April 25, 2025 • 59 mins
"Vampire Diaries" star and environmental activist Ian Somerhalder joins Jennie with his creative partner, Rebecca Tickell, to discuss their extraordinary documentaries "Kiss The Ground" and "Common Ground" that are out now on Amazon!
Through this informative conversation, they discuss how changes in farming can positively impact the economy and the planet we live on!
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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
(00:24):
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
(00:45):
the earth and nature and sustainability.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
And pushing and pushing and pushing to.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
They're all inextricably linked, right, They're all inextricably linked.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
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
(01:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Great within the human body.
Speaker 5 (01:36):
And so it's using the same model but turning in
on its head for wellness and regeneration.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
And then our families grow as a result.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah, and they grow healthy, which is which is not
easy to do in this date.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Healthy families create healthy streets that create healthy neighborhoods, create
healthy towns, communities. It's crazy.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Single day, several times a day.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Tell us, sister.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
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
(02:50):
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
(03:10):
been a huge global success. It's King Charles's favorite movie.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
We touched a billion people.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
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
(03:37):
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.
Speaker 6 (03:55):
All have a role to play.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
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
(04:21):
fourteen year journey for us to get to this point.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
For fourteen years.
Speaker 5 (04:25):
And by the way, I know you're like, oh gosh,
a soil movie that sounds.
Speaker 6 (04:29):
Dull as dirt dirt, but it's got.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
And it has Jason, his buddy Jason, and has daw.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Jason.
Speaker 6 (04:40):
They all make the soil so sex And.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Why did you do work about that?
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Why was it so important to you to be a
part of this, to jump in and be such a leader.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
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.
(05:14):
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
(05:35):
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
(05:56):
the thirties. Actually the little pots made of manure that
you german eight seeds in and grow them.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Yeah, and they're like the biodegrade into their arca.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
He created those.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
He made the mold forward and the whole thing, and
he made thousands of thousands of thousands of them.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Those are still being used today.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (06:23):
And Josh is my directing, producing partner, writing partner.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
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.
(06:46):
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,
(07:07):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:12):
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
(08:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
And that's where I met Allen Amazing.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
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,
(09:23):
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.
Speaker 5 (09:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
So you see, this is really potent, scary stuff where
we were putting our lives at risk to get this footage.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
I mean, the movie is fascinating, crazy.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
I learned Thank you so much great in the.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:07):
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
(10:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
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
(11:08):
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.
(11:29):
And if this was ten, twelve, fifteen years ago, we
would it would be a little scary.
Speaker 5 (11:36):
Stocked, we'd be stocked and I actually have been stocked.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Incredible.
Speaker 6 (12:02):
So we pulled back the curtain.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
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
(12:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Dressed fire bullied like big time.
Speaker 5 (12:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
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.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
Yes, they sell the only treatment for the disease that
their other product.
Speaker 6 (13:31):
Cause of the.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Movie was like, think about startling.
Speaker 6 (13:35):
And that's not a conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
That's disease with the chemicals and then they're providing the
medications to cure the disease.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
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,
(14:05):
and so they all participate in this unbelievable web of money,
like enormous amounts of money. Sorry, what were you going
to say?
Speaker 5 (14:11):
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
(14:32):
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
(14:59):
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
(15:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I want to just go back. I want to talk
about and.
Speaker 5 (15:35):
That's common ground, but it's actually a hopeful movie. I
promise you it's not all bad news.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
It's full of and inspiring at the same time.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
I grew up in the Midwest.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
I grew up in the middle of corn and soybean
fields Iowa, Illinois, Illinois.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Okay, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
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
(16:31):
how the farmers are feeling about them.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
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
(16:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Soil, which there are many many there.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
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
(17:37):
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.
(18:00):
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.
(18:22):
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.
(18:43):
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
(19:05):
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.
(19:29):
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
(19:50):
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,
(20:10):
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
(20:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
And yeah, this is how regenerative farming can change everything everything.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
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
(21:10):
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
(21:31):
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
(21:51):
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.
Speaker 6 (22:08):
And so that's why.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
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.
(22:30):
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.
(22:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
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,
(23:32):
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.
Speaker 5 (23:43):
Wouldn't move on, never still, they would never stand still.
Speaker 6 (23:47):
There were huge herds.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
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,
(24:09):
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
(24:32):
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
(24:53):
for their indigenous understanding of how to build large scale
food systems.
Speaker 5 (25:00):
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.
(25:23):
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
(25:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Prosal networks so that that ability for nutrients to be
distributed all through because soil is literally alive, like it's
like a.
Speaker 5 (26:06):
Web of It's like an internet web system, and.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
It moves, it changes shit, I mean, it changes direction.
Speaker 5 (26:13):
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.
Speaker 6 (26:29):
So even trees like they have.
Speaker 5 (26:32):
This way of moving gnerals and all trees.
Speaker 3 (26:36):
Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 5 (26:37):
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
(26:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
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
(27:38):
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
(27:58):
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
(28:19):
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.
(28:39):
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.
Speaker 6 (28:58):
Yeah, plan a seed.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
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,
(29:21):
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
(29:42):
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.
Speaker 5 (30:07):
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
(30:27):
and third generation farmers that start.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
To express the healthy impact.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
How do you how do you change a farmer's mind? Like,
how do you teach a farmer?
Speaker 5 (30:37):
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,
(30:59):
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,
(31:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
It's a resilience to get through it.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
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
(32:04):
they're struggling so hard and considering whether they even want
to go on another day.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
The economic models don't add up anymore when they look
at the economics.
Speaker 5 (32:12):
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,
(32:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Duh, well, this is a no brain.
Speaker 5 (33:00):
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.
Speaker 6 (33:12):
It's like Hollywood.
Speaker 5 (33:13):
But then people started watching the movie, and then these
YouTube videos started popping up with farmers giving.
Speaker 6 (33:19):
Reviews, and it was like it was so cool to
watch there.
Speaker 5 (33:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Tell us tell our listeners, what are the five ways
to keep regenerative farming moving forward?
Speaker 5 (33:37):
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
(33:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Brings nitrogen in from the air, puts it into the soil.
Speaker 5 (34:22):
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
(34:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
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,
(35:14):
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
(35:35):
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
(35:57):
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.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
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
(36:32):
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.
Speaker 6 (36:41):
It's usually cheap, yeah, maybe even free.
Speaker 5 (36:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Yeah, that wouldn't be healthy.
Speaker 5 (36:59):
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.
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
But you guys, what if I'm not a farmer can
I do.
Speaker 5 (37:58):
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
(38:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
Because we really put it together structures.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Yes, it's like not as mean, and it's such a
visual too. Yeah, so you.
Speaker 6 (38:31):
Really get it.
Speaker 5 (38:32):
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
(38:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
We gave Kiss the Ground away to forty five million students.
Speaker 5 (39:06):
Amazing and common fifty thousand classrooms, and Common Ground also
has an education cut fits coming from.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
We'll end up giving Common Ground away to probably one
hundred million students globally and.
Speaker 5 (39:16):
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.
Speaker 6 (39:31):
Number two.
Speaker 5 (39:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
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
(40:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
To five or whatever it is. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (40:35):
Yeah, no, for sure, it takes effort.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
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.
(40:59):
How did I get in to that system?
Speaker 2 (41:01):
You got to re priority where I.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
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
(41:23):
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
(41:44):
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
(42:04):
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
(42:27):
he was born in slav who ended up becoming one
of the most famous soil scientists in the world, celebrated
by presidents and a.
Speaker 5 (42:36):
Professor at Tuskegee University. He was the one that invented
nitrogen fixing exactly.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
I learned about this in the movie.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
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
(43:21):
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.
Speaker 5 (43:39):
It's so disrespectful to the people that like built our
country and feed.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
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
(44:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
And Summer Holder and Jason Momoa.
Speaker 6 (44:16):
We got Gay Brown.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
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.
(44:37):
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.
Speaker 5 (44:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
Obviously, you guys, I this movie. Everybody means to see
both of these movies.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
It's the Ground and common ground.
Speaker 5 (45:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
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
(45:52):
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
(46:13):
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
(46:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Yeah, that's how it works.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
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
(47:27):
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.
(47:48):
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.
(48:09):
You can transform your life by building soil.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
It's a choice, it's your best part. It's a choice.
It's a choice.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
Can do it. And that's exciting.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
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.
Speaker 5 (48:46):
I'm a mom. I feel like I'm more of a
servant than I choose me.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
That's the thing.
Speaker 5 (48:52):
Let's see, I choose me. Let's see. I went swimming
naked the other day.
Speaker 6 (48:57):
That's all I'm going to say about that.
Speaker 3 (49:00):
I like that choice.
Speaker 5 (49:02):
And I drank and I drank a little of the
water I was swimming in.
Speaker 3 (49:07):
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
(49:28):
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
(49:50):
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
(50:12):
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,
(50:35):
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.
(50:57):
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
(51:19):
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
(51:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
So tell us it's Absorption.
Speaker 3 (51:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
That's the key it works.
Speaker 5 (52:15):
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
(52:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (53:00):
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.
Speaker 6 (53:08):
You know, we got to go film the King, which
is crazy.
Speaker 3 (53:11):
I mean just the people we get to interface with.
Speaker 5 (53:14):
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.
Speaker 6 (53:19):
You're supposed to like Curtsey.
Speaker 3 (53:20):
And all this stuff.
Speaker 5 (53:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
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
(53:51):
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
(54:13):
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
(54:36):
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
(54:57):
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
(55:18):
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
(55:40):
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.
Speaker 6 (55:52):
Today it does heavy earthdayath.
Speaker 5 (55:54):
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,
(56:15):
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
(56:37):
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.
Speaker 6 (56:51):
This is why this is.
Speaker 5 (56:52):
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
(57:14):
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
(57:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (57:52):
By weather and money is the weather.
Speaker 5 (57:54):
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
(58:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (58:28):
Going to go.
Speaker 5 (58:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (58:51):
Thank you, guys, Thank you so much, really really happy.
Speaker 3 (58:54):
Then we're super grateful we got to do this. Congratulations
on the show.
Speaker 5 (58:57):
Happy Earth Day everyone, Thank you for having us.
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
(00:24):
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
(00:45):
the earth and nature and sustainability.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
And pushing and pushing and pushing to.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
They're all inextricably linked, right, They're all inextricably linked.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
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
(01:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Great within the human body.
Speaker 5 (01:36):
And so it's using the same model but turning in
on its head for wellness and regeneration.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
And then our families grow as a result.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah, and they grow healthy, which is which is not
easy to do in this date.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Healthy families create healthy streets that create healthy neighborhoods, create
healthy towns, communities. It's crazy.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Single day, several times a day.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Tell us, sister.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
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
(02:50):
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
(03:10):
been a huge global success. It's King Charles's favorite movie.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
We touched a billion people.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
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
(03:37):
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.
Speaker 6 (03:55):
All have a role to play.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
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
(04:21):
fourteen year journey for us to get to this point.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
For fourteen years.
Speaker 5 (04:25):
And by the way, I know you're like, oh gosh,
a soil movie that sounds.
Speaker 6 (04:29):
Dull as dirt dirt, but it's got.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
And it has Jason, his buddy Jason, and has daw.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Jason.
Speaker 6 (04:40):
They all make the soil so sex And.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Why did you do work about that?
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Why was it so important to you to be a
part of this, to jump in and be such a leader.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
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.
(05:14):
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
(05:35):
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
(05:56):
the thirties. Actually the little pots made of manure that
you german eight seeds in and grow them.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Yeah, and they're like the biodegrade into their arca.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
He created those.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
He made the mold forward and the whole thing, and
he made thousands of thousands of thousands of them.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Those are still being used today.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (06:23):
And Josh is my directing, producing partner, writing partner.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
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.
(06:46):
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,
(07:07):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:12):
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
(08:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
And that's where I met Allen Amazing.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
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,
(09:23):
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.
Speaker 5 (09:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
So you see, this is really potent, scary stuff where
we were putting our lives at risk to get this footage.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
I mean, the movie is fascinating, crazy.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
I learned Thank you so much great in the.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:07):
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
(10:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
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
(11:08):
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.
(11:29):
And if this was ten, twelve, fifteen years ago, we
would it would be a little scary.
Speaker 5 (11:36):
Stocked, we'd be stocked and I actually have been stocked.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Incredible.
Speaker 6 (12:02):
So we pulled back the curtain.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
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
(12:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Dressed fire bullied like big time.
Speaker 5 (12:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
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.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
Yes, they sell the only treatment for the disease that
their other product.
Speaker 6 (13:31):
Cause of the.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Movie was like, think about startling.
Speaker 6 (13:35):
And that's not a conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
That's disease with the chemicals and then they're providing the
medications to cure the disease.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
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,
(14:05):
and so they all participate in this unbelievable web of money,
like enormous amounts of money. Sorry, what were you going
to say?
Speaker 5 (14:11):
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
(14:32):
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
(14:59):
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
(15:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I want to just go back. I want to talk
about and.
Speaker 5 (15:35):
That's common ground, but it's actually a hopeful movie. I
promise you it's not all bad news.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
It's full of and inspiring at the same time.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
I grew up in the Midwest.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
I grew up in the middle of corn and soybean
fields Iowa, Illinois, Illinois.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Okay, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
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
(16:31):
how the farmers are feeling about them.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
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
(16:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Soil, which there are many many there.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
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
(17:37):
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.
(18:00):
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.
(18:22):
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.
(18:43):
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
(19:05):
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.
(19:29):
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
(19:50):
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,
(20:10):
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
(20:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
And yeah, this is how regenerative farming can change everything everything.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
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
(21:10):
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
(21:31):
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
(21:51):
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.
Speaker 6 (22:08):
And so that's why.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
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.
(22:30):
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.
(22:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
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,
(23:32):
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.
Speaker 5 (23:43):
Wouldn't move on, never still, they would never stand still.
Speaker 6 (23:47):
There were huge herds.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
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,
(24:09):
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
(24:32):
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
(24:53):
for their indigenous understanding of how to build large scale
food systems.
Speaker 5 (25:00):
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.
(25:23):
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
(25:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Prosal networks so that that ability for nutrients to be
distributed all through because soil is literally alive, like it's
like a.
Speaker 5 (26:06):
Web of It's like an internet web system, and.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
It moves, it changes shit, I mean, it changes direction.
Speaker 5 (26:13):
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.
Speaker 6 (26:29):
So even trees like they have.
Speaker 5 (26:32):
This way of moving gnerals and all trees.
Speaker 3 (26:36):
Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 5 (26:37):
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
(26:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
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
(27:38):
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
(27:58):
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
(28:19):
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.
(28:39):
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.
Speaker 6 (28:58):
Yeah, plan a seed.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
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,
(29:21):
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
(29:42):
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.
Speaker 5 (30:07):
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
(30:27):
and third generation farmers that start.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
To express the healthy impact.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
How do you how do you change a farmer's mind? Like,
how do you teach a farmer?
Speaker 5 (30:37):
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,
(30:59):
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,
(31:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
It's a resilience to get through it.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
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
(32:04):
they're struggling so hard and considering whether they even want
to go on another day.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
The economic models don't add up anymore when they look
at the economics.
Speaker 5 (32:12):
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,
(32:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Duh, well, this is a no brain.
Speaker 5 (33:00):
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.
Speaker 6 (33:12):
It's like Hollywood.
Speaker 5 (33:13):
But then people started watching the movie, and then these
YouTube videos started popping up with farmers giving.
Speaker 6 (33:19):
Reviews, and it was like it was so cool to
watch there.
Speaker 5 (33:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Tell us tell our listeners, what are the five ways
to keep regenerative farming moving forward?
Speaker 5 (33:37):
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
(33:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Brings nitrogen in from the air, puts it into the soil.
Speaker 5 (34:22):
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
(34:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
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,
(35:14):
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
(35:35):
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
(35:57):
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.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
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
(36:32):
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.
Speaker 6 (36:41):
It's usually cheap, yeah, maybe even free.
Speaker 5 (36:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Yeah, that wouldn't be healthy.
Speaker 5 (36:59):
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.
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
But you guys, what if I'm not a farmer can
I do.
Speaker 5 (37:58):
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
(38:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
Because we really put it together structures.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Yes, it's like not as mean, and it's such a
visual too. Yeah, so you.
Speaker 6 (38:31):
Really get it.
Speaker 5 (38:32):
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
(38:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
We gave Kiss the Ground away to forty five million students.
Speaker 5 (39:06):
Amazing and common fifty thousand classrooms, and Common Ground also
has an education cut fits coming from.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
We'll end up giving Common Ground away to probably one
hundred million students globally and.
Speaker 5 (39:16):
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.
Speaker 6 (39:31):
Number two.
Speaker 5 (39:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
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
(40:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
To five or whatever it is. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (40:35):
Yeah, no, for sure, it takes effort.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
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.
(40:59):
How did I get in to that system?
Speaker 2 (41:01):
You got to re priority where I.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
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
(41:23):
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
(41:44):
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
(42:04):
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
(42:27):
he was born in slav who ended up becoming one
of the most famous soil scientists in the world, celebrated
by presidents and a.
Speaker 5 (42:36):
Professor at Tuskegee University. He was the one that invented
nitrogen fixing exactly.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
I learned about this in the movie.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
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
(43:21):
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.
Speaker 5 (43:39):
It's so disrespectful to the people that like built our
country and feed.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
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
(44:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
And Summer Holder and Jason Momoa.
Speaker 6 (44:16):
We got Gay Brown.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
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.
(44:37):
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.
Speaker 5 (44:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
Obviously, you guys, I this movie. Everybody means to see
both of these movies.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
It's the Ground and common ground.
Speaker 5 (45:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
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
(45:52):
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
(46:13):
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
(46:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Yeah, that's how it works.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
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
(47:27):
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.
(47:48):
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.
(48:09):
You can transform your life by building soil.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
It's a choice, it's your best part. It's a choice.
It's a choice.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
Can do it. And that's exciting.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
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.
Speaker 5 (48:46):
I'm a mom. I feel like I'm more of a
servant than I choose me.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
That's the thing.
Speaker 5 (48:52):
Let's see, I choose me. Let's see. I went swimming
naked the other day.
Speaker 6 (48:57):
That's all I'm going to say about that.
Speaker 3 (49:00):
I like that choice.
Speaker 5 (49:02):
And I drank and I drank a little of the
water I was swimming in.
Speaker 3 (49:07):
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
(49:28):
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
(49:50):
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
(50:12):
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,
(50:35):
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.
(50:57):
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
(51:19):
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
(51:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
So tell us it's Absorption.
Speaker 3 (51:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
That's the key it works.
Speaker 5 (52:15):
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
(52:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (53:00):
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.
Speaker 6 (53:08):
You know, we got to go film the King, which
is crazy.
Speaker 3 (53:11):
I mean just the people we get to interface with.
Speaker 5 (53:14):
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.
Speaker 6 (53:19):
You're supposed to like Curtsey.
Speaker 3 (53:20):
And all this stuff.
Speaker 5 (53:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
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
(53:51):
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
(54:13):
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
(54:36):
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
(54:57):
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
(55:18):
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
(55:40):
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.
Speaker 6 (55:52):
Today it does heavy earthdayath.
Speaker 5 (55:54):
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,
(56:15):
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
(56:37):
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.
Speaker 6 (56:51):
This is why this is.
Speaker 5 (56:52):
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
(57:14):
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
(57:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (57:52):
By weather and money is the weather.
Speaker 5 (57:54):
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
(58:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (58:28):
Going to go.
Speaker 5 (58:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (58:51):
Thank you, guys, Thank you so much, really really happy.
Speaker 3 (58:54):
Then we're super grateful we got to do this. Congratulations
on the show.
Speaker 5 (58:57):
Happy Earth Day everyone, Thank you for having us.
Hosts And Creators
Tori Spelling
Jennie Garth
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