'Kiss the Ground': How Regenerative Agriculture Can Help Reverse Climate Change
The new Kiss the Ground documentary is a bright beacon of hope in these challenging times. It has an important message: Although we are overwhelmed by the apparently imminent catastrophic reality of our world due to climate change, we shouldn’t give up. There’s another path.
That path is beneath our feet and the film cleverly illustrates how something as simple as our soil just might save us all.
Watch the trailer above.
Kiss the Ground: A Message of Hope
What I loved about this film is its ability to answer these questions without complexity. Why it happens is the result of politics and capitalism. It’s a story that has been told a million times; shareholder value and corporate needs versus humanity.
Directors Rebecca and Josh Tickell don’t hold back, tearing the fabric of the US farm subsidy programmes. National farm policies that favour large multi-national corporations, like Bayer, over the health of the country is nothing new. No country has been unscathed by this greed, not even New Zealand.
With the Soil Right, We Can Fix Anything
The film kicks off with Ray Archuleta, a conservation agronomist — and incredibly driven American — who says point blank that, "healthy soil leads to healthy plants, healthy plants lead to healthy animals, healthy humans, healthy waters, and a healthy climate.”
It is the theme that drives the movie forward and is so basic, it seems almost ridiculous that this is not the norm.
Gracefully the movie helps the viewer understand the difference between living soil and dirt. Soil has its own entire universe of microorganisms that work harmoniously to not only feed us nutrient-rich foods and works to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Whereas dirt is the soulless result of years of tillage and spraying chemical poisons that have resulted in erosion.
The methods of conventional agriculture are clearly negligent and the cause for one-third of the world’s topsoil loss and the largest man-made environmental disaster of the 1930s, the dust bowl. Within 60 years, the world’s remaining topsoil will be gone and leaving in its wake approximately 1 billion desertification refugees.
For me, as an advocate for organic farming, one of the most rememberable moments in the film is the short and poignant history of how conventional agriculture got its start.
German scientist Fritz Harber is considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I.
He invented a process for making synthetic nitrogen fertiliser to increase food production. His other scientific breakthrough included poisons known as pesticides, the first chemical weapons in history, and then later developed the pesticide, Zyklon B, that was used in the holocaust.
After the war ended, those poisons were rebranded and brought back to farmers and marketed as a way that farmers could go to war on insects and weeds. Over time this led to what we now refer to as conventional agriculture, a system that was not designed for the betterment of the soil because it kills the very microorganisms that we need to give us health and pull the carbon from the atmosphere.
Spraying toxic chemicals on our food has become so overused that it’s found in drinking water, and even in breast milk to detrimental effects including birth defects and cancer.
The sobering and sad reality of industrial agriculture leaves the viewer in almost disbelief and wondering, how could we let this happen, and what now?
The Solution
The solution is easier than we think: it’s called regenerative agriculture. And it turns out that this solution sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, grows more nutritious food, and improves the quality of our environment and natural resources.
Soil is the beginning of the quality of food because it provides our bodies with the best possible nutrients. Our nutrient intake directly correlates to how well our bodies function. The irony is that modern agriculture was not designed for the betterment of the soil. It wasn’t designed to sustain human health.
With regenerative agriculture, instead of applying degenerative inputs such as herbicides, insecticides and pesticides, farming looks to mimic nature to feed the soil biology.
Instead of tilling crop fields that reduce life in the soil, farmers have the ability to build upon a universe of helpful microorganisms.
Controlled grazing plans utilise the power of livestock as mobile micro tanks to regenerate the land.
Food waste can be turned into compost which acts as a natural sponge.
The list of regenerative practices goes on and on, but the important takeaways are:
1. It’s called REGENERATIVE for a purpose, and
2. We have a lot of options to help us reach our climate goals.
R.E.G.E.N.E.R.A.T.I.V.E.
Let’s leap out of the film for a minute and discuss its lack of vocabulary. I assume that like myself, many organic and biodynamic farmers and advocates in New Zealand will be amazed by the film’s sideline of the word ‘organic’. Similar Hollywood hits like The Biggest Little Farm also ignore the word at all costs and it leaves me feeling a bit annoyed. What is it about the “O” word?
Regenerative isn’t a new invention, it’s not a new concept and it’s been encapsulated by the principles of organics since people first started cultivating the land. If organic farming systems are regenerative, why does the movie not acknowledge this?
The answer to this question isn’t easy and I invite the organic community to engage in this important conversation. It’s a topic that deserves a lot of attention because organics holds significant market value and its rules helps minimise green-washing, protecting consumers from bogus claims. Regenerative is a concept that has no rules, no definition and because of this all of the positive practices we love about regenerative agriculture have the ability to become poisoned by the very greed that caused its need in the first place.
I for one look forward to discussing this topic in more detail with the Rodale Institute, who’s staff graced the film with an abundance of knowledge. The organisation is also a founding memeber of the Regenerative Organic Certification that uses organic certification as a baseline from which additonal regenerative practices are incorporated. The certification is anwsering the call, ‘what more can I do to help ensure global health?’
The Power We All Hold
Farmers hold one of the most important roles in our society. They not only feed the world, but the way they decided to farm directly impacts how we humans survive. But I don’t think all farmers, and society for that matter, truly realise this.
There, in itself, is one of the fundamental problems with modern agriculture.
At the beginning of the film, Ray Archuleta tells us that farmers’ lack of understanding of how soil works is the ecological problem of our time. I’d open this educational responsibility up to all of us
Knowledge is power and it’s our collective responsibility to take ownership of our problems and find solutions. It should be every single person’s responsibility to understand where their food comes from, and how it was produced.
Starting with the basics is a perfect place to start.
If people do not understand the basic ecological principles of soil and how carbon runs the system, how will we find solutions? How will we sign up for any changes, to amend how we live our lives, if we don’t understand what it is that we are adapting?
By enabling carbon fuel to be sent to the roots of plants to feed soil microorganisms, which in turn bring plants nutrients that we then eat, allows us to understand what Dr. Mark Hyman means when he tells us that if we want to be healthy we need to eat what’s in the ground. In other words, this basic ecology is human survival 101.
There are so many ways we can utilise regenerative practices throughout our daily lives. Kiss the Ground helps us realise that we have the power to change the world.
We have the power to help farmers make important decisions for us by supporting those that support the simple notions that, healthy soil leads to healthy plants, healthy plants lead to healthy animals, healthy humans, healthy wanters, and a healthy climate.