Kurt is in the Boy Scouts and the Future Farmers of America and is a member of Students Against Drunken Driving (SADD). He plays the piano and the tenor saxophone and has started Tae Kwon Do. He hopes to become a physician, because he is "interested in how all of the internal anatomy works together and what affects it."
Kurt's father is his mentor. "He is a farmer and has to work with science on a daily basis, whether it is growing under natural weather conditions or enhancing the crop with chemicals."
Last year, Kurt created an effective deicer, and he wanted to continue working with deicers this year. He decided to test the effects of different road salts on vegetation and water quality and determine whether some deicers are less toxic to vegetation and water life than others.
Kurt obtained a variety of chemicals commonly found in deicers and tested their toxicity on lettuce seeds and daphnia (a freshwater crustacean). He treated the lettuce seeds with a solution to reduce other factors (like fungi) that might produce a variable in the germination rate. Then, he placed lettuce seeds in different petri dishes containing the various chemicals. Similarly, he placed the daphnia in petri dishes with differing chemical solutions. Kurt observed the lettuce seeds and daphnia after a period of time and concluded that calcium acetate was the least toxic on lettuce and the least inhibiting on the daphnia's activity. Calcium chloride, which is used on roads in Minnesota, performed well in the daphnia experiment but not with the lettuce. Kurt found that the most toxic deicers on both vegetation and water life were magnesium chloride and sodium chloride.
