. They are also fragmented across 9 federal databases, each with its own search interface, its own coordinate system, and its own conventions for what "near" means.

For a home grower asking a simple question — is it safe to grow food here? — the answer is in the record, but the work is in reading it. Here is the working guide.

Source types

EPA + USGS federal record

Sites indexed

1.9M

National, all states

Pathways modeled

Road, wind, groundwater

What the federal record covers

Nine federal source types matter for home growers. None of them are obscure; all of them are public. The lift is pulling them together for your address.

Superfund (EPA CERCLIS / NPL). The most serious sites — actively remediating or completed long-term hazardous releases. Roughly 15,000 nationwide.
Brownfield. Properties with known or potential contamination, often former industrial or commercial sites. Around 580,000 tracked.
Underground Storage Tanks (UST). Active and closed tanks for fuel, heating oil, and chemicals. Around 737,000 records. Old tanks are a common source of petroleum contamination near older homes and gas stations.
Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). Annual self-reported industrial releases from facilities — to air, water, or land. Roughly 73,000 facilities. Air releases are the relevant pathway for nearby growers.
Mining (EPA + OSMRE). Active and abandoned mine lands — historic heavy-metal and acid-drainage risk. Around 65,000 sites.
CAFO. Concentrated animal feeding operations — nutrient runoff, ammonia, antibiotic and pathogen pressure on nearby surface and groundwater. Around 10,000 federally registered operations.
Nitrate (USGS NWIS + EPA). Groundwater nitrate exceedances, primarily from agricultural runoff. Around 310,000 well records.
Pesticide history. Historic orchard and intensive-spray parcels, often legacy lead-arsenate sites. Around 108,000 mapped.
PFAS. The EPA's growing public register of per- and polyfluoroalkyl contamination — firefighting foam, industrial use, military bases. Around 10,000 sites and climbing.

Why direction matters more than distance

A nearby contamination site is not a binary on/off signal. Different contaminants travel through different media, in different directions, at very different distances.

Road runoff

Lead, zinc, hydrocarbons, salt. Travels along the road shoulder and with surface drainage. Risk drops sharply with distance — most studies show heavy-metal deposition concentrated within roughly 30m of a busy road.

Wind plume

Industrial air releases, mining dust, CAFO ammonia. Travels downwind — so the prevailing wind direction at your station matters more than straight-line distance. NOAA wind roses set the geometry.

Groundwater

Underground tanks, dry cleaners, leaking landfills. Travels with the aquifer — generally following terrain, but the actual direction depends on the water table and geology, not the road map.

The Growable Ground contamination view renders each of these as a directional shape on the map — a road-aligned buffer, a downwind wedge, a groundwater plume — so the same site can read high-risk on one side of a parcel and low-risk on the other. This per-pathway view is patent-pending work that no generic mapping site offers today.

Free Report

Check your address against the federal record

See contamination sites within reach, what kind, and which direction they travel.

25+ data sources analyzed in seconds

How to read the result for your address

No flagged sites within reach. Good baseline. Still worth a soil test for lead and arsenic if you are growing within 30m of a road or near a pre-1978 house.
Flagged sites, but upwind / upgradient / off-axis from your land. Lower risk than the raw distance number suggests. Read the directional view to confirm; in many cases the standard precautions are enough.
Flagged sites downwind / downgradient / on the road shoulder. Order a lab soil test through your state Cooperative Extension before you plant food in-ground. Heavy-metal panels are inexpensive; lab results guide what kind of remediation you need.
Active Superfund or large industrial release within 500m. Talk to an environmental professional before food production. Raised beds with imported clean soil are often a workable answer, but the design is site-specific.

The platform shows the per-plant risk for each pathway on the paid plant view, so you see which crops are most affected by which contamination type — leafy greens accumulate differently than tomatoes; tree fruit differently than ground covers.

Authoritative starting points

EPA — Search Superfund Sites Near You — the official viewer for the National Priorities List and active Superfund work.
EPA Facility Registry Service (FRS) — the master federal index for regulated facilities. Underlies most of the source-type databases above.
EPA UST Program — underground storage tank records and reporting.
EPA Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) — annual industrial release reports by facility.
USGS NWIS — the national groundwater and surface-water quality record.
USDA Cooperative Extension — your state's Extension lab is where you order the lead and arsenic soil test once the federal screening points you to it.

Frequently asked questions

Should I get a soil test for contamination before I plant food?

If your address is near a Superfund site, an old industrial parcel, a busy road, a former orchard, or a known underground storage tank — yes, a lab test is the right next step. Your state Cooperative Extension can run a heavy-metal panel for a modest fee. The federal record narrows down whether and where to test; the lab confirms what is actually in the soil you plan to plant in.

What contaminants are most relevant to home growers?

Lead from old paint and historical leaded gasoline near roads; arsenic from pre-1990 orchards and historic pesticide use; petroleum hydrocarbons from underground storage tanks; PFAS from firefighting and industrial use; nitrate from agricultural runoff in well water; and a long list of site-specific contaminants near Superfund or brownfield parcels. The plants you choose, and how you prepare the bed, both matter.

What does Growable Ground actually show?

The platform reads 9 federal contamination source types — Superfund, brownfield, underground storage tanks, TRI industrial releases, mining, CAFO, nitrate, pesticide, and PFAS — across roughly 1.9M indexed sites nationwide. For your address, it shows which sites are within reach, what kind of contaminants they involve, and how each source type travels — by road runoff, by wind deposition, or by groundwater flow direction.

My property has no flagged sites nearby. Am I safe?

A clean federal record is good evidence and not a guarantee. The EPA does not catalog every historical land use, every domestic burn pit, every painted barn. If your soil has been disturbed, your house is pre-1978, or you are growing within a few feet of an old structure or driveway, a lab test for lead and arsenic is inexpensive insurance.

Are raised beds enough to grow food on a contaminated parcel?

Often yes, with care. Raised beds filled with clean imported soil, lined to prevent root contact with native soil, and located away from the dominant contamination pathway (the road shoulder, the downwind plume) are the standard remedy for low-to-moderate contamination. Leafy greens and root crops accumulate more than fruit-bearing crops, so plant choice matters too. For higher-risk sites, an environmental professional should weigh in before food production.

Is this enough for legal due diligence on a property purchase?

No. For a land purchase, a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment by a licensed consultant is the legal standard, and a Phase II involves actual soil and groundwater sampling. The Growable Ground view is a public-record screening — useful before a Phase I, not a substitute for one.