You're listening to I Choose Me with Jenny Garland. Hi, everyone, welcome to I Choose Me. This podcast is all about the choices we make and where they lead us. My guests today are the creative force involved in an incredible documentary that impacts us, all about the importance of regenerative farming that affects the food we all eat, and the health and longevity of our beautiful planet. You have to check out their documentaries Kiss the Ground and Common Ground,
out now on Amazon. Please welcome Ian Summerholder and Rebecca Tickle to the podcast. I'm so excited to talk to you about this because I'm really also very passionate about the earth and nature and sustainability.
And pushing and pushing and pushing to.
Try and do better and be better and stay healthy and longevity and everything. It's you know, it's all for me. So I feel like this is a good connection.
They're all inextricably linked, right, They're all inextricably linked.
I think, as you're talking to think, this is like the opposite of the circle of profit that we talk about. Like the bear like bear makes the poison to kill the pests, but then they also make the medicine to cure the disease that's caused from exposure to the poison that kills the pest. That's like this degenerative loop of cycle of profit. But what you're doing is the opposite of that. You're spreading the message of regeneration, and then
you're also spreading the message of like self health. Regeneration's like, that's a cycle of profit, that's regenerative, that's a.
Great within the human body.
And so it's using the same model but turning in on its head for wellness and regeneration.
And then our families grow as a result.
Yeah, and they grow healthy, which is which is not easy to do in this date.
Healthy families create healthy streets that create healthy neighborhoods, create healthy towns, communities. It's crazy.
Well, on this podcast we talk all about choices, and there is one choice that we all make collectively, every single one of us, every.
Single day, several times a day.
Is the food we eat. And your documentary, Common Ground, is an all encompassing documentary and it talks about how to get that healthy food and so much more. Can you just tell us about Common Ground?
Tell us, sister.
Common Ground is environmental documentary that is a hopeful, uplifting, inspirational film about how we can save the future of humanity. It shows how we can fix our climate. It shows how we can create a trillion dollar industry of regeneration that's our future, and it shows how each one of us can get involved and what that pathway is. It really sparks a shift from that paralysis in the climate
anxiety that we're all feeling. And then suddenly when you see that pathway, it spurs you into action because you realize that we have a window of time where we can course correct and turn this whole thing around. And that's what Common Ground shows us. And it's the follow up film to the Predecessor Kiss the Ground and Kiss the Ground came out in twenty twenty on Netflix. It's been a huge global success. It's King Charles's favorite movie.
We touched a billion people.
Ian's in the film. He actually started shooting that back in twenty eleven, and then we started filming and we started in twenty thirteen, and then we synced up after the fact, only to discover that we were all working on the same stuff, or on the same issue. With Alan Savory and regeneration and we were learning like the same sort of niche information about soil and the sort of magic of soil to sequester all of the carbon that we've emitted. I mean, there's more life and healthy
soil than there are stars in the universe. And so when you start to think about the power of life that's generated and that soil, you suddenly want to start taking care of it because it means the sustainability of life for humans and all living things, and it can be done in any ecosystem and we.
All have a role to play.
So today Earth Day, Happy Earth Day, Verny. These films have just been launched. Case the Ground is being relaunched to the director's cut with our indigenous people's section. Wonderful and and Common Ground are now they're Amazon Originals, which is phenomenal, and they're now globally available to stream in every country and in most languages. And it's been a fourteen year journey for us to get to this point.
For fourteen years.
And by the way, I know you're like, oh gosh, a soil movie that sounds.
Dull as dirt dirt, but it's got.
And it has Jason, his buddy Jason, and has daw.
Jason.
They all make the soil so sex And.
Why did you do work about that?
Why was it so important to you to be a part of this, to jump in and be such a leader.
I grew up on the very delicate ecosystem in the buyers of Louisiana, and we grew up super poor. We had nothing, but we had everything because we lived off of all the bounty of the lakes, the rivers, the bayous, the sky, the land of my grandparents. My mom's side were Mississippi redneck farmers and my dad's side was Cajun. And so that amazing balance of my dad taught me the balance of wetlands and what it means when there's an imbalance when you take more than you put back.
That imbalance throws off the entire ecosystem, and the only creatures that lose are us. All of a sudden, you can't sustain life anymore. Right, same on the farm, my grandparents always taught us. My grandfather was like an agricultural inventor. Fortunately never patented any of this shit. I'm so curious, Oh my gosh. In the forties, he so he built a mold and he started drying out bull and calmanure, and he was the one that made the first in
the thirties. Actually the little pots made of manure that you german eight seeds in and grow them.
Yeah, and they're like the biodegrade into their arca.
He created those.
Wow.
He made the mold forward and the whole thing, and he made thousands of thousands of thousands of them.
Those are still being used today.
I know, I wish, I wish our family had a patent on that from years ago. But the idea was is that we both grew up and Josh and I went to the same high school in Mandeville, Louisiana.
Wow.
And Josh is my directing, producing partner, writing partner.
Okay, yeah, So it's this powerhouse couple who built these films and then these amazing inner circles that came together. We've been waiting on this moment for fourteen years. So I learned from the farming side of it, how these farms regenerate and how all systems work off of one another. That's what my grandfather taught me, and then my dad taught and my mom and then my dad taught me on the other side, which is the delicate balance of nature.
But from the landscape are the lens I guess you could say of wetlands, because that system is extremely delicate in its balance. Those types of things inform who we become, and that's how we found ourselves here. I met Alan Savory when I spoke at Stages and Scientists that I want to say it was the end of twenty ten. So Alan Savory is this man. You can look him up. He's basically like the godfather of soil. He was and
he was this very famous political figure. He's the one that led the Basically he's the one that led the revolution and maintained power in what rose Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. He was the transition of that. So he was like exiled by Mugabe. Like this man was an unbelievable He basically built the most famous the first real guerrilla warfare outfit was Alan. But he's also the most amazing soil scientist.
And in nineteen seventy three he ran the numbers. He was looking at agricol trual practices globally and thinking, by about the turn of the twenty first century, our soils globally are going to be so degraded that we're going to be basically looking at an extinction event by basically causing large scale global desertification, which is exactly what happened. I met him at the symposium that Deep Bac Troper used to put on called Sagans and Scientists, and I
spoke at it. It's like a four hundred person ted talk, and it was so intimidating because I was there talking about the relationship as how the world and our bodies are basically the same biological process, taking that concept and breaking it down for people. The guy who went up before me was one of the guys that won the
Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI. These are the smartest people in the room, and I was thinking, what in the hell, And like this poor kid from Louisiana have no college education, but I'm here talking about this story.
And that's where I met Allen Amazing.
Four months later, we packed up Jeff Schattz and I, who was our a camera operator in Vampire Our He was our steady caam operator who ended up becoming a big producer and now he runs his own show and stuff. But we packed up and went to Zimbabwe and we went to Allan's ranch and where Mugabe allowed him and remind you like this was still Mugabe was in power, so like you could not go into Zimbabwe as a
white journalist with like camera equipment. You still can't, by the way, you still can't because we tried with.
Ground Swell and all of our our gear got confiscated by the government and we ended up not being able to film out and Safey. It's a result for Grown Sweat.
So you see, this is really potent, scary stuff where we were putting our lives at risk to get this footage.
I mean, the movie is fascinating, crazy.
I learned Thank you so much great in the.
First thirty minutes. I was like, wow, I'm really learning a lot from this movie. And I couldn't take my eyes off of it. Was really well done. The cast, you know, just all the information. It was riveting and important.
So when you go to Prime Video today on Earth Day or whatever it may be, start by watching Kiss the Ground, because that's the first film with that ands in that film, and it really does a great job
at explaining the carbon cycle. What is regeneration, what is regenerative agriculture, Why is soil so important, and then it gives some great examples of some unlikely heroes, like farmers who've been conventional farmers for a long time, who have made a really sort of crazy and bold risk to make a transition away from a lot of you know, the industrial farming that they've been doing and then have a huge success. And so the film really follows that story along with and then.
But it breaks it down into such simplified entertaining because that was the first thing about you know, Just the Ground took seven years to make. Yeah, you know, we're not playing around anymore. Bezos and that team and Amazon and MG, I mean this is these are some of the most powerful groups entities in the world. And they took all three films, repackaged Kiss the Ground, pulled it off of Netflix. Thank you, Netflix, we love you. It's
an amazing, credible run and relationship. But now Common Ground. So Kiss the Ground was like dipping our toe in regeneration. Common Ground is really the nuts and bolts and the promise of how it actually works, but the big aha moment. And if this was ten, twelve, fifteen years ago, we would it would be a little scary.
Stocked, we'd be stocked and I actually have been stocked.
We've basically uncovered on film the agrichemical companies have been secretly micro financing virtually, I can't say all in public, but a very large portion, I'll say that of the university agricultural curriculum in this country for forty years.
Incredible.
So we pulled back the curtain.
We talked to whistleblowers. So the second film, Common Ground, which comes after Kiss the Ground, we filmed it during COVID. So instead of going and traveling around the world like we did with Kiss the Ground and like you did,
we weren't able to do that. So we instead packed up our sprinter vans and hit the road and traveled across North America during that time, and people were like wearing masks and it was the first time people were like taking their masks off, and we were doing social distancing. So the whole film Common Ground was filmed during the pandemic, and that's why it focuses so specifically on North America.
But what was crazy was that we found all these whistleblowers that were willing to talk because they believe in regenerative agriculture and they had been suppressed, fired.
Dressed fire bullied like big time.
And they do a great job breaking down how these different entities which are put in place to protect us have essentially been bought by the chemical companies. They're the products that are then put on these foods that then turn these farmers into debt surfs that are pulled into bank loans that require them to use those chemicals.
And then the pharmaceutical companies that participate in this sort of closed loop economy where you have a you have a an agrochemical company that the pesticide creates a certain disease, but then it's also owned by a company non Hodgkins Foma, but they also possess pretty much the only treatment for them.
Yes, they sell the only treatment for the disease that their other product.
Cause of the.
Movie was like, think about startling.
And that's not a conspiracy.
That's disease with the chemicals and then they're providing the medications to cure the disease.
Disease. Isn't that wild? And we allow that the US the congressional members of the US Congress have allowed this to happen. The universities have allowed that, you know, they've the chemical company to basically bought the best science money can buy. But then the legislators base legislation on those findings, and so they all participate in this unbelievable web of money, like enormous amounts of money. Sorry, what were you going to say?
I'm so sorry to interrupt, but I'm excited about what you're saying, because one hundred percent what happens is people go to land grant universities thinking that they're going to get a great education in agriculture, and instead what they're like, like you said, the majority of funding that comes into these lang grand universities comes from the companies that are selling the chemicals, and so they find all the curriculum
and they make the science and so. And then if you look at where the people who go to these land grant universities end up, if they're smart, they don't end up a farmer. They end up in policy or they end up some place where they can actually make money, and then they're dictating the policies. And they had an article that came out which showed that there was a big party at the at the EPA when they waved their ten one thousand study that showed the harms of
the effects of these chemicals being exposed to people. So the government is actively suppressing the science that's coming in that's showing the connection between our health and these toxic chemicals and the impact that's having. And then they had a party to celebrate it where they invited everyone from the EPA to come and they served cake to celebrate the ten thousand study that they waived that they are responsible for making sure that we're protected from incredible.
I want to just go back. I want to talk about and.
That's common ground, but it's actually a hopeful movie. I promise you it's not all bad news.
It's full of and inspiring at the same time.
I want to go back and talk about what is regenerative farming. How is it different than industrial farming, which is what we have always done, big farm.
I grew up in the Midwest.
I grew up in the middle of corn and soybean fields Iowa, Illinois, Illinois.
Okay, Yeah.
When I was a little girl, I used to walk for twenty five cents an hour. I would walk the bean fields and weed them with my sisters. And I know farmers like I come from farmland, so I'm really curious about if you could break down the difference between the two systems and then also talk to us about how the farmers are feeling about them.
It's super simple. I'll take that one really quickly. I'll break it down because people ask us this all the time and saying, what the hell is regenerative agriculture? Why should I care? What does it do? Yeah to me? For me, regenerative agriculture is just the use of planned grazing methods right and using living growing plants like at scale to sequester enormous amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store safely back in the ground where
it belongs. Because then when you do that, you pull that carbon from the air. It it brings that carbon down in the soil. But when you do that, it feeds all the vital micro organisms in that.
Soil, which there are many many there.
Yes, and so it's really more I think grams. But you could just say, for argument's sake, that there are more living organisms and a cup of soil than all humans who have ever lived in history. What so just tells you how a live soil is. Right, So when you generate, when you build the health of soil, you build the ability for that soil to sequester enormous carbon but produce really nutrient dense food. So as your soil gets healthier, your plants get healthier. But you can balance
the climate, build robust economies. We're talking about injecting fifty eighty one hundred billion dollars back into Middle America. That's the reindustrialization of Middle America. It's exactly, and I love that. People say, well, this is a revolution, it said, no, no, no, man, it's not a revolution. It's an evolution. So when you start, when farmers start making more money, they start paying more taxes, which they'll gladly do. And as they do that, school
districts all of a sudden get better. Water districts get better, after school programs get implemented, parks get better, all these things that build communities get better and better and better. Why because there's more money. And as human health or as soil health goes up, human health goes up, which means human health care costs come down. They fall precipitously. So now you've got even more money in the system.
Because everyone thinks, you know, insurance is paid by premiums. No, man, A lot of it's funded by the US tax payer. That's the deal they've cut. So now with food agricultural on this say industrial agriculture, So you're injecting one hundred billion dollars back in the system. Well, now your healthcare costs are way down, so you're injecting an additional two hundred billion from that. All of a sudden, you have a third of a trillion dollars a year injected back
into the into the country. This is how you rebuild America when you do it from the ground up, from Main Street literally, not from Wall Street down. So you're building up Main Street, not Wall Street. And that is how you build this thing back. And so like you know, I also have a vitamin company, but I also make whiskey, like really with some of the best whisky in the world. We use a lot of things, and you're a tough palette. We use a lot of grain. And so there's two
hundred million acres of grain in this country production acres. Roughly. Regenerative agriculture saves up to four hundred dollars an acre. Now you multiply four hundred dollars times two hundred million, it's eighty billion dollars a year, then we send two
agrochemical companies and foreign countries. So you have to sit and ask yourself, why why are we having farmers like your dad going to a bank to borrow money that a cruise interest to spend all that money and send it overseas to other countries while polluting our water, our land, our air, and our bodies. When you put a stop to that. We are talking about the regeneration of America and obviously beyond too. But what happens here is then
going to That's what Groundswell is. The third film is about the international not just the promise, but the practice of regenerations. So these are big, big numbers. You're talking hundreds of billions of dollars. So effectively, what we're doing is we're building the single largest carbon capture food economy in the world from the Carolina coast to the California coast.
And yeah, this is how regenerative farming can change everything everything.
And I want to add on to one thing, which you know, you mentioned that this is the way it's always been done, and that's true in terms of our kind of ecological memory of how we've been farming. The truth is that this is not the way that it's always been done. This is what we call modern industrialized agriculture, and it's been labeled the green revolution. And the idea of the green revolution wasn't that we were going to
heal the earth and make everything green. The mottle of the green revolution was to make lots of money profit and heald profit and yald. And the way to do that they take get it. At the end of World War Two, they had all of these poison chemicals that they had used to kill people. They'd started inventing them in World War One, and then they got refined in World War Two, and then that was a big money making Like war is a huge industry and there's a
lot of money. It's kind of like the pharmaceutical industry in a way. And so they took those poisons and those war machines after World War Two and they were like, what are we going to do with this? How are we they manufacture them? How what are we going to do? Oh, I have an idea. Let's spray that on our food that we eat. Let's spray the poison that we've designed
to kill people, to kill pests on our food. And so that's how the quote unquote green revolution started by trying to figure out what to do with all these poison and war machines, and we decided to use that on our family farms, a green of revelation.
And so that's why.
But we think of this and I have to just say, like, when we think of this as something that we've always done, I have learned coming from a legacy farming family, that is actually incredibly offensive to some people. I didn't know that, and I've learned a lot through this process. But the reality is that regenerative agriculture is a form of indigenous agriculture, and so indigenous agriculture was always putting the land first.
It was about thinking seven generations ahead. It was looking at soil like it's in modern terms like your bank account, Like the more you feed the soil, the more the soil will feed us. And there is this intuitive, natural symbiosis between the people and the land who manage the land for their future, not for today, although it did take care of them today. That's the beauty of it. And there were way more ruminants like cows, like buff in the form of buffalo and bison on the land.
And guess what we didn't have a greenhouse gas problem. There was no climate change, So how could that be that we didn't have climate change, We didn't have a greenhouse gas problem. We had way more ruminants on the land.
Well, the US Army took out about sixty five million head of American buffalo bison, So the idea to starve out the Native Americans was to kill all the bison. Well, those ruminants and those undulates. To remember, they were all kept in tight herds from what predators lurking. They have safety numbers. Packs of wolves, packs of wolves, large cats, all of those kept them moving in tight herds across
that landscape. And those hoofs till the soil and they'd fertilize that soil with their dung and their urine, and they would eat all the grass to the growth points. And then they.
Wouldn't move on, never still, they would never stand still.
There were huge herds.
And so when you had sixty something million head of these bison. So basically you can go back and look at fossilized pollen records, which you can see in the movie. Where indigenous cultures didn't plant gardens, they planted forests, They built systems where it allowed their food to come to them, right, their food came to them because they built ecosystems where protein models thrived, because that's where they that's where the likenesses.
And this goes back. You can look at this. This is tens of thousands of years this was done, and it wasn't until colonists came in, and then it brings in this unbelievable story of race and the triumph of
indigenous people as well. You know, when colonists got here, they did not know how to create large scale agricultural systems, and they went to western Africa and they stole people who did and they brought them here and they subjected them to horrible, horrible life, But they brought them here for their indigenous understanding of how to build large scale food systems.
They're like a grarian experts from Africa, and that put seeds in their hair to bring to the new land that they didn't know that they were going, because they knew that they would need those seeds to be able to live. The problem is, though, when the colonists got here and they brought with them slavery and this like crazy model, there was no way for them to keep
that regenerative model alive. And that sort of linear extractive system where people are being abused, that's not a regenerative system. Regenerative system is a healthy system where everyone is taken
care of. But what we did do when we came to the United States is we plowed up all that top soil that had been built up by those herds of bison and buffalo, Like we just ripped it up like huge, like they'd used these huge like blows and they would literally take like eighteen inches of that rich top soil the skin of our mother earth, and they would just tear it up. And that's how we built
the foundation of our economy in the United States. And what that did, we removed the ruminants from the land to control the indigenous people, and then we plowed up all that beautiful top soil.
Prosal networks so that that ability for nutrients to be distributed all through because soil is literally alive, like it's like a.
Web of It's like an internet web system, and.
It moves, it changes shit, I mean, it changes direction.
And depending on their relatives like trees favor so they built through the microhizole fungi and then networks. It's all connected, and so there is so family like a tree that's related to another tree will prefer its family members to another tree and send nutrients through the root system to its preferred family relatives.
So even trees like they have.
This way of moving gnerals and all trees.
Isn't that amazing?
So plants communicate with each other. But what happened is when we ripped up that top soil and we destroyed that network of communication. Guess what happened next in the United States, Something very famous happened in the United States. The gospel basically, we desertified the United States. Yes and so, and that's what we've been doing, and we've been continuing that.
And then when we add it on top of that the synthetic chemicals and fertilized and the huge war machines that came in and tilled and plowed, we destroyed our natural ability to be able to heal, regenerate, move water where it needs to be, and to have these healthy ecosystems that reflected what that land looked like before we came and ripped it up.
And so soil that can also take twenty inches of rain. You know, go down twenty inches within an hour. So we're not having all this erosion and kids now. And this is the thing that I learned from Alan Savory. Each human is responsible for basically about a pickup truck load of erosion a year of soil. It's cent our fault. And I'm saying it breaks down, it breaks down. Yeah, the stat is pretty wild. So there's so much erosion happening right now because of land mismanagement and that dust bowl.
Crazy thing is and because you saw common ground, were you so used to talking to people who haven't. It's happening again. And so where it becomes really positive, it's like what Gabe was saying, this is very serious. We have to stop this. But then you cut to a guy like, you know, Gay Brown's farm in North Dakota.
He's sequestering ninety six tons of carbon per acre by doing what by drawing through a process called biose questration, or just draw down right of that terra ton of carbon in the air if we call it the legacy load. And we get this all the time. And I'm not trying to laugh, I'm not trying to it's just misinformation. But people think because they drive an electric car, and they use paper straws. They're going to change the planet. And it's just simply not the case. Right, that legacy
load of carbon is not going to go anywhere. And my buddy, you know, like Elon and Bill Gates and all these guys are talking about all these like elaborate ways of scrubbing carbon out of the air. Then you have Gay Brown. He goes, I have a novel. I have a novel. Idea, let's plan a plant.
Yeah, plan a seed.
Plan to see Gabe is sequestering ninety six tons of carbon and acre and these sev seventy five acres. Yeah, this is And he literally says in the movie goes, can we mitigate climate change? Absolutely? We have the ability right now by deploying and implementing large scale regenerative agriculture, where by the way, everyone wins, everyone makes a shitload of money. Communities get better, are climate balances, and all of a sudden, we have healthier soil, so we have
healthier people. We have people who are mentally healthier, physically healthier. All of a sudden you have got farmers and rural communities. And by the way, some of the people in not so rural communities. But now those rural farmers can now go to the local Ford or Chevy dealership. They can buy new trucks, ones that have heat, where their transmission works better, and you know, take their wives and their kids to dinner once a week, not once a month
or once every six months. They can live in thrive.
I don't think people realize how farmers in America are living. No, No, I don't think that people realize that the farmers have a five times higher suicide rate than other professions in the United States. Their bank loans will require them to spray toxic chemicals, and the farmers are on the front lines of that. And now we're talking about second and
third generation farmers. And if you start to look at the epigenetics of how that plays out, it's the second and third generation farmers that start.
To express the healthy impact.
How do you how do you change a farmer's mind? Like, how do you teach a farmer?
So, my dad's a farmer, my dad's an industrial farmer. Okay, I've come, like you said, from an industrial farming family in the Midwest like you, And you know, I'm making these films about regenerative agriculture. And I think my dad, I think what he said the first time I told them we were making these films. He goes, what do you know about farming, little girl? And that was like, well, I'm learning a lot. And you can imagine how those conversations went. It didn't go well at all. Because my
dad loved spraying round up. It was so easy. He loved the because he grew up, you know, sprain DDT and two four D and standing in the bats of chemicals and plowing that he had a license of like age twelve or something to drive the tractor. Needless to say, here we are what fourteen years later, ten years later, eleven years later from me? And now my dad never said you're right, but he does send me his organic and regenerative vegetables that he grows, and so he's doing
a lot of these farmers you know. And I can say this coming from a farming family. There's a kind of stubborn gene that runs in farming families and you have to be it's so that's a resilient heritage.
It's a resilience to get through it.
And it's that you had, like you survived so much when you're a farmer, and a lot of these innovations I want to give a little credit to, Like, Okay, maybe some of these innovations were there to help the farmer in theory. In theory, but the reality is is that this technology has destroyed the lives of these farmers.
And as farmers are beginning to wonder what's happened to their land and what's happened to their family, and why they're struggling so hard and considering whether they even want to go on another day.
The economic models don't add up anymore when they look at the economics.
And then they see their neighbor who has a microclimate of in a biodiverse of crops and they can sell if one crop fails, they have so many crops that they can sell. They're suddenly making a huge profit. Like ninety percent of the farmers who transition within year one are making a profit. And then all of a sudden, Okay, maybe a fire comes through, or a drought or a flood or a pest blight. Guess what, your farm is decimated, But your neighbor's farm over there, they have steady rain,
they have green coverage. Maybe it didn't burn down like case after case after case, and people witnessing the resiliency of these regenerative farms and these microclimates.
That you guys have in the movie of one industrial farm next to a regenerative farm, it's incredible and it's so beautiful and so like just.
Duh, well, this is a no brain.
And when people would watch Kiss the Ground, like farmers are I don't know about this Hollywood movie about farming and about Woody Harrelson in it, you know, they don't want to watch it because you know, it's some like liberal left wing thing, people that don't know what they're talking about.
It's like Hollywood.
But then people started watching the movie, and then these YouTube videos started popping up with farmers giving.
Reviews, and it was like it was so cool to watch there.
I don't know about Woody Harrelson, but I learned a lot about this. And they'll go on for an hour about how one of those five or six principles of regeneration.
Tell us tell our listeners, what are the five ways to keep regenerative farming moving forward?
All right, I'll give my version, then you give your version of crush it. So there's like principles and then there's practices. So the principles of regeneration is like everyone is taking care of you're bringing soil health back to life. The practices, however, are really simple. So if you're a farmer, it's different depending on who you are. But if you're a farmer, you're going to keep a living route at
all times. Can always have life in the soil, and you're going to keep that soil covered at all times. Gay Brown likes to say, MoMA Earth likes to be covered. She doesn't want to be naked, you know, she wants to be covered. She wants to be covered with that green greenery because it's what that's what holds in the moisture, it's what keeps it cool, it's what keeps the life protected.
Brings nitrogen in from the air, puts it into the soil.
Use nitrogen that that photosynthesis to take that carbon and then put it into the soil, which is what feeds all of the life in the soil. And that's the reason soil is the healthy soil is black. That's carbon in the soil. When it's dead, it turns almost white and denude of life into desert. And so so don't cut so keep the ground coverage, no tillage, no past, no synthetic pesticides, so herbicized pesticides, undersides like, you don't
need those when you have nature. Nature takes care of all of it.
Now, listen, I will say, not every and we and we know this as well, not every single one hundred percent of topographical and not one hundred percent of every topography is going to be completely input free. That's we're not saying. But you vastly reduce and you can use inputs that are regenerated exactly, So you vastly reduce inputs, but you don't need to use high use of synthetics.
And so that's where people really start to go, oh gosh, because even on a thousand acre farm, or let's just say a two hundred acre farm, if you're saving hundreds of dollars an acre, you think about all of that savings, all of that money. So you can do it through regenerative practices. And like John said, I call him doctor John because I'm from New Orleans. But people are saying he's one of the Scientist Center movie and he's amazing,
but he's talks of farmers. He's the question you have to ask yourself, is not what it's going to cost to transition, it's what it's going to cost you not to transition. Well, it's going to cost you your farm, it's going to cost you your grandkids. It's going to cost you these things that you're not willing to give up.
Doctor Jonathan Lundren, he's a like a bug expert. He's got he was a whistleblower at the USDA, was the the EPA, actually was the USDA, and pummeled him because he started asking questions about it. So that leads me into the last two principles of agriculture. So no synthetic, no inputs because you don't need them. You know why, because nature has a way of doing that. You have ground squirrels like we were talking about earlier, put in some owl boxes, you've got some kind of might get
some lady bugs. Like nature has a solution. And guess what the beauty of it is.
It's usually cheap, yeah, maybe even free.
All you have to do is stop paying to put inputs on there that are killing it. So right, and then the other thing is biodiversity. So you never want to have a monocrop. You never want to have just one thing. Can you imagine if all you ate all day long was corn and that was it.
Yeah, that wouldn't be healthy.
It would not be So we have to make sure that we're using biodiversity to our advantage because that's resiliency. And then, lastly and probably most important, is animal integration, right, because that's the part that people are really confused about. People think that cows are bad. They think that the way to save the planet is to eat an impossible burger. And the fact is that the only way to bring a desert back to life, there's only one way, and
that's their animal integration. You need cows, they're hoofs, right. You need ruminants. You don't need to pay for fertilizer when you can put a ruminant that's poop's symbiotic and co evolved with that land, and it has fertilizer, It
has urine which actss water. It has hooves that breaks up that hard pack that was there to protect the indigenous seeds so that when the right conditions came along, those seeds could come back and it could go back to the way that it was before we destroyed that land.
But you guys, what if I'm not a farmer can I do.
So what you can do, I'm sure you have a great answer to what you can do is first watch Kiss the Ground and Common Ground on Prime Video literally today, yes, because in three hours, or just watch one of them, but if you can watch them both, because it tells a really interesting story and there's a real surprise at the end of Common Ground that you will not expect.
So watch both films because you're going to Ian and I could sit here and talk for probably four days about this and you'll learn more watching one of these films, and you'll do will listening to us talk about this for you.
Because we really put it together structures.
Yes, it's like not as mean, and it's such a visual too. Yeah, so you.
Really get it.
And then as you watch it and you look at your own life and what this means to you to be able to say I was a part looking back on today, when we had a moment, during this critical moment in time to course correct to make sure that we are regenerating and not degenerating our planet, that I was a part of that movement. I was on the
front lines of that movement of regeneration. I found my role in that by learning about it, which you can do by watching Kiss Ground and Common Ground, and so whoever you are, whether you're a teacher, you can share the free cuts of the film. There's free educational versions of the film.
We gave Kiss the Ground away to forty five million students.
Amazing and common fifty thousand classrooms, and Common Ground also has an education cut fits coming from.
We'll end up giving Common Ground away to probably one hundred million students globally and.
In free educational curriculum. So if you're a teacher, you can teach young people. Guess what, it's not all bad news. You have a future and here's how. And those young people will do they'll take this on because this is their future. But we have a responsibility to make sure that this information gets out there. That's number one.
Number two.
Participate in the food system. So if you live in an apartment, grow a tomato plant in your window box. If you have a backyard, grow pollinators to attract grow go pollinating flowers to attract pollinators.
And bets and then starts to connect with your local you know, those farmers market environments are really really important because once you start again, even like a microzil network under the soil. Once you start connecting with other people,
you start feeding one another. You feed each other in, you feed each other passion, you feed each other inspiration, and that transpires into something that where you're purchasing, you're buying from local farmers, you're talking to them, you're propping up their businesses, and so they're actually able to start transitioning and practicing these things that are going to sustain everyone while regenerating.
Sold people find out about the farmer's markets in their area. Do you have a resource where because for me, I understand why people just go to the grocery store and buy stuff because it's easy finding that farmer's market and getting there between the hours of two.
To five or whatever it is. Yeah.
Yeah, no, for sure, it takes effort.
It does take effort, But also too, I think once you get in, when there is a little bit of effort, yep, it means so much more. But then you start to find community and it reminds you slow down. How is it that I've built a life for myself that I can't even take my kids to a farmer's market at nine o'clock on a Saturday morning after a soccer game. How did I get in to that system?
You got to re priority where I.
Can't even just go and pick up some food from people who are growing it from their farm to our hands. How did I get to that point? So, if you have an acre or you've got a front yard, you can turn it into a magical regenerative system. And we have toolkits actually kiss the ground if you just go on the website we have if you go on the Kiss the Ground website, we have toolkits to do all this. And that's what's been so incredible as well. And one of the things we're really once we get out of
production and post production is we're just so in. But one of the things that we really I'm excited to do and we're going to do it with Absorb as well.
You start going into some of these food desert communities that are disproportionately black and brown, where all of this really unhealthy snap food is pumped subsidized by the US government and taxpayer money to create such unhealth, both physical unhealth and mental on health in these minority communities, which is such a such a waste of these humans are they're starving for something great and once you start building
this resilience within these communities, they thrive. All does is taking to just go back in history and look at what doctor George Washington Carver got to do. I mean, you had a man who was born into indentured no he was born in slav who ended up becoming one of the most famous soil scientists in the world, celebrated by presidents and a.
Professor at Tuskegee University. He was the one that invented nitrogen fixing exactly.
And he also helped build a very very very robust black economic agricultural economic system. Well that wasn't good for business, and so that was squashed.
I learned about this in the movie.
So oh yeah, that's train keep forgetting you've seen the film. But so in the nineteen twenties there are a million black farmers in this country. There's less than fifty thousand now, but that is numbers about to change. And the indigenous, oh my gosh, these these native indigenous reservations are about
to become these unbelievable, regenerative, giant, agricultural, robust systems. So you know, we hear like some of our like coastal elite friends always talking about the flyover States and you're like, no, man, these are not the flyover states. These are about to become the rock stars. I do not like that phrase. I typically don't use the word hate. Hates a very strong word. I hate that phrase.
It's so disrespectful to the people that like built our country and feed.
Us exactly so. But this is like these farmers. You know when you look at when you look at these guys, whether it's Gay Brown or our dear brother and my mentor and just brother of mine, Rick Clark as well. Gabe and Rick have become like these amazing mentors. Rick Clark is actually growing all of our regenerative organic rye for Brothers Bond and Regenerative Grains and gabiz To. These guys are about to become the most famous farmers in the world. And he's in Western Indiana.
And Summer Holder and Jason Momoa.
We got Gay Brown.
These guys are the coolest dudes. And then we have Alejandro Corrio down in the Chiuahuan Desert. It's about to regenerate two million acres of this unbelievable desert land in Mexico that is so magnificent, where they see the microclimate change within months of these regenerative systems starting to take place. And so you have these systems where you're going to see indigenous in white and black and brown, all of this this information coming together common common ground, the soil.
You know, we are so divided that are the soil is our only common ground. That's why they name the film common Ground.
And we actually had Gay Brown our star. You know, he says the very much a typical farmer, very conservative in his views. He's a very religious man, which is why he did this with us, because he believed that that was his calling from God to tell his story with us, which was a huge privilege.
Obviously, you guys, I this movie. Everybody means to see both of these movies.
Thank you.
It's the Ground and common ground.
You you know, Malcolm Gladwell has the site this theory that when you get ten percent, that that's the tipping point that then shifts everything that direction. So if we could get ten percent of our actually.
One hundred million, it's about a temper, you know, it was about a billion acres farmed here at that ten percent, when we're looking at that is the tipping point. It will never go back because at the end of the day, and I'm not trying to sound crass, money talks, bullshit walks, and they're gonna be rich. You tell these people that they can make money and their kids can go to great schools and they don't have to be sick, and they can drive a new car that actually has set
in Iowa where it's freezing cold. I mean, this is how you change America. And it's so powerful that I left a very very successful, pretty damn lucrative, you know, career in television. Didn't have much luck in film, but hey, your film, well, no, in this film exactly, but really did well in televisions, and left that business to raise my kids, build my family, and build my companies, raise my kids, and then launched these films. And that was that.
I don't know any other way to spend time. And people say, are you you know, why don't you go back to acting? And I'm like, I don't know when I would have the time to sit on a set and tell someone else's story. Yeah, when we are writing in our own stories. All of a sudden it just came together.
Yeah, that's how it works.
When you you sound it sounds like you really prioritized what you want in your life and what you want for your kids and your family, and you have done is the same thing coming from your background. It's so inspiring what you are both doing in individual ways, and I love your passion about it. It's so necessary to get this very very important message out there and heard.
Thanks for sharing it with your incredible people love your show and I see why. But this is the watershed moment and the Gregstone, doctor Gregstone, one of the most famous marine scientists literally walking the planet, is also a very dear mentor of mine. I mean this, guys, you know of the caliber of like a Sylvia Earl right before Oceans and he saw remember we were at the Common Ground, I mean at the Kiss the Ground premiere which we had to do a drive in a drive in.
Everyone was wearing masks, but he literally he was literally in tears and he said, he's like, I am a scientist and he's been a scientist for thirty something years. This is a watershed moment for the planet. This is where science, economy family. This is where everything comes together in one neat package and you can turn it on the flip of a switch. Whether you have a backyard that's one hundred feet ten feet or one hundred acres. You can transform your life by building soil.
It's a choice, it's your best part. It's a choice. It's a choice.
It's making a different choice, a choice that might seem a little bit more difficult. But if you get the knowledge and you get the you know, do your research. With this information that you're providing with you your platforms, people.
Can do it. And that's exciting.
And I think you know everybody is going to be really excited about this conversation. Before I let you go, though, I have to ask what was your last I choose me moment.
I'm a mom. I feel like I'm more of a servant than I choose me.
That's the thing.
Let's see, I choose me. Let's see. I went swimming naked the other day.
That's all I'm going to say about that.
I like that choice.
And I drank and I drank a little of the water I was swimming in.
I mean house, you and Josh like you, we've all found ourselves in very much a servants. I live in a very a life of service, and I mean I just had this conversation with my own mom, and she goes, I see you, guys, you're traveling around the world. You're just talking about regenerating, regenerating, regenerating, but you are really
you're you're degenerating yourself doing it. My I Choose Me moment really was the big, big, big one, really was building absorption, you know, because I needed something to actually make sure I could do all this. And so every week or every month that we're building into these innovation pipelines, some stop is a lot of it's for women, and Nikki and our team really drives a lot of that innovation, and then some of it is for men, and I
get to help drive that innovation. And that I Choose Me it was driving some I can't say what it is right now, but very male driven nanometric liposomal technology, like this thing that I've been always wanting and hoping would be in the market. No one's ever been able to crack it because I didn't have the science to do it. And I just said, I'm going to push
this through this innovation pipeline. And this is a very male is something that's really good for men because you know, we see this a lot, because we talked to all the scientists, and we talked to a lot of people. Healthy happy people build healthy happy societies by making healthy, happy choices. But one of the things I got to I realize is is that healthy happy guys and my age, I mean, I'm in my mid forties now, mid to late Now, I can say it happen, it happens fast.
But you know what, you realize that there is in a salt on people of our age into middle age, into late middle age. Healthy people in middle age is not good for the system. It's better when we're all sick, right, It's just better for the economy that they want. And I choose that, my choose me moment is that is going to stop. And I am tired of that assault on middle aged humans, both men and women. Doesn't matter whether you're middle class, it doesn't matter what you are.
It is no longer acceptable to me for us to be sick. I'm done with it. And so we're building a couple of really robust, super disruptive supplement SKUs that are going to really rock the rock the whole market.
So tell us it's Absorption.
The Absorption Company. Literally, it's why we you know, because I told you, you know, I set offline that we have this proprietary piece of technology that allows us to take lipophilic material, a liposoma material, and turn it into a water soluble material that's a nanometric particle, so it's five hundred percent more absorbable.
That's the key it works.
It saved me so many times his product through this. As you know, it's a bit degenerative. As you're talking about, it's pretty hard to We've we've made ourselves responsible, like on the hook for spreading the message of how we actually can fix the climate, and there's a lot of pressure there and it puts us into this endless loop of constantly, constantly, constantly advocating for that. But what happens is that it actually is kind of degenerative towards our
own bodies. And so that's actually one of the things we're talking about in our next film, Groundswell. We've got Demi Moore also one of our narrators along with Ian and Jason Lemon and Jayden Smith. But Demi wants to really talk about that inner microclimate of what regeneration is for our bodies because it starts within, that starts each one of us.
And getting to hear some from like some of these conversations, like you know, people like you know, the King of England and stuff like that.
You know, we got to go film the King, which is crazy.
I mean just the people we get to interface with.
The King was like your movie is my favorite movie. He like came out with his hands stretched outs. You're not supposed to touch them.
You're supposed to like Curtsey.
And all this stuff.
So like I like, I'm like going to Curtsey and then he reaches out. I actually fell on it. Actually, the whole night with him was kind of a train wreck, but he found it charming, fortunately.
But it's just this, these are the people that that are that we get to bring into our orbit and get to experiences and hear from them. And again it's this pooling of knowledge. And I'm not saying power from a self standpoint, knowledge and power coming together because and I mentioned this to one of the single most powerful legislators in the country who will go unnamed, but I said, I I said. He basically said, like, so you're saying soil is are common ground, but you're splitting you know,
you're telling conventional farmers are doing stuff that's wrong. And I said no, no, no, sir, we're not. We're bringing them into the conversation, just telling them they can actually prosper and make money. And I said, one of the things that that we've realized it's going to happen is once that kicks into high gear, incumbents or candidates. And I don't mean we stay so far out of politics. I've been offered to run for office so many time. I
wouldn't do it, No way, I would never. I would never run for office because we can do so much more out here. But I said to him, I said, sir, with all due respect, I said, listen, these elections are going to change because it's the small communities. If you look at a gubernatorial election, look at how presidential elections are one, they're won by tiny little communities. They're dots
on maps, right. And I said, you're no longer going to be able to come into these go back to your districts, whether you're an incumbent or candidate as a hero, if you're taking agriculture and pharmaceutical money, it's just not going to happen anymore. Voters are they're too hip to it now. And I said, one of the things he asked me. He goes, well, what have you learned most about being in DC? Because I spent a lot of
time in DC. I said, well, sir, to be honest with you, I've learned that the Republican Party is owned by agrochemical industries and the Democratic Party is basically owned by pharmaceutical companies. And I said, neither one of those is good for America, and it's time to change that. And so this is the sea change, and so kiss the ground, common ground, and then ground swell. This is the promise of a regenerative, bright future, not just here
in America but around the entire globe. And we're going to build a trillion dollar carbon capture food economy. And it starts literally today.
Today it does heavy earthdayath.
Two tiny thoughts I want to share this concluding from our whole conversation that I want to just say, one, it's important to do things like drive electric cars and use plat paper straws like all of those things. Like energy efficiency, which was the message that Josh and I came out with in the very beginning back in two
thousand and eight, is a huge part of this. And we're not saying don't do those things, right, that dies like, we do need to reduce the amount of carbon that we're putting into the atmosphere, right, there's no question about that. But what he was saying that I really want to put a point on is that's not going to do anything about that thousand gigatons of carbon that we've put into the atmosphere that the absorb, oceans have absorbed as much as they can and acidifying as a result of
and can't absorb anymore. So, yes, we need to reduce what we're admitting, but the only way, And this is what's been missing from the conversation for the last twenty years, forty years. This is what's been missing. This is why this is so important.
This is why this is.
Such a huge moment for us. It's because when we add to the conversation the power that soil has to pull all of that carbon out of our oceans and out of our atmosphere and to put it in the soil. And we have not been talking about that for twenty years. We've been talking about climate change, and we haven't been talking about this simple, easy, elegant, natural solution that nature has to this problem that we're all freaking out about that's crazy. That's why this is so important, right, Yeah.
And then the other thing that I want to mention is that as the daughter of a farmer and a farming family, I know that it can be very hard for people to talk to farmers about this when they're passionate about it. You may not be able to talk to your farming neighbor about climate change. They may not want to hear about climate change. It could actually cause
them to stop listening to you altogether. And I know this. However, when you talk to your neighbors about the climate and the weather, suddenly you have their attention because that's what they live and die.
By weather and money is the weather.
And so when you start talking about the weather and they're looking at their neighbors' farms and they have enough water, they're not having a dry they're not having a pest problem. Their weather next door on the other side of the fence actually looks pretty stable, resilient and great growing conditions. How come my farm is running off into the river
and drifting away and blowing away in the wind. So when you talk to farmers about the weather, you know you want to meet people where they're at in this conversation. You don't want to come out righteous like, oh, you spray chemicals and oh you're the problem and you're the reason that we're having climate change and you have to fix it. Can you imagine how well that conversation is.
Going to go.
I can tell you because I've had them. Yeah, it doesn't go well. All you do is polarize people and become part of the problem when you talk to people about the magic and power of regeneration to restore ecosystems, your farm, your family, your community, your own body on a region by region level, that is regeneration.
Thank you, guys, Thank you so much, really really happy.
Then we're super grateful we got to do this. Congratulations on the show.
Happy Earth Day everyone, Thank you for having us.