have no problems. On one hand, the use of celebrity ambassadors is an unsubtle but effective tactic to draw casual viewers and followers. I help with that too , Join my supportive community to move to eco-friendly eating and receive tips, advice, recipes and support. We need to spread the word to drive this important movement forwards! I dont know a single holistic management practitioner that advocates cutting down forests to grow more cattle. Thank you for the review. This is the central statement of Kiss the Ground, an eco-educational Netflix documentary directed and produced by Josh and Rebecca Tickell.On-the-ground agricultural practices carried out by millions of individual farmers directly affect the health of the soil, and by extension, global atmospheric carbon levels and the pace of climate change. If you are wondering whether its worth your time to watch, or want to know the gist but dont have an hour and a half to spare, read on and Ill cover the key points simply and factually for you. The difference is immense and plain for anyone to see. So its incredibly facile. best charter schools in nashville. If we restore all the degraded land, we can return the earth to paradise, making room for biodiversity and feeding the worlds population (with lowered animal protein consumption). I dont understand how they didnt emphasize that you still have to eat a plant rich diet if you want everyone in the world to eat pasture raised animals Theres only so much to land and hence animals you can raise. Awesome! IMPRESS, 16-18 New Brige Street, London, EC4V 6AG. His response: holistic management does not permit replication, and youll find the scientific method never discovers anything.. With that said, any time a new study, book, documentary, or other media publication is published, I read or watch with great interest. As long as its grass-fed. Its the misbalance of carbon that is the issue. (Though theyre still good ideas.). "All farmable soil could be gone in 60 years. (Source: Maggie Eileen Lochtenberg, freelance artist and transformational witch. You can reach me at novelhandco@gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn. Journal of Animal Science. It only takes a quick read of theDrawdown Reportto realize that this is absolutely unfounded its going to take an enormous amount of solutions to radically transform our energy and food systems to reverse climate change, and holistic grazing, while certainly better than intensive farming, is not the miracle carbon-sequestering practice that those watching are led to believe. Hotter soils during the day create hot rising air, which pushes any of these clouds away, and is how deserts are formed and grow. Kris: Im always excited by the opportunities to discuss Regenerative Agriculture. Im not saying the filmmakers should have gotten a token Black person, but they couldnt have gone wrong centering the voices of people for whom the stakes of not reversing climate change are much higher than their own. That sounds catastrophic. Ive listed these below in short, and then we will go through each together looking at the claims made and where the science lies: (These have also been covered in detail with Environmental Researcher Nicholas Carter (co-author of this article) in episode 104 and 111 on thePlant Proof podcast). A plant-rich dietary pattern that places emphasis on regeneration but really could be chopped in a number of ways to suit the individual Mediterranean, paleo, pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan, etc can all be done in a plant-predominant manner. Kiss the Ground gave the microphone to Ranchers Alan Savory and Gabe Brown, but we didn't hear about any legitimate science testing out whether the claims they were making truly hold up? The long term prognosis for our survival with business as usual is very, very poor . The role of ruminants in reducing agricultures carbon footprint in North America. Healthy soils can store more carbon than all the trees combined! The long term prognosis for our survival with business as usual is very, very poor , Topsoils are disappearing and the land is desertifying, Regenerative farming principles explained, Examples of regenerative farming restoring land. Ground News rates Kiss the Ground Film's media bias as unknown. It took a Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady cameo to hit this point home. We have now decoupled these so farmers are either crop or livestock, and each are done on an intensive scale, with no natural cycles in place. When receiving subsidies for crops like corn and beans, farmers know that they will make a profit. Even though we werent farmers, scientists or experts we knew that together, we could still make a difference! I graduated from Vanderbilt University with degrees in Political Science, Economics and Spanish, and I currently study law in Texas. Ray: That a large audience will come away with a basic awareness about the transformative power of our living and life-giving soil. All whilst minimising our 'footprint'. Farmers, scientists, cows, and celebrities work together in this documentary to spread the good word about regenerative agriculture and its potential to mitigate climate change. And so, with these words, Harrelson immediately draws us into "Kiss the Ground," a documentary focusing on growing our food in a way that builds and protects our precious soil and also draws back into the ground the carbon dioxide that is causing climate change. Scientists and researchers in the documentary back them up. This is because there is a legacy load of carbon in the atmosphere an amount of carbon dioxide that will persist for decades, if not centuries. With no plants to transpire and create the water vapour which condenses to rain, local rainfall also fails, turning the area to desert. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. Having gone from being a vegetable hating, stressed out and sick corporate mum who felt constant guilt for not feeding her family properly and not doing enough for the planet to a healthy, veggie loving and eco-minded mother with much less stress, she's been where you are and can definitely help you overcome your barriers! Ryland co-founded Kiss the Ground in his living room with a friend ten years ago. Its within this context, that it becomes so vividly apparent, that in this conversation we are not just talking about planetary health, but at its core, human health. Heres my critique of that paper: https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/its-the-soil-biology-stupid/ This paper includes a number of these soil science papers. Bare soils are at great risk of erosion by heavy rain, and its also been shown that bare soils vary in temperature much more, so the microclimate is changed. But 99 percent of those crops go to feeding livestock. Farmers need to make profits but we need to be transparent here and lay down all solutions on the table to have an open discussion. Gabe: I agreed to become involved because when Josh explained to me that the purpose of the documentary was to highlight how farming organically could improve our planet, I knew I needed to help bring his understanding of soil health and ecosystem function to a higher level. Seven years in the making, the movies thesis proposes that by regenerating the worlds soils, humans can rapidly stabilize Earths climate, restore lost ecosystems and create abundant food supplies. Required fields are marked *. Holistic management is a decision making framework which has been developed over the years to deal with complex situations. GHG Mitigation Potential of Different Grazing Strategies in the United States Southern Great Plains. If we can only get everyone on board! A Feb. 27, 2023, video of U.S. President Joe Biden purportedly shows him announcing a new national draft, in which 20-year-olds would be conscripted into military service on account of a growing . There are many things you can do, all varying in difficulty. Its predicted that, if we can scale up some of these farming methods over the next 30 years, we can REVERSE global warming. The farmers are now starving or have moved on as the soils wont grow anything anymore, they have become dirt. They are told that the chemicals will make things better by the companies selling these chemicals, and not helped to learn how to work with nature, rather than against it. Anyway, I can go on and on doing a review of the shortcoming of this review, but the author is obviously more interested in justifying the supposed superiority of his food religion than he is in actual peer reviewed range, soil or atmospheric science by people who actually understand agricultural systems. Watch the film trailer here and the full movie on Netflix. Your email address will not be published. For teachers, educators, schools, community organizers and home schoolersthanks to a generous grant from the Bia Echo Foundation and Triptyk, there is a free 45-minute-long Educational Version of the Kiss the Ground movie and also a free DVD with both the 85 minute long feature and the educational cut on one disk. But efforts have been made to restore the soils since 1994. To start tiny or full-size victory gardens, turn their lawns into meadows, petition their city councils to zone land for community farms/gardens, or donate to conservation nonprofits or farmland trusts? Did you have any reservations about appearing in it? Heres below are just a handful of recent PEER REVIEWED papers supporting HPG. Instagram @maggie.eileen.art). The rest of our topsoils are projected to be lost within 60 years. Hopefully enough of them will see this movie and find enough alternatives to be able to make some real change. It is possible that this is coincidence, but the correlation is striking! The film begins by examining . Regenerative agriculture describes farming and grazing practices that, among other benefits, reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil biodiversity - resulting in both carbon drawdown and improving the water cycle. Over the years, tilling causes the soil to dirt, leaving it vulnerable to erosion and desertification. Ive been interested in and learning more about the importance of soil health for years. In COP21 in Paris, 2015. In other words, a 73 percent reduction in beef available per person in the U.S. For holistic grazing, that figure would be even higher because it requires far more land per cow and thus produces significantly less beef than the traditional more intensive grazing systems. Looking for a way to kill the quarantine boredom? Either way, shifting the typical diet in such a way is a certain win for humanity and all life on Earth, and thus something that not only should have been made clearer in Kiss the ground, but something that everyone reading should strongly consider. Another issue with our modern methods is that we plough to remove existing plants, and then plant, or even leave the field bare over winter. Check out her story here or take a look at HOW she can help you on the Services page. Use this compost for your beds rather than buying in compost or fertilisers. Cited as the worst man made environmental disaster in history, by the end of 1934 about 200 million acres of croplands had been permanently damaged. Using livestock is thought to make this process 7 times faster! Above all, its great to see this conversation growing from what has very much been a fringe movement to now entering the mainstream. 2 Creation of a false dichotomy. Kiss the Ground Directed by Joshua Tickell, Rebecca Harrell Tickell Documentary 1h 24m Find Tickets When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an. If youve seen The People vs. Larry Flynt in all of its obscenity, like I did in Constitutional Law last semester, youll be a little surprised to hear the voice of actor Woody Harrelson narrating a documentary about social and environmental issues. In fact, if we look at the solutions outlined in theDrawdown Reportand their potential to draw down carbon from our atmosphere, shifting to a diet that favours calories from plants is twice as powerful compared to shifting to silvopasture and four times as powerful compared as shifting to managed grazing two forms of regenerative agriculture that involve livestock. Kiss the Ground has the perfect documentary mix of celebrity activists and wise elder scientists. Look no further than Kiss the Ground, a newly-released Netflix documentary that explores the relationship between climate change and dirt. The movie stars Woody Harrelson, David Arquette, Gisele Bundchen, Jason Mraz (and others) and three newly minted stars you may know personally: Understanding Ags Ray Archuleta, Gabe Brown and Kris Nichols, Ph.D. Those of us who have been in the regenerative ag arena for some time, already know these three as soil health super-stars, but now a wider, world-wide audience will benefit from their experience, insight and wisdom, too. View and change your settings here, Regenerative Farm Map Regeneration International, Donate Regeneration International | Organic Consumers (netdonor.net), Compost Toilets in Africa: Human Feces as Fertilizer | Thrive4Good (thriveforgood.org). Although I would have liked more with real life farmers and ranchers, it is hard to put together a documentary that will appeal across the spectrum from rural to urban communities, young and old, and everyday people to activists. Work your way down the list until you find the things that youre willing to do. Find farms local to you that are farming in a regenerative way and support them by buying your produce from there. You can see all of thisherefor yourself. Fund charities that are helping people to compost their poo in toilets in the third world. It was better than most but could have hit that point harder. Before we get into a few major claims made inKiss the Groundthat are directly at odds with scientific knowledge, I want to preface this entry by saying that I wholeheartedly supportregenerative agricultureas a goal and think the documentary did a great job bringing light to the detrimental impact that intensive animal agriculture is having on our planet. Theres also a lot of new recent PEER REVIEWED soil science that demonstrates this. If we adopt regenerative farming practices, we can reverse carbon release into the atmosphere and stabilise the climate, and it wont take long! By practicing regenerative agriculture, a no-till, chemical-free system designed to bolster and protect soil health, we can grow healthier plants, sequester more carbon, and ultimately reverse climate change., Narrator Woody Harrelson calls regenerative agriculture a simple solutiona way to heal our planet and asks viewers to save our soil in hopes the soil might just save us., The short version: Growing food with regenerative agriculture leads to healthier soil, better food, cleaner skies, and clearer water. I enjoyed Woody Harrelson as a narrator; he felt genuine. Learn how your comment data is processed. They agreed and heres what they told me, How and why did you become involved the movie, Kiss the Ground?. Farmers need to learn how to regenerate and take care of the soil. Repeatedly using abstractions to sum up complex issues makes people comfortable talking about soil as if there is one entity, soil, that we (who is we, anyway?) you can help by supporting our work today. We need to talk about agriculture in a way thats meaningful to people with boots on the ground and enumerate specific steps that lead to material change. how to make a chi ball visible for beginners Keagy's Best Price Plumbing Finally, the elephant / cow in the room (not sure which is more fitting) duringKiss the Ground is how are we going to produce enough meat using holistic grazing to meet current demands? Hosted by Robbie Lockie, Plant Based News delivers pioneering vegan news and ethical views weekly. Gabe: Yes, I am very optimistic about our future if regenerative practices are widely adopted. One thing with ruminant livestock is that when they are use as solar powered mobile composters in brittle environments, their manure, urine and saliva act as inoculates that increase soil microbiology. This means that compared to factory farms, or traditional grazing where cows are overgrazing and destroying the soil, a regenerative farm using holistic grazing would require a lot more land for any given number of roaming cows. I asked Finian Makepeace, the co-founder of the Kiss the Ground organization, to tell me more about how he and the films producers and directors selected our trio of regenerative experts to appear in the movie. If filmmakers are serious about educating and calling people to action, they shouldn't couch their messages in gentle, sweeping language. In short:- If you act with maturity and consideration for other users, you should The solution is right under our feet THE SOIL. All farmable soil could be gone in 60 years. Ryland Engelhart is a philanthropist. Every year 40m people are displaced as their farmlands become desert. Sustainability, 7(10), 13500. http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/10/13500, Teague, W. R., Dowhower, S. L., Baker, S. A., Haile, N., DeLaune, P. B., & Conover, D. M. (2011). Its sad, really, seeing gray, dead soil devoid of life. The good news is that soils can recover fast if they are allowed to and managed correctly. Because whereKiss the Groundlacks in science, it makes up in celebrity power with the likes of Woody Harrelson, Jason Mraz, Ian Somerhalder, Gisele Bndchen, and Tom Brady all featured. Kiss the Ground members are the grassroots stakeholders that stand with us in the regenerative movement. Due to its immense scale, and ability to sequester (store) greenhouse gases, it could be the one thing that can balance our climate, clean our water and feed the world! Kris Nichols is such a key person in this film because her discoveries have allowed for this movement to be built on cutting edge science that changes how we think about soil and landscape function., Since its not every day I get a chance to interview real-live movie stars, I shamelessly asked Gabe, Kris and Ray if they would answer some of my Inside Hollywood questions about their movie-making experiences and what impact they believe the new movie may have on the regenerative ag movement moving forward. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Kiss the Ground is a full-length documentary narrated by Woody Harrelson that sheds light on an, Awakening people to the possibilities of regeneration. This dirt then cannot store water, and heats up massively under the sun with no protection, baking the soils and exacerbating the problem. 1 Claims that holistic grazing can reverse climate change. If you have found your way to this article, I can only assume that we have something in common: both of us want to see a better world where humans and all life on earth is thriving. This is a major oversimplification of our complex and varied farming system. Directors Joshua Tickell Rebecca Harrell Tickell Writers Johnny O'Hara Joshua Tickell Rebecca Harrell Tickell Stars Also that we can fix this and the fix is quite simple. The first point that I think deserves our attention, before getting into the science on the reversal claim, is the way the producers wanted you to see holistic grazing. Our mission stands strong: to awaken people to the possibilities of regeneration and inspire participation in the regenerative movement. Your email address will not be published. Often, our best solutions arent actually that innovative; they simply mimic natural processes and what the Earth already does. Every version got better, and the last version was the best one. Ryland is also the producer of The Kiss the Ground documentary and the co-creator of the by Sarah Read | May 18, 2022 | Eat, Eco-friendly eating, Sustainable living tips and advice, Think, Kiss the Ground is another in the line of eco-documentaries that Netflix is putting out there (albeit one of the first and most famous). 3 Unclear about how the proposed solutions would affect our diets. If he is the only one that can achieve the carbon sequestration that he claims, I fail to see how thats a hopeful solution. A group of activists had gathered to see what could be done about Climate Change. And as we all know, this creates a slippery slope. While the film can at times feel like a jumble of connected concepts and issues with an occasional celebrity cameo, the documentary is overall optimistic. Regenerative agriculture is an important part of the solution when it comes to climate change. Plowing the earth, preparing fields for planting, exposing bare soil. Thank you for this article! Heres the big picture: a wide-screen projection of the surface of the Earth. So ifKiss the Groundhad taken a more evidence-based approach and included dietary recommendations what would it have looked like? The documentary carefully positions holistic grazing as the answer to intensive animal agriculture (including the mono-cropping that occurs to feed factory-farmed animals). If cattle are allowed to roam and graze, they contribute to carbon sequestration the process by which plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. Practically speaking this looks like the plate below perhaps this could be The Regenerative Plate that Kiss the Ground adopts in their communication going forwards. The claim: Video shows cracks in the ground that formed after earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. Also, I must confess that I did not fully understand the implications of a film crew following me all over the country. The bonus being that plant-rich dietary patterns just so happen to also be whatmajor health institutionsand progressive Government departments likeHealth Canadaare advocating for to tackle rising rates of obesity and chronic disease, and improve quality of life. Our current farming methods are simply not sustainable. It's a tool. The movie didn't even include an indictment of current US politics or President Trump, which is notable by its absence considering the film was released so close to election time. Simple reducing emission does nothing to decrease the greenhouse gases that are already in our atmosphere. Your email address will not be published. Grazing management impacts on vegetation, soil biota and soil chemical, physical and hydrological properties in tall grass prairie. As a side note, the documentary routinely employed uses numerous fear-mongering tactics to scare the viewer into grasping for whatever solution comes next. After the country decided to increase yields and started intensively farming and tilling the fertile midwestern plains, leaving the soil bare for large periods of time. After all, its communities of color, low-income communities, and immigrant communities who do the majority of the essential work of growing food and yet are most exploited and harmed by the agroindustrial complex. Why? After all, this method of grazing, which Gabe Brown and Alan Savory speak about at length, is being positioned in the documentary as the solution we have all been waiting for to reverse climate change. This is actually seen using satellites which monitor the CO2 levels. doi:10.1093/jas/skx060 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jas/skx060, Stanley, P. L., Rowntree, J. E., Beede, D. K., DeLonge, M. S., & Hamm, M. W. (2018). Grow your own veg using your home compost! There is too much in the air now and too little in the earth (released by tilling and soil degradation and burning fossil fuels and plants/trees) causing global temperatures to rise. So really, the idea of conservation and restoration, needed to be absolutely front and center ifKiss the Groundtruly wanted to educate the masses about how agriculture can help tackle climate change. A Facebook video shows aerial footage of what appears to be large fissures or cracks in the Earth . . HaHa! Regenerative agriculture is a more resilient system based on principles of soil health and biodiversity that integrates multiple crops, cover crops, and livestock animals. This sounds like something else that he would likely regret in the near future. Its especially interesting to me as I am working towards a biology degree and hope to become a soil scientist. Essentially, Hawken and his team have created a long list of approximately 100 solutions, which when implemented together, would be capable of drawing down more carbon than we are emitting by 2050. Bundchen and Brady point to the health of the soil as directly influencing the health of the plants we eat and our health as well. Ray: Hope. Nature strives for balance, and has a system for reversing the carbon released into the atmosphere using the growth of plants and their relationship with soil microbes. There are a few clues within the documentary that speak to this but they are by no means overtly clear to the viewer. Will you join us? It was very much positioned as absolutely crucial to confronting this climate emergency we find ourselves in. We can all make some simple changes for massive benefits to our health and footprint. The problem is, the lay viewer who is not across the science, and blinded by the message of hope, is likely to confuse the role of cows in holistic grazing with instruction that we should continue eating meat at current rates (as long as its grass-fed) and perhaps even double down on our meat consumption. In the 1930s the Dust Bowl was created. It turned out to be more involved than I imagined. Farming like nature has also been shown to reduce inputs (costs) and improve yields. Sounds pretty ambitious to champion this form of animal agriculture as a climate solution without strong empirical evidence?
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