Common Ground (2023)

[bunniefuu]

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 k*ll 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 sl*very.

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 sl*very 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 w*r, a new way

of farming emerged.

It combined the vast industrial might-of-w*r machines with

the k*lling 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 k*ller.

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

g*n.

The spray g*n 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

sh*t 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 k*lling our bees.

And then I started to ask the wrong

questions.

I started to ask whether pesticides are k*lling

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 k*lled 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

K*llers sprayed on these monocrops were so toxic

They didn't just k*ll the weeds, they also

k*lled 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 k*ll 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

k*lling 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 st*lks.

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 k*lling 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.