Common Ground (2023) Movie Script

Jason Momoa here.
I'm excited to share with you all Common
Ground.
Common Ground is about how we heal our
land, and it's a love letter to our
kids who will inherit this earth.
It's a really special film, and I'm so
very excited for you to see it in
theaters.
All my aloha.
Hi, I'm Josh.
And I'm Rebecca.
And we're the directors of Common Ground.
We wanted to take a moment to thank
you for being here at this screening.
And maybe you've seen our film Kiss the
Ground and already know the power of regenerative
agriculture.
Common Ground continues that critical message.
We hope this movie will have an impact
on you, and if you spread the message
of the film, it could have an impact
on the whole world.
So stay tuned after the screening, and we'll
tell you more about how you can be
involved in that.
And now we present Common Ground.
This is a difficult letter to write.
It's written with love, but some of it
might be hard for you to hear.
It's both a warning and a promise.
There are things I need you to know.
About how we got ourselves into this mess.
It's not something they taught you in school,
but it might be the most important thing
you'll ever hear.
There are some harsh truths that I need
to share with you.
And once you know them, they will be
hard to ignore.
Your life, and the life of your children,
will depend on how you respond.
Because what I'm about to tell you is
a matter of life and death.
The universe is big.
In the vast expanse of that seemingly infinite
space, there is only one place that we
know of that supports life.
In fact, it's quite possibly the only place.
It's our home.
What makes our home even more amazing?
Most of it is covered by water.
A small fraction of it is the thin
layer amazing substance that is home to almost
nine million species of plants and animals, including
us, one species that decided to reshape the
surface of the earth.
And when we did that, we destroyed the
very thing that feeds us, regulates rain, and
balances the climate.
We call this thing simply soil.
Used up and dead?
We call it dust.
With much of the planet's soil turned to
dust, we've found ourselves in a race toward
extinction.
Simply put, if the soil dies, we die.
The good news?
There's a way to save our precious soils.
It's called regeneration.
This is the story of how soil might
just save us.
But to do that, just have to save
the soil first.
Thank you.
Our story of soil begins on a farm.
Like many modern farms in America, this one
is large.
And it's run by only a few people.
But unlike other big modern farms, this farmer
has become famous for making a profit while
rebuilding his soil.
We're headed right now.
to my neighbors.
Land is directly adjacent to mine.
It's been cropland for as long as I've
You have to farm in context with your
environment.
In case you haven't noticed, it can get
a little cool in North Dakota.
Yet the farmers today, many of them are
trying to only grow warm-season crops, such as
corn and soybeans.
Yeah, don't get me started.
Hey, I timed that right.
Here's the gate.
Can you get that erosion down there on
the bottom?
So what we have here to my left,
this is the neighbor's cropland field of soybeans.
It was eroded by wind.
To the right here, this is my land.
It's in perennial pasture.
This is a shelter belt tree windbreak to
protect the soil.
Erosion is soil moving off the field.
It can be due to wind.
It can be due to water.
But we lose the topsoil.
The topsoil is gone.
We were in my neighbor's field.
They had tilled their field.
Then they had planted soybeans.
Then we had 50-mile-an-hour winds for three days.
Because they had nothing growing there except the
soybean, the wind caused that soil, because it
was powder fine, Due to the tillage, it
blew away.
There's literally 18 inches of topsoil blown off
the fields onto my land, onto my fence
row.
Plus, we're only seeing a small fraction.
Most of it went up into the air
and was carried who knows for how many
miles.
But unfortunately, you see the same type of
agriculture, not only in the U.S., worldwide.
Tillage, monocultures, high uses synthetics.
Not sequestering carbon, degrading the soil, that's common.
That's common.
I really think that the vast majority, by
that I mean 95 plus percent of farmers
and ranchers, they don't put their hands in
the soil.
They don't understand.
It just makes me sick.
It literally makes me sick to my stomach
to see this.
Because I know if I had management of
this land, this wouldn't have happened.
We're told that we have to farm.
get greater and greater yields to feed the
world.
Really?
Is this going to feed the world?
One system is working to kill things.
One is working in harmony and synchrony with
nature, with life.
You can hear the difference.
You can hear the birds.
You can hear the insects.
This epitomizes life.
This, to me, is death.
The chronic loss of topsoil on farms around
the world.
could determine the fate of our civilization.
But this isn't the first time that bad
agriculture led to the destruction of America's topsoil.
It's important for us to realize that the
Dust Bowl was caused by copious amounts of
tillage.
Tillage caused that soil loss, that soil to
be blown away, to be washed away.
You know, the Dust Bowl occurred 90 years
ago.
But we have one occurring today.
This is serious.
We have to stop this.
Regenerative agriculture is working within the context of
nature to create a profit while enhancing the
ecosystem for future generations.
As human beings, we've had such a devastating
impact on the Earth's ecology.
We can't just stop harming.
What regeneration means is not just restoring the
land to the state that we found it
at, but actually making it better.
Regeneration to me is not just about healing
the soil.
It's the practice of stewarding whole land bases.
We were thinking about how to regenerate the
land and give more than we take.
And to me, that is the most beautiful
expression of our indigenous nature.
Okay, what is this thing called regenerative agriculture?
We debated in our own group quite a
bit at what point are you regenerative or
not regenerative.
And so we started studying regenerative systems.
Just scientifically, we needed to be able to
distinguish this farm that I just walked onto
is a regenerative farm, and this farm that
I walked onto is a conventional farm.
And we distilled it down to just a
few questions.
Did you till last year or not?
Tillage is the process of breaking the soil
with a disc or plow to eliminate weeds
and plant seeds.
Regenitive agriculture does not till.
Did you plant cover crops last year or
not?
A second principle of regenerative agriculture is planting
different species of cover crops so the soil
is never exposed to the elements.
Did you use herbicides or fungicides or insecticides?
Regenitive agriculture vastly reduces the use of chemicals
and instead relies on making plants and soil
healthy so they can resist pests.
Did you integrate animals into cropland?
Just like in nature, in regenerative agriculture, herds
of animals are used to eat weeds and
fertilize the soil.
Within one year of adopting regenerative practices, we
see positive benefits in terms of soil carbon,
life conservation.
in almonds in California orchards, right across the
higher soil carbon, six times more life, twice
the profits.
We did this economic assessment.
We looked at 100 corn and soy farmers
across the Midwest that had been successful in
their adoption of soil health management practices.
And on average, 88% of the farmers interviewed.
we're making more money.
It turns out there's a simple metric that
determines how much money a farmer makes.
It's how much carbon is in their soil.
Plants actually take CO2 from the atmosphere and
they exudate carbon into the soil.
We can change the amount of that by
our management practices.
In 1991, these fields were less than two
percent organic matter, or carbon.
So in other words, we've almost quadrupled the
amount of carbon in our soils.
And it's that carbon in the soil that
drives life.
Soil organic matter, or SOM, is the delicate
layer of topsoil that's so dense with carbon,
it's black.
carbon.
is food, water, and tiny life forms.
For all the things they do for us,
you've got to give those fungi a little
respect.
If we look underground, soils are the most
diverse ecosystems on Earth.
You've got plant roots, and you've got these
mycorrhizal networks, and then all within that are
so many other types of microorganisms.
Seventy-five percent of all terrestrial carbon is stored
underground.
And mycorrhizal networks play a huge part in
keeping that carbon underground.
The plant feeds carbon down into this fungal
network, and in exchange, the fungi scavenge for
resources in the soil, like phosphorus and nitrogen,
and they feed it to the plant roots.
What's exciting is that we're actually able now
to start following the way that that carbon
moves through the fungal network.
And what we see is that These networks,
they're a major carbon sink.
It's like a nutrient highway.
It'll go fast, it'll go slow.
Even the whole stream will switch directions.
When this partnership evolved, plants and fungi, it
coincided with a 90% reduction in the amount
of CO2 in the atmosphere.
That one innovation between plants and fungi led
to this dramatic drawdown of carbon.
Regenerative practices, if done right, are about putting
more carbon in the soil.
Through the magic of photosynthesis, carbon from the
atmosphere can be returned to the soil.
Over the past 25 years, we have added
over 96 tons of carbon per acre into
our soils.
Can we mitigate climate change?
Absolutely.
Each year, our species emits 35 billion metric
tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, mostly by
burning fossil fuels.
The good news, according to the Rodale Institute,
by converting our farmland to regenerative agriculture, the
soil could sequester all of the carbon dioxide
that humanity emits each year.
That would bring our carbon emissions to net
zero.
In other words, our planet's soil could help
stabilize our climate.
People talk about carbon sequestration.
They got all these schemes to sequester carbon.
I have a novel idea.
Let's grow a plant.
Modern science shows the power of plants, soil,
and fungi to help bring our planet into
balance.
Instead of trying to control nature, it's time
we remember our roots.
We all come from nature.
Nature is the mother of us all.
And if mama ain't happy...
Rolling, take one, and the only one.
Much of what's called regenerative agriculture has been
practiced by indigenous people for generations.
Greetings, my kin and my people.
I'm from the Black Charcoal Streak Division of
the Red Running Into Water Clan of the
Din Nation.
We are also incorrectly known as Navajo.
Prior to Columbus's arrival, many different nations had
mastered different ways of cultivating entire ecosystems.
We didn't plant gardens, we planted forests, as
evidenced by fossilized pollen records, and we worked
on land systems collectively.
It was not intended to feed humans alone,
although it did feed us plentifully.
A lot of people say that we followed
the buffalo, but there's increasing evidence that the
buffalo followed our fire.
Because in the wake of Indigenous fire comes
what?
Nutrient-dense grasslands.
Indigenous peoples have purposefully applied fire to this
continent for tens of thousands of years, because
you're actually recycling those nutrients from the expired
grass tissues into ash, and that ash goes
straight into minerals for the new plants to
use.
So you had your nut and your mast
food source, and then you had open savanna,
which would attract your protein, relatives, which were
deer, elk, and other ungulates.
A lot of indigenous regenerative praxis is about
creating a home for your food so that
your food comes to you.
It's about creating habitat.
We should ensure that the original peoples of
this land have a land base to do
their practices.
And so to me, regeneration, it's about healing
history.
The story of agriculture in the Americas that
began with people who had lived here for
thousands of years radically changed with the arrival
of colonists from Europe.
Industrial agriculture in the U.S.
began with theft of indigenous lands, genocide of
indigenous peoples and their food systems, and then
a system of agricultural labor that was built
on the model of slavery.
by people who didn't see this land as
their home, but who saw it as a
resource to extract wealth from.
That ecological level of extraction is inextricably tied
to that social extraction of taking land away
from people who've had reciprocal relationships with it
for generations and generations.
The reality is that Northern Europeans did not
know how to grow rice and cotton and
sugar.
And so they stole human beings who were
expert agriculturalists in these technologies.
My grandma's grandma's grandma, Susie Boyd, was one
of the millions of African women who were
kidnapped from the shores of Western Africa.
Like so many of these mothers and grandmothers,
she had a practice of braiding seeds into
her hair as insurance for an uncertain future.
And it became important to them to imagine
a future on soil and to carry with
them their most precious heritage, which is the
seed that they've been saving for generations.
The seeds, saved in the hair of enslaved
women, became a foundational part of America's powerful
agriculture.
So the reason that we have many of
these crops...
in the Americas is because of the audacious
courage of our ancestral grandmothers in braiding those
seeds before this transatlantic crossing.
One person who was a pioneer in using
regenerative agriculture to repair damaged soil was born
into slavery and rose to become a household
name.
Dr.
George Washington Carver was a faculty member at
Tuskegee University in the late 1800s and the
early 1900s.
and is arguably one of the parents of
the modern regenerative movement.
Professor Carver knew that there's one element that's
critical for growing crops.
That element is called nitrogen.
And, as it turns out, George Washington Carver
discovered a simple way to get abundant quantities
of nitrogen from the air and return it
to the soil.
Dr.
Carver was observing that monocropping was wreaking havoc
on the soil, and he came up with
a strategy of feeding the soil life as
the main work of the farmer.
Primarily through cover cropping, he popularized things like
peanuts, beans, veg, clover, the black-eyed pea.
What they do is they pull nitrogen down
from the atmosphere and capture it in the
nodules of these plants.
replenishing the soil.
He did manage to convince a whole generation
of farmers in the late 1800s to plant
cover crops and to plant a diversity of
crops instead of just a monocrop.
The Black community was really essential in establishing
a lot of the regenerative technology that we
celebrate today.
After Carver's death, instead of embracing his philosophy
of working with nature to heal soil, America
went down.
a very different path.
After the Second World War, a new way
of farming emerged.
It combined the vast industrial might-of-war machines with
the killing power of chemical warfare.
It used the nitrogen technology of bombs to
produce massive amounts of fertilizer from fossil fuels.
The machines were used to till, plow, and
transform nature into perfectly uniform farms.
Where machines could not be used, three million
migrant field workers came from Mexico to do
the most dangerous jobs in food processing and
farming.
Industrialized agriculture had many unintended consequences, including never-before-seen
quantities of pests and weeds.
To combat the onslaught of pests, chemical pesticides
were developed.
And to destroy the endless weeds, toxic herbicides
were created.
They called this combination of specialized seeds, deadly
chemical sprays, and fossil fuel-powered machines the Green
Revolution.
Of the many companies that fueled the Green
Revolution, there was one company, that created the
culture for the chemical and seed giants.
It was a company that discovered a chemical
used to clean industrial pipes.
And as it turned out, that chemical was
also a very effective weed killer.
Like many adults and children these days, I
was struggling for years with some chronic health
problems.
I went off of gluten and lo and
behold, My feelings started coming back in my
hands, and I slowly over the course of
the year regained my strength.
I wanted to know what has changed in
gluten so much that I can no longer
tolerate it.
I decided I was going to raise money
and do research on gluten and Roundup.
There was a trial that was starting in
which a local school groundskeeper, he had so
much exposure to Roundup that he developed non-Hodgkin's
lymphoma.
Not only that, but maybe even more intriguing
was this massive level of corruption that was
being unveiled in front of this jury about
what Monsanto had done to hide the fact
that Roundup causes cancer.
That morning, we went in to a school
called Farmer.
We were dressed in these full-body white Tyvek
suits.
I have long holes connected to a spray
gun.
The spray gun is naked to the tank.
The holes became detached.
That's when they got the chemicals on me
past my Tyvek suit.
I didn't really think about it until I
got the scar on my knee.
Friday, a jury in San Francisco found biochemical
giant Monsanto liable for former school groundskeeper Dwayne
Johnson's cancer.
The facts have been proven now that Roundup
does cause cancer.
Monsanto has advertised Roundup on television and you
see people are out there very happily spraying Roundup,
But what you see from Monsanto's own internal
documents, they're advising their own employees, if you're
spraying this stuff, be sure you're wearing protective
gear and very worried about how rapidly glyphosate
can absorb into the skin.
Monsanto's own documents reveal the tactics the company
uses when people speak out about the dangers
of glyphosate.
We always felt pressure from Monsanto.
There's a whole spreadsheet, Carrie Gillum book plan,
about how to get third-party book reviews posted
that would denigrate the book, how to manipulate
Google search engines so that if people search
for my name or search for glyphosate, they'd
get directed to a website set up by
Monsanto.
There were over 10,000 pages of documents devoted
to how Monsanto wanted to take down Carrie
Gillum.
Moms across America initiated the first glyphosate testing
in America that was citizen-funded, and the results
were astounding.
We found glyphosate in the majority of our
children's urine, somewhat very high levels.
We found glyphosate in the majority of tap
water, and we even found glyphosate in breast
milk, 3,000 times higher than is shown to
cause sex hormone changes and organ damage.
So it was shocking.
Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in
the world.
found in food that we feed our kids,
found in our own urine.
Government researchers have even found glyphosate in rainfall.
You can't really escape it.
Women in this food movement are targeted as
hysterical, emotional.
It's frankly quite misogynistic.
The Monsanto trials did reveal that Monsanto hired
hundreds of contractors to go after me and
people like me.
They would threaten us on Thanksgiving evening, Christmas
evening, Sunday mornings.
They did a thing called doxing us, which
is revealing financial information, your personal information, your
address.
They literally said, we need to beat the
shit out of these moms.
As jury after jury concluded that glyphosate, aka
Roundup, causes cancer, the lawsuits against Monsanto began
to pile up.
And the people at the top, they jumped
ship.
The executives at Monsanto knew that the ride
was ending, and they wanted to sell the
company, and they found a very willing buyer
billion dollars for Monsanto in 2018, just as
the very first Roundup cancer trial was underway.
Bayer is making a lot of money.
Bayer has created what is called a circle
of profit.
They're selling Roundup.
And the other really appalling aspect is that
they have a really great product that treats
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
What is the cancer that is at question
in these trials?
Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
You know, it's always nice to create the
problem and then cure the problem and make
money on both ends.
Monsanto.
paved the way for the ruthlessness of the
modern agrochemical industry.
But to ensure nearly infinite demand for their
toxic products, the agrochemical giants would have to
co-opt something at the very bedrock of farming.
Eight years of university study, 30 years of
government service.
The premise that I was taught was it's
not about working with the natural system.
It's not about biomimicry.
It's not about mimicking life.
It was about making nature into a machine.
Training starts at an early age in agriculture.
They start indoctrinating.
You grew up on the farm and ranch,
but you also went to formal education through
a land-grant college.
There are land-grant universities across the United States
that educate the nation's young farmers on all
aspects of agriculture.
A disproportionate amount of the funding for these
universities comes directly from the agrochemical industry.
The way I was taught was broken.
A lot of the money for research is
funded through these huge corporations.
If you look at the faculty in the
weed science department at Ohio State or the
University of Minnesota, you'll see that those faculty
members that are the stars of promoting biotechnology
and trying to convince people that all pesticides
are safe.
If you burrow deeply enough, you will see
that there is a pipeline of money from
the pesticide industry into those universities.
They're getting the kind of science and the
kind of public support that money can buy.
I got my doctorate.
Joined the USDA hoping to help the world
and followed all of the rules just the
way that I was supposed to and asked
just the right questions.
I was named one of the top young
scientists in the country and got to meet
Obama in the White House.
Meanwhile, the beekeepers started to reach out and
they said, John, our bees are dying and
the pesticides are killing our bees.
And then I started to ask the wrong
questions.
I started to ask whether pesticides are killing
our bees.
I started publishing peer-reviewed papers.
And when I did that, everything changed.
Instead of being the golden boy, I became
a pariah.
And so I quit.
How does scientific suppression happen?
USDA and university research could not happen if
it wasn't for large corporate donations.
To be a successful scientist, you have to
get a lot of grants.
And who's the largest pockets in the room?
Agro-industry.
Boy, you've just completely influenced the quantity of
science that's now in favor of your product,
but you've still got this noisy guy or
gal conducting these studies that are poking holes
in our agenda.
What do you do?
You destroy that person.
You eviscerate them publicly.
And you put their corpse upon a stake
so everybody else can see it.
And nobody ever asked that question again.
That's science.
It happens at the universities.
It happens at the USDA.
This is how it's run.
This is the game.
When I told my co-workers and my supervisors
that we didn't need all these chemicals, we
didn't need fertilizers to make the soil healthy
and functioning.
They were disturbed.
Can you imagine the majority of the money
going to the farmer and rancher versus going
to the corporations?
That's a problem.
Any faculty member that would take on that
kind of research is going to get a
black mark.
And then the representatives of those companies are
going to be going in and talking to
the department head.
You know, the work that Dr.
Smith is doing, you know, you need to
do something about that.
You get a phone call.
Ray, the message you're giving out, it's not
acceptable.
You got to follow the construct.
You start asking questions, you're going to pay.
They've taken me down twice already.
I was fired because of the efforts of
pesticide manufacturers.
Now, they haven't killed me.
I'm grateful for that, but I'm not high
on their most appreciated scientist list.
By teaching millions of new farmers that they
need expensive seeds and toxic sprays to succeed,
the agrochemical giants established almost complete dominance over
our food system.
However, to create a true monopoly, they would
need to control one final chess piece.
The Farm Bill determines how the United States
Department of Agriculture spends a Approximately eighty-five billion
dollars a year.
Approximately eighty percent of Farm Bill money goes
to food assistance programs.
Most of the other twenty percent goes to
crop subsidies.
And a tiny fraction goes to environmental conservation.
The big problem with the Farm Bill is
it's rigged.
Sixty percent of our calories come from commodity
crops, soy, wheat, and corn, that are supported
by government policies.
The only reason that we're investing in corn
and soybeans right now is because of subsidies.
One of the ironic things here is the
taxpayer is subsidizing this type of production.
Let me ask you this, subsidies, no subsidies.
Do you think the Farm Bill is working?
There's a reason the current Farm Bill subsidizes
commodity crops that make people sick.
There are over twenty-three registered lobbyists for every
member of Congress in Washington, D.C.
A good portion of these lobbyists work for
the agrochemical giants, who wield unprecedented influence over
the policies that guide our food system.
We have a massive problem, which is the
single biggest lobby in Washington, by far, is
the food and ag industry.
these big agribusiness giants, they put in a
hundred-plus million dollars into campaigns every year, and
that's just what we've sleuthed out.
The problem is, in the Farm Bill process,
it's negotiated between agribusiness and politicians who get
a lot of money from all these multibillion-dollar
players.
They have the lobbyists.
They want to make sure we're using as
much pesticide and fertilizer and seed as they
can possibly sell.
Our nation right now, in your name, your
federal government is subsidizing the foods that another
part of your federal government is telling you
to eat very little or none of.
The USDA and Health and Human Services produce
the dietary guidelines for Americans, and yet, with
the same agency, we spend $75 billion a
year for processed food for SNAP or food
stamps.
Those people on SNAP eat that food, and
they get sick.
So the government...
meaning the public is paying multiple times for
the consequences of how we grow our food.
Those who are profiting from this system do
not want it to change.
All right, ready?
In response to the Dust Bowl, the very
first Farm Bill was commissioned by a visionary
president who understood the need to protect the
nation's soil.
We are going to have a farm policy
that will serve the national welfare.
We are going to conserve soil and conserve
light.
We haven't really had a president since Roosevelt
that truly understood the importance of a sustainable
food supply to the health of the nation.
The office of the U.S.
president has tremendous powers, including the power to
veto any farm bill that does not transform
the nation's food system and protect the health
of the people.
If you really were a visionary, President, and
you really cared and you really tried to
make the change, you wouldn't be popular, but
it would be worth it.
Because most of the grain grown in North
America goes to feed animals, one of the
biggest beneficiaries of the subsidy program is the
concentrated animal feedlot industry, otherwise known as CAFOs,
or factory farms.
Factory farming is institutionalized in our farm subsidy
program.
We're overproducing low-priced corn and soy.
Feedlots and factory farms, these are the biggest
users of that corn and soy.
The problems with factory farming are almost too
numerous to list.
In today's world, it seems like there must
be a quick tech fix for our animal
protein problem.
Plant-based meat, or fake meat as some might
call it, is wildly popular, especially on Wall
Street.
Fake meat is turning into real profits.
The stock market debut for Beyond Meat went
beyond...
The hottest IPO of 2019 so far.
The stock has a cult-like following.
One particular industry has decided the way to
address climate impact of agriculture is to create
an alternative to meat.
Let's go plant-based.
We're hearing that a lot.
A plant sounds good, but an agrochemical company
grew the plants.
Then the plant, whether it's a pea or
a soybean, goes into a factory-like setting.
where it's mixed with caustic chemicals to separate
it all out and then purified on columns
and filters, heated, dried, cooled, evaporated.
It's an entire factory process just to generate
one of the dozens of ingredients that you
often find in these alternative protein foods today.
Compared to industrially produced meat, these clearly have
benefits for the environment.
The greenwashing that's going on is these plant-based
meat alternatives are not better for your health.
There's extracted protein in the meat, and we've
learned protein that's highly processed raises insulin and
can cause diabetes.
So this is not anywhere on my top
look like.
If you really want to do something good
for the planet, there are other options.
The good news is...
If you don't want to eat meat to
satisfy that protein craving, there are a growing
number of products made from minimally processed and
plant-based regenerative ingredients.
Just like factory-farmed meat, today's fake meat primarily
relies on monocrops of corn, soy, and peas,
which are sprayed with glyphosate.
Early on, it was discovered that the weed
killers sprayed on these monocrops were so toxic
They didn't just kill the weeds, they also
killed the crops.
So the chemical companies came up with an
ingenious solution.
Scientists in Monsanto started working in the 80s
on a way to genetically engineer crops so
that Roundup could be sprayed on top of
a soybean field or on a corn crop
or on a cotton crop while it's growing.
By genetically modifying the corn and soy kernels
to resist Roundup, Monsanto and other seed companies
created new crops that could be sprayed all
year.
These genetically engineered, Roundup-ready grains soon overtook the
entire seed market.
When a farmer buys their seed, there's an
extra $12 or $15 per acre premium in
the price of that seed, paying for that
trait.
With nearly 200 million acres of genetically modified
corn and soil planted each year in the
U.S., the chemical and seed companies of the
green revolution discovered a new type of green
by charging farmers billions of dollars each year
for their toxic sprays and patented seeds.
The estimate is eight cents of every dollar
flows back.
to farmers.
The money is flowing to all of these
folks who sell the farmers seeds or chemicals
or fertilizers.
Farming right now is run primarily on debt.
Farmers need to go into a lot of
debt in order to operate their farmland.
Every time a farmer needs to purchase genetically
engineered seeds, and every time he needs chemicals,
he goes to the bank to take out
a loan.
And that bank's pretty darn happy, because guess
what?
That debt accrues interest.
Where we are today now is that farmers
carry $426 billion in debt.
They have financed this change in agriculture on
their own backs in order to prop up
the earnings of these genetically engineered products.
The current Farm Bill tells the farmer exactly
what to grow.
The chemical and seed companies make the profit.
Consumers get sick.
and the farmers are mired in debt.
That's the way it works.
For many farmers, the stress of trying to
make their operations pencil out is simply too
much.
Chris and I met in high school at
a barn party.
There was this handsome blue-eyed blond there that
kind of just caught my attention.
We were wild and crazy and liked to
have fun.
Just giving you an update from vacation.
We're sky high right now.
This is so amazing.
We were married two years before we had
kids.
What did you get, Kobe?
Are you guys going to open your presents?
We moved out to the farm in February
That was a lot of money.
June 6th would have been his 35th birthday.
We were supposed to meet with our banker
that day.
He woke up in the middle of the
night saying, I need help.
Please help me.
And I heard him get up, and I
heard him drive off in the farm car.
My cell phone rang, and it was the
lady who rented out in that North Farm
place.
And it was her husband.
And he said, Amber, Chris's breathing has really
slowed down.
And I said, what do you mean?
He said, oh, Amber, I'm so sorry.
Chris shot himself.
In today's farming community, I know that there
are other families feeling the weight of finances.
There are other farmers that are feeling the
same way that Chris felt.
If we can save another family from having
to deal with suicide, that's our mission.
A new report from the CDC says suicide
rates among American farmers is higher than any
other occupational group.
The CDC looked at workers in 17 different
states and they found that the suicide rate
in the field of farming is more than
five times higher than the general population.
We're facing really daunting problems right now.
Each and every one of us, we need
to ask the question, what's it going to
cost me not to change?
It's going to cost you your farm, going
to cost you your grandkids.
Is it worth it?
Most Americans are not fully conscious of how
our food system is creating a category five
hurricane of disaster in everything that we care
about.
We have a system that's hurting consumers, that's
hurting our environment, that's hurting independent family farmers,
that's hurting animals.
It's hurting farm workers.
It's just a morally bankrupt system, and we
have to change it.
Where did the life go?
We eliminated it.
We're losing species on planet Earth at a
rate that has never been experienced before.
This is worse than when the dinosaurs died
off.
It's birds, it's bats, it's bees, it's butterflies.
We're 50 years away from losing most life
on this planet.
A lot of those problems that we're facing
right now are driven by our food system.
The very way we're growing food is threatening
our future ability to grow food.
In the darkest night, when fear tries to
overtake you, we need to remember that even
the most insurmountable problems have solutions.
Revolutions often start with one radical idea.
are as old as dirt.
When I was very young, I wanted to
farm.
I admired my father.
I wanted to do what he was doing.
And his way of farming was we would
till the ground till it was black.
And if it wasn't black, you tilled it
again.
We could till with the best of them.
And you came out of the winter and
do it again.
That night, we got a one-inch rain event.
And I'm thinking...
I sure hope we can get in the
field this afternoon and plant corn.
As I'm driving down the road to the
field, I see something in the ditch.
And the closer I get, it's like the
field is moving.
The erosion moved the soil to the ditch
and then leaving the farm that way.
It's very hard to build soil health when
you are mass destruction to the soil profile.
So if we think about tillage, that physically
severs these mycorrhizal networks in agriculture.
It chops them up.
Resources cannot move, so then there's no more
carbon moving from the plant down into the
soil, and there's no movement of the nutrients
moving up through the soil and to the
plants.
You've just severed that.
That's done.
That was the epiphany moment for me at
It's time to make a change.
That next spring, we took all the tillage
out.
So we're already ahead of the game on
cost.
In the fall, that field was our best-yielding
cornfield on the whole farm.
And it wound up being number one on
return on investment because we eliminated tillage.
I am hooked.
Four years in, we were full block.
Rick Clark?
is one of the first farmers to crack
the code of large-scale, no-till, regenerative organic agriculture.
To do this, Rick uses two special machines.
The best tool we bought was a roller
crimper.
This is our roller crimper.
This is what I call my baby.
A roller crimper is like a steamroller.
It smashes the cover crop down.
The dead cover crop protects against weeds.
and becomes food for the microbes.
That's our mat to suppress weeds so we
no longer need to spray Roundup.
The other machine, called an air seeder, aka
no-till drill, plants the seeds without tilling the
soil.
Industrial agriculture uses expensive chemicals to fertilize crops
and kill weeds.
But regenerative agriculture uses free microbes and cover
crops to bring nutrients into the soil.
Right now, where we're standing in Midwest America,
there's thousands of pounds of phosphorus and potassium
right below our feet.
We just need to get the cover crops
out there, unlock them, bring them to the
surface, and regenerate them.
We've got biomass covering the soil.
Biomass is the layer of cover crops protecting
the soil.
We've got the microbial biome working in high
gear.
The microbial biome is the life in the
soil.
We've got aggregate stability that's eight inches deep.
Aggregates are how the microbes build soil.
We've got 1.5 million earthworms per acre.
Earthworms turn plant matter into soil.
The more earthworms, the healthier your soil.
We've got water infiltration rates of 20 inches
an hour.
And infiltration is how much water the soil
can hold instead of running off.
The deeper the soil organic matter, and thus
the more carbon that soil has...
the more water the soil will hold.
We've eliminated seed treatments.
We've eliminated insecticides.
We've eliminated pesticides, herbicides.
We are saving upwards of $400 an acre
on input costs.
It works out to be about $2 million
a year in savings.
That is serious cash.
I have not taken a government subsidy.
I no longer take any crop insurance.
If the average grain farmer in the U.S.,
who farms about 2,500 acres, switched to Rick's
model, they would each save approximately $1 million
a year.
If all the grain farmers in the U.S.
used Rick's model, It would put over a
hundred billion dollars back into rural America annually,
more than all of the money the Farm
Bill allocates each year.
I wanted to eliminate all of these inputs
for many reasons, but one of the main
reasons was human health.
I mean, on the label is a skull
and crossbones.
That's death.
I'm a stage four metastatic breast cancer survivor.
I wanted to know why I got sick.
And we realized quickly that our practices were
killing us.
Three people in the immediate family, young, I
mean, my nephew was 23, had cancer.
I don't see how you could say that
chemicals are not affecting us adversely.
It's been proven that glyphosate is very much
giving people cancer.
I think if you're aware of that, you
have to mitigate all your risks.
And that means taking the chemicals away that
are going to harm you.
I certainly didn't want my girls to live
on a farm that was harmful.
I've been around these chemicals my whole life.
I have two beautiful daughters and I have
two beautiful grandchildren.
They are not going to be around chemicals.
They are not going to be around pesticides.
They are not going to be around insecticides.
And that's my legacy.
for the next generation is to have a
viable, regenerating, organic, no-till system to hand off
to the next generation.
And that's what we're doing.
While large industrial farms have become the mainstay
of the agrochemical complex, about 85% of people
farming in the U.S., as well as most
farmers worldwide, actually farm on small-scale farms of
less than 500 acres.
That's why small-scale regenerative farms can play a
big role in healing the soil.
Soul Fire Farm came out of a conversation
with some of our neighbors when we were
living in the south end of Albany, New
York, where there aren't any farmer's markets, no
land to grow food, no bus line to
get you to the grocery store.
So we were struggling to feed our then-young
children fresh vegetables and fruit.
I started farming as a teenager.
So when our neighbors found out that I
had farming experience, they started encouraging us to
start a farm for the people.
I went to all the conferences that I
could.
I got my hands on every farming book.
There wasn't a single book or a single
lecture at any of those conferences who looked
like me.
Farming is among the most racially skewed professions,
where being a landowning farm manager is among
the whitest professions, and being a farm laborer
is among the brownest.
We have to acknowledge that the system of
agriculture that we have been operating under has
been preferential to white people.
There have been four different discrimination lawsuits against
my agency.
It was proven that we were engaging in
discriminatory practices.
When a Black farmer would go to a
U.S.
Department of Agriculture office to apply for a
loan, they would be denied and delayed time
after time.
And that has resulted in massive foreclosures.
you had over a million Black farmers.
And now we've got to a point that
So we wed ourselves to this 80 acres
of land in Mohican territory grafted in New
York and got growing.
When we first arrived, there was almost no
topsoil.
It was heavy clay with lots of stone,
impenetrable to a spade, completely eroded.
When a U.S.
Department of Agriculture agent came out, they said
of the 13 soil classifications and rankings, yours
is the worst.
You can't grow food here.
Small-scale regenerative farms grow a lot of food,
but they can also grow something else, soil.
The team at Soul Fire Farm has increased
their farm's soil organic matter from less than
We have restored the soil organic matter.
to pre-colonial indigenous levels.
We have captured tens of thousands of pounds
of carbon into the soil.
We've brought back pollinators.
We've increased the biodiversity in the sky, in
the water, in the soil.
It's not just Soul Fire Farm.
There are thousands of farms like us who
continue to feed the world.
We are seeing an entire rising generation take
those seeds that our ancestors braided into their
hair.
and who are saying we're going to keep
farming the ways that our ancestors have and
innovate and build upon that, and that will
continue to feed the world without destroying it.
You don't need thousands or even hundreds of
acres to grow food.
In fact, you can use regenerative practices to
grow food on your own front lawn.
Grass is America's most irrigated crop.
It's also the crop we spray the most
pesticides on.
I literally don't even understand.
When I drive down the street and I
see one yard after the other and it's
grass, I think to myself, no.
I run an organization called Good Neighbor Gardens,
where we install edible gardens.
We give the homeowner their own personal farmhand
who shows up once a week to grow
the food.
They seed, they harvest, they maintain, they do
integrative pest management, they're building soil all the
time, they're layering on compost.
plot planning and refreshing the gardens when the
season's over.
So all of the farmhands bring all of
their harvest to the urban barn so that
we can aggregate our surplus harvest with local
regenerative farming partners that also provide their food
so that we can aggregate it and make
these beautiful harvest boxes of hyperlocal, nutrient-dense, shared
goodness from these yards.
We also teach children.
the importance of growing their own food.
In doing that, we're basically raising capable people.
We've got to understand that soil is not
dead, it's not dirty, it's alive.
The principles of soil health can help farmers
grow just about anything, including one of America's
oldest crops, a plant we call hemp.
I'm talking about the kind of hemp that
makes fuel, food, clothing, and paper.
I mean, what'd you think I was talking
about?
I'm a descendant of the Menominee Nation out
of Wisconsin.
We were one of the first tribes to
get our federal license to grow hemp.
Hemp can save the world.
It's just such an awesome plant.
You can use every single part of it.
When we were harvesting last year, I gave
my dog a couple of stalks.
Calmed her down, thank gosh.
We're creating feed for our cows.
It's food that they can eat, and it's
healthy for them.
We've implemented a new practice called amp grazing.
That's where we set up paddocks for the
cattle.
It's nothing different than trying to mimic the
way Mother Nature had worked hundreds of years
ago when the buffalo and the bison had
came across the land and grazed those areas.
We're making sure that those pastures are not
overgrazed.
Those cows get a fresh paddock every day.
You could just look down from above onto
our reservation.
You would see a distinct difference in what
our tribe is doing as opposed to what
the farmers that are non-tribal members are doing.
You would see the healing in our lands.
In ten years, it's going to be amazing
on this reservation.
Regenerative agriculture isn't a new idea.
It's an old idea.
A very old idea.
I am a cow-calf producer on the Cheyenne-Riversu
Indian Reservation, where I am fortunate to be
one of the 125th generations to help to
steward this landscape.
Through effective and thoughtful management of our cattle
and horse herds, we're able to impact the
grasses and the soil in a way that
it's craving to be impacted.
For millions of years, four-legged animals roamed the
plains in tight herds, spreading seeds with their
hooves and fertilizing soil with their dung and
urine.
Regenerative agriculture aims to bring those bovines back.
How did we get 80 to 50 feet
of topsoil in places in the Midwest?
We had 169 million ruminants running around the
country that were grazing and moving and building
soil.
Animals are a critical part of the ecosystem
of soil creation.
You need animals to integrate into a regenerative
agricultural system in order to restore soil.
You don't have to eat them if you
don't want to, but you can't ignore the
fact of science, biology, and ecology.
What happens when the cow comes along or
the sheep or the goat and they grab
onto a plant and pull on it to
eat?
That plant has a response, and that response
is, I need to put more photosynthate into
my roots, so the next time I'm grabbed,
I'm holding solid.
It means CO2 out of the air into
the plant, making carbohydrates and sugars that go
into the soil, feeding the microbial population.
Animals that eat only grasses have a high
level of a fat called omega-3s, the same
beneficial fat found in wild salmon.
When you see a regeneratively raised cow that's
fed on a hundred different plants, they have
higher levels of omega-3s, more antioxidants, more vitamins
and minerals.
A recent study was published that people who
had the highest levels of omega-3 fats in
their blood, which are coming from usually wild
animals, have a five-year extension on their life
expectancy.
Why is that?
Because most Americans don't eat food containing omega-3
fats.
Healthy soil leads to healthy plants.
And healthy plants lead to healthy animals, including
humans.
The quality of what you eat determines the
quality of your health.
A living soil is where it all starts.
I'm 34 years old.
We currently farm and we ranch.
And we are transitioning to more regenerative agriculture.
In 2007, I began to feel sick.
The local doctors did all the lab testing.
My liver enzymes were off the charts.
They took a peek in my small intestine.
That kind of tipped them off that it
was Crohn's disease.
I really realized that some of the food
I was eating would make me feel amazing,
and other food would make me feel terrible.
At this time, I knew so little about
nutrition, I thought high-fructose corn syrup was good
because it's derived from corn.
Health does begin to soil.
I'd heard that, but I still didn't know
what it meant.
So we did just a very small garden
plot in our backyard.
to have the most nutrient-dense food we can.
Hey, bud, you want to pick some spinach?
Yeah, we could make a strawberry spinach salad.
They say healthy soil looks like chocolate cake.
That's what we have in our garden.
Oh, Hyde's going for another one.
That may or may not have had a
worm on it.
I wanted to regenerate my health.
I didn't want to just treat the symptoms.
That's where I really started diving deep into
nutrition.
After a year, it was just incredible.
The surgeon had to call my doctor and
make sure they had the right write-up on
me because they couldn't find any disease.
You know, as a doctor, it became really
clear to me that I could not cure
diabetes or chronic disease in my office, that
it was cured on the farm, in the
grocery store, and in the kitchen.
What you'll find at the end of your
fork is more powerful than anything you'll find
in a prescription bottle.
Food is literally medicine.
It's not white medicine.
So we're going to be burying a brand-new
pair of underwear.
We're going to check the underwear in the
regeneratively farmed field versus the conventional soybean field
and see if we can tell a difference
between the microbial activity.
If the elastic band is the only thing
left, that shows that we have really good
microbiology at work underneath the soil surface.
I believe soil health is truly...
the beginning of all health we know regenerative
agriculture can bring soil back to life but
it can also be used to help bring
back the biodiversity above ground i see so
much opportunity in these mountains in this wild
country to deliver just some of the most
excellent protein to people in the world with
animals that were hurting to mimic wild creatures
like bison and elk These vast public lands
we have in the United States, we've actually
called them wastelands.
And it was because we couldn't put a
plow down.
And the irony for me is these are
some of the most intact soils in the
world.
Cattle in raw land, that's always a good
sign.
You know, when I'm up here, I still
sleep with one eye open all night long.
We have active packs of wolves all through
those rangelands.
So they start dining.
Having a great time at our expense, and
we're like, either we fix this or quit.
So we did this super simple hack of
just changing our grazing.
And we may put 400 head of cattle
in a given area over just maybe an
afternoon, instead of continuously, every summer, on and
on and on.
Plants started responding dramatically.
The second that happened, another species started chilling
out.
It was aspen.
Third thing was the willows.
and the gooseberries and all the other brush
started coming in and we started getting shade
in our creeks and fish being successful so
these songbirds started taking over and i don't
know how but beaver somehow knew beaver waddle
their way at their own bodily risk all
the way over into our creeks and why
are they colonizing these beautiful creek bottoms because
they could rapidly build dams When you start
to mimic nature, nature begins to heal itself
and biodiversity flourishes.
This web of life is called the trophic
cascade.
And it's super exciting, because that top species,
that beaver, we call a keystone species, because
the beaver changes everything.
The beaver fast-tracks ecological restoration.
It even changes...
the temperature of the water all the way
down the creek.
It changes the water yield all the way
down the creek.
It changes spawning habitat way downstream.
beavers up there, where we had zero about
six years ago.
When you're doing regenerative grazing, boy, it's powerful.
You have this cascade of all these animals
and all this plant life healing this land.
And that's so beautiful, because it's like, holy
cow, we could change everything.
There's hope.
Over the past 10,000 years, humans have become
experts at turning soil into dust.
The big question is, can we become experts
at turning dust and deserts back into fertile
ground?
If you come to visit Chihuahua, you're going
to see what a truly debtor is.
I think the point here is that It
wasn't that way.
It was grasslands.
The Chihuahuan Desert crosses two states in the
U.S.
It covers seven states in Mexico.
It's the largest desert in North America.
So we're going to drive miles and miles
through very infertile soil until we reach the
ranch.
The state of Chihuahua as a state has
the most ranchers under plant grazing management.
Right now we have about a couple of
thousand ranchers.
who are approaching two million acres, and he's
growing really very fast.
To regenerate the desert on two million acres
of land, these ranches are practicing planned grazing
management.
They move cattle in tight herds so the
hooves break the hard layer on top of
the soil, and their manure fertilizes the ground.
This allows the grass seeds stored inside the
soil to germinate.
forming tall grasses that pump carbon out of
the atmosphere.
Let's take a look at this cow pie
and see how life is going underneath.
Obviously, wouldn't you really use any ivermectin or
any toxin or calcium, because why would I
be killing the ants, the termites, the dambitals?
They're worth 24 by 7 for me.
Termites are putting nitrogen into the soil.
Oh, there's a termite here.
You see?
They're teaming up with the dambitals.
Those tombitles, they take all that moisture that
is on the cow pie and all those
nutrients and put it into the soil.
All these holes were done by the tombitles.
You can see the hole going underneath.
When I arrived at this place, these areas
were just bare ground.
We're just using cows.
We didn't bring any seed.
We didn't do any mechanical.
We didn't do any fertilizing or chemical.
Nature stored the seed.
waiting for the right conditions to appear.
If you really look at an environment, for
example, the prairies or the grasslands, the grasses
co-evolve with the buffalo.
So the cow is taking the place of
that buffalo.
If we just get rid of the cows,
we are going to promote desertification.
We need that animal to help us restore
the place.
Desertification begins when the soil is stripped of
plants.
When solar radiation hits bare ground, some is
absorbed by the ground and the rest is
reflected back into the atmosphere.
The increasing heat creates a greenhouse effect.
Think about what it does with all these
millions of acres.
And you would say, well, yeah, but that's
the typical Chihuahuan desert.
You cannot change it.
You can change this with proper plant grazing
management.
We have done it in in all ranches
and it can be done here.
This guy is just wow.
We got the cattle here, we actually work
all this land for let's say three, four,
five, six days and then we leave for
a full year.
And because the cows put a lot of
manure here the grass is just rebound.
I mean I'm almost six six feet, this
is more than six feet.
This grass in the middle of the desert
with a eight inch precipitation i mean this
is great salad for the cattle just look
at the multiple species we have here dense
grasses help moderate temperatures but these plants don't
just stabilize local climates they also do something
else on the last few years we've been
seeing rain even two or three times per
week Tall grasses pull water from the ground
and transpire the water into the air.
This creates rain.
When this plant-based water cycle is done on
hundreds, thousands, or even millions of acres, it
can regenerate entire ecosystems.
Could you just say a couple of things
for me real quick?
Yes, sir.
Test one, two, three.
We are the rainmakers of the desert.
We can do cattle ranching profitable while at
the same time protecting the wildlife and enhancing
their habitat.
A lot of places in the world are
former grasslands.
The only way we have to restore those
grasslands is by using the cow properly.
We need to stop wondering how we can
green this planet.
We're already doing it at a scale that
can be done.
Worldwide.
Forever regenerative agriculture is practice.
It puts carbon back into the soil.
And when you recarbonize soils, incredible things are
possible.
I often get asked, what makes you think
that this can occur anywhere in the world?
And I answer that because it's nature.
Nature is always self-organizing, self-healing, self-regulating.
If we would cover the earth in a
biodiverse array of plants and animals and insects,
we wouldn't hear about climate change anymore.
We wouldn't have this human health crisis.
We would have food that is truly nutrient-dense.
In the near future, The consumer's going to
be able to pull out their phone out
of their pocket.
They're going to be able to scan a
product.
They're going to be able to see where
that food was grown or raised, what the
practices are on the land, and they're also
going to be able to read the nutrient
density of that food.
When I was a conventional farmer, I sprayed
pesticides, I sprayed fungicides, I used copious amounts
of herbicide, I used synthetic fertilizers.
Now...
I haven't used a pesticide in years.
Do farmers, ranchers have a higher exposure to
chemicals, things that are used in production today?
Absolutely.
How do we not?
I have no regrets.
I'd do it all over again.
Not sure my wife would, but I would
do it all over again.
I would have never imagined 25 years ago
that...
I'd be testifying in front of the House
Ag Committee.
I would have never imagined I'd be standing
in front of the Board of Directors of
General Mills, explaining to them about regenerative agriculture.
Never would have expected that I'd be talking
to Prince Charles via Zoom.
To be just a small part of such
meaningful change, that makes life worthwhile.
That, and a good bourbon.
Yeah, humanity has a choice to make.
We can turn, go down the regenerative path,
heal our soils, our rivers, our streams, our
estuaries, heal communities, heal people.
Or we can continue down the path we
are, a path of degradation, more violent weather
events, weather extremes, flooding, drought, food shortages, health
issues.
We have a choice to make.
Which path do we want to go on?
The situation we find ourselves in requires bold
action from brave leaders.
Maybe it was time for a farmer to
go talk to the people in charge of
our country.
In twenty-twenty-two, Rick Clark was officially invited to
testify before the House Agricultural Committee.
Same committee.
that writes the Farm Bill.
Folks, this is urgent and it's critical that
we have bipartisan action today.
I am a Republican and I've spoken to
thousands of farmers across this country and not
once has my party affiliation come up.
Adopting soil health practices can slow down and
reverse the degradation of soil.
We are pushing to ensure the next Farm
Bill robustly supports Regenerative Ag.
If we do not listen to you, we
will have a food shortage in this country.
As a farmer, when I can be in
the room to support other farmers, and the
fact that the hearing today was about regenerative
ag was even more remarkable.
It's historic.
Regenerative ag is actually just indigenous principles.
And as an indigenous person, we just want
to make sure that Mother Earth is here
for future generations.
We always talk about a country that can't
feed itself ceases to exist, and soils are
the foundation for everything that we do.
It should be the foundation.
People on both sides of the aisle are
beginning to work together to support farmers who
put carbon into the soil.
Senator Braun, what are your thoughts on the
concept of regenerative farming?
I'm open to that, because you want to
keep carbon in the soil.
I think it's the key to using fewer
resources.
So, Senator, how many other people are behind
you with this?
Well, I mean, I'm the first Republican that
was willing to start a climate caucus for
that discussion.
So you're on an island.
Kind of on an island.
I mean, conservation, conservative are almost spelled the
same.
I never understood why we didn't have more
basic interest in it.
You look at keeping the carbon in the
soil, keeping the soil healthy, manage it well.
and measure the results there's a financial incentive
to keep doing it you're going to have
healthier soil long term and when you can
get two benefits financially and you're taking care
of mother earth i think that's going to
be important to farmers one thing's for certain
each of us can do something for soil
health i forgot my suit i apologize i
feel like i'm underdressed for this event I'm
not a big believer in the political process
that exists in this country, but if you
are the people who can make a change,
well, by God, now's a good time.
I mean, the world needs it.
The planet needs it.
The farmer needs it.
The soil needs it.
It's high time to finally get regenerative agriculture.
Let's prioritize the farmer.
We need to find a way to balance
the scale.
When I travel the Midwest and I meet
farmers of all backgrounds, they are facing a
system that is working against them.
This is an integrated food system.
All of us are in this together.
We all should be obligated to fix it,
stand together, look to a brighter day together.
What I've always believed is best about America
is when we are a light of hope
and possibility to all nations.
We've got to get everybody involved here.
You've got to get the farmer involved.
You've got to get the consumers, the distribution.
Everybody's got to be on board in the
food chain and agree that we need regenerative
farming.
We have a Lakota teaching that means that
seven generations from now will be impacted by
what I do today.
It gives a sense of responsibility that you
have to carry as you walk this earth.
The phrase that we use is midakoye oyase,
which means we're all related.
And we're all related beyond humans.
It's a connection to the land.
It's a connection to the air.
It's a connection to those that came before
us and those that are going to come
after us.
I don't want this letter to be an
apology.
Instead, I want this to be a statement
of hope to you, my children.
Because I love you.
Or fail.
inherit this earth from your parents.
It is your generation that will have to
face this future.
I said this letter is a warning, but
it's also a promise.
In the time that I have left, I
promise to do what I can to heal
our broken food system and save our soil
and our...
So I'm gonna fight like hell to save
your future, and I'm counting on you to
do the same for your children.
So remember this, next time you look up
at that night sky, think about where you
are.
You're on the only planet we know of
that's filled with life.
And the one thing that's keeping us all
alive is the soil you're standing on.
Now that you've seen Common Ground, you may
have a mix of feelings.
You might feel hopeful.
You might even feel angry.
Hopefully, you're feeling motivated.
Motivated to take action.
And the most important action you can take
is to spread the word.
We need as many people as possible to
watch this film.
We need to turn this movie into a
movement.
This could really be the tipping point for
our food system.
And you can help accomplish that.
by encouraging people you know to watch this
movie and also post about it on social
media.
In fact, take out your smartphone right now
and scan that QR code that you see
on the screen.
That'll take you to the Common Ground website,
where you can sign up to join the
movement and learn more about regenerative agriculture.
We know firsthand the importance of soil regeneration.
Including the importance of incorporating animals.
In fact, we live on a farm.
And we made this film in a converted
barn surrounded by a lot of animals.
Including these two animals here, our kids, Jedi
and Athena.
So, for children of all generations...
And all children of future generations...
Please join this movement.
And spread the word.