[Applause] coal mining has ruined millions of acres of land across the u.s [Music] and it can pollute the surrounding areas for decades after the coal is gone now these farmers are restoring coal mining land with lavender can this farm be a model for lands destroyed by coal mining across the country we went to ashford west virginia to find out when i signed up and i found out it was a lavender farm i said hey no way i never heard of a lavender farm i kind of like it it's my new home aaron morgan worked as
a coal miner for a decade yeah i'm not the only x miner here there's a lot of mexico miners here he never imagined he would be picking flowers on coal mining land it's strange to me that it's been farmed now because it's really just not rock it's a wasteland really [Music] appalachian botanical company or abco is on a retired part of a larger coal mine let's go over and meet some of the guys my name is frank i've had an assortment of jobs i like this one i don't even work here we do turn a
good section of this mountain purple during the blooming season the business is part of a reclaiming process that rebuilds the landscape with new vegetation but it's complicated and costly [Applause] imagine blasting the top off of a mountain and then trying to rebuild it piece by piece growing plants in the soil on mines is tough but luckily lavender loves poor soils and the sweet smelling herb can actually reduce toxic heavy metals in the soil we make sure the soil tests come back so that there's no heavy metals no toxins of any kind the team harvests the
lavender throughout the summer and early fall abco uses every part of the flower so nothing goes to waste i need like 35 pounds of these buds cut off by tomorrow they spread the lavender on the floor to cut the buds and bundle the stems to sell for cooking we strip the bottom two leaves off and we'll dip that in water and rooting hormone they save small leaf clippings and plant them to grow more lavender this is the 40 gallon pot that's a 26 gallon matt carter boils water to steam distill about 40 pounds of lavender
to make essential oil everybody knows that oil is lighter than water the oil floats to the top just strain the water off of it which we keep to water too they filter the oil three times before bottling it up they also use the flowers to make creams honey salt and hand sanitizer finally the leftover plant biomass is transformed into compost [Music] coal companies are legally required to restore the land they have mined after a company drills and blasts a deep pit it piles all the broken rock and topsoil back into it to reshape the landscape
all that earth gets compacted down to prevent erosion and runoff they plant some sort of vegetation and clean the water if need be an old mine can become any number of things like a grassland a home or in the case of abco a farm but does the land actually go back to what it was like before it's still fairly rare i think for um reclamation to be done well mike is reforesting a 2500 acre surface mine that has already been reclaimed but he says growing trees in the rocky compacted soil is really challenging they have
to rip the soil sometimes three or four feet to plant anything here when you stop the mining it doesn't mean that the pollution stops layers of rock that have been deep in the earth for millennia are now exposed and so they become very active chemically when they're exposed to water pollutants leech off of those materials for you know decades if not hundreds of years hundreds of thousands of acres of mining land across the u.s coal fields haven't been reclaimed yet if the mine is stopped and reclamation activity stops these mines just sort of sit uh
often is you know wastelands of bare soil and rock and there's a fear that as the coal industry continues to decline more land could go to waste abco hopes to expand its farm onto this patch of partially reclaimed land on the mine but for now it's it's idle you look out there and see all the nasty water just sitting out there and laying it's awful man we ain't even loud out there and i'm assuming that's the reason we're not allowed out there what is most likely is that these mining companies will end up going bankrupt
leaving this partially or unreclaimed land without following through on the reclamation obligations unreclaimed mining land can lead to more flooding and landslides the coal companies stopped working which meant they also stopped fixing any of the problems that they had created companies only became responsible for cleaning up old mines in 1977 before that they simply abandoned them there are over 6 million acres of abandoned coal mines across the country and they're releasing heavy metals and other toxins into the water [Music] like abco are working to both restore the land and provide jobs here in boone county
as coal is on its way out the farm has doubled in size since it broke ground in 2019 that's a lot of flowers there's a lot of lavender it's a lot of work that's a lot of employment along with employing former coal miners abco also hires people in long-term drug recovery i like working here because they gave me the opportunity to show that my past is in the past they was still willing to work with me and it was great that somebody gave me a chance to show that i can do this and so when
we reclaim we don't just reclaim land we reclaim land people communities everything reclaiming my land is one step toward a post-coal future the biden administration has committed to investing 260 million dollars in reclamation efforts for states and tribes and apco hopes to use some of that money to expand the business to more of west virginia if that is funded it will enable us to set up a new farm location in a neighboring county and set up a regional community hub there but the us government is still adding one more hurdle to cleaning up abandoned mine
land the proposed infrastructure bill would reduce the tax on coal production that funds these reclamation projects the appalachian region they've sacrificed a lot for energy that has really built this country we as as a nation owe it to this region to fix some of these inadequacies appalachia has a long way to go to clean up the mess created by generations of mining but these flowers give hope for a blossoming future a lot of times you get a ripple effect in the water right we don't make a ripple we make a wave
