The Highwire with Del Bigtree - FINDING COMMON GROUND

Episode Date: May 5, 2024

Finian Makepeace and Ryland Engelhart, producers for the “Common Ground” documentary, discuss the unsafe farming practices that have devastated most of the U.S. crop soils and the more holistic solution of regenerative farming that lead them to co-found the Kiss the Ground organization and two star-studded documentaries.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

I want to start out this conversation today with a topic that I'm sure is going to trigger someone in this audience. And it happens every time we try to deal with something that revolves around the idea of our environment and then growing and food and farming. So I want to ask the audience today because I've watched a few times as we're getting into these controversial topics that sometimes, you know, the the trigger. is I want to say something right away. I know where this is going and I know that the feed and all the comments get rolling, but then I feel like some of you really miss the nuance of what we're discussing. So I'm all about judgment. I think that you should be skeptical and I've told you I'm not here to tell you what to think. I'm just trying to tell you how to think, where your information should come from, where you look, how you prove a point. And so I'm open to any's criticism.

But can we try to at least listen first and then criticize after? The reason I say all this is because today we're going to be talking about farming. And for me personally, I want all the pesticides and herbicides off of all of my food. I eat organic. I make sure that my family eats organic. I'm tired of reading about 260 chemicals in the umbilical cord of pregnant women. Those types of things really bother me. Now, for some in our audience, we, you know, want to have.

you know, a booming economy and we think, well, if there's regulatory agencies that get in the way, then you're going to hurt the economy and hurt America. And I understand all of that. But does that mean that every industry then should just be poisoning us? And we should just watch our quality of life disappear. We now have chronic illness, skyrocketing, neurological disorders, skyrocketing. We're well over, you know, 50 percent. Some think it's more like 60 percent of American children and adults now have a chronic illness, meaning they're sick, their entire lives. Something needs to change. How are we going to change it if we fight, number one, for freedom of industry to do whatever

it wants and make as much money as it can while also trying to fight to do the right things for our earth and ourselves? So get ready, because the name of the film we're going to talk about is exactly what we all need to work on. This is Common Ground. What I'm about to tell you is a matter of life and death. If the soil dies,

we die. The facts have been proven. Ground death does cause cancer. If you burrow deeply enough, there is a pipeline of money from the pesticide industry into those universities. They're getting

the kind of science that money can buy. Nature is the mother of us all. And if Mama ain't happy, we're f***. But there's a way to save our precious soils. It's called regeneration. Regeneration is not just restoring the land to the state that we founded at, but actually making it better. We have added over 96 tons of carbon per acres into our soil. Can we mitigate climate change? Absolutely.

We're going to check the underwear and the regenerative versus the conventional soybean field and see if we can tell a difference between the microbial activity. We've eliminated insecticides, pesticides, herbicides. We are savings upwards of $400 an acre. It works out to be about $2 million a year in savings. That is serious cash. I forgot my suit. I feel like I'm underdressed.

But if you are the people who can make a change, Well, it's high time to finally get regenerative agriculture. Let's prioritize the farmer. It's a connection to the land. It's a connection to those that came before us and those that are going to come after us. We can change everything. There's hope. I said this letter is a warning, but it's also a promise.

So I'm going to fight like hell to save your future. My children. Because I love you. Film Common Ground has just released, and I'm joined now by two of the producers, the founders of Kiss the Ground, Finian Make Peace, and Ryland Englehart. It's really great to have you guys here, Finian. Ryland, thanks for coming in. Yeah, thank you so much.

You know, so this is film number two, a journey that you're on. First of all, regenerative farming. How did you guys get into this? Where does this whole thing start? Beautiful. Yeah, happy to. So I come from hospitality, and actually from hospitality that was specifically around vegan plant-based diets.

My family actually brought a restaurant called Cafe Gratitude and Gracious Madre to the world. I just ate at Cafe Gratitude like a week ago. I go through California. It's one of the things that was like, you know, get a nice, like, veggie meal. It's cool. Organic ingredients. Yeah.

Yeah. So that was my life was serving. I thought veganism, plant-based, whole foods was the way the truth the answer. And we were doing that in Los Angeles, San Francisco and then Los Angeles. Yeah. That led me to, you know, obviously getting interested in health and wellness. I was evangelizing the plant-based world and sustainable business. And that brought me to New Zealand, where I was speaking at a conference.

And basically, I found myself sitting in an audience of a panel discussion called, Can human beings sustain life on planet Earth? Okay. And five of the six experts said, we're degrading the ecosystem in ways that ultimately we're heading into the antipariseen, and it's pretty much too late. And the last person who spoke was a guy by the name of Graham Seat, and he said, what we don't see is that we are part of nature, and if we see ourselves as separate, we don't see how we could actually work with nature to heal the damage that we've done.

And that's through a process of regeneration, starting with our soil, and then everything above that soil. And here I am sitting somewhat as an arrogant, California vegan, running the most sustainable business, doing all the right things, and I'm seeing a conversation. for the first time that connects the dots that shows me that, right, we can't just sustain a broken system or a broken soil or a broken degraded coral reef or ocean system. That needs to be regenerated until we can sustain something. And it was a complete epiphany to really understand that the way photosynthesizing plants work with soil microorganisms is a perfect technology that is nature, which is self-healing,

self-correcting, and self-balancing. Just like our bodies, which is something we talk about a lot. Finian, you guys go way back. Yeah, Rylan and I go way back. We grew up in Ithaca, New York, together. Our parents were friends, both activists as well. But, yeah, as Rylan was in the industry. So, what, like hippie parents type thing?

Like, you know. Make peace is his last name, Englehart. Yeah, we go way back. So for Rylan, I was always the activist policy-knowing guy would be like, all right, what are we doing? Both of us kind of activators in our own right, and he came back from New Zealand just lit up, like, look, I really need you to get this. And it just so happens, I convinced the guy who was talking to come to L.A. to talk with us. So the two of us set up an auditorium. I brought my sound equipment.

I was in music. And in four hours, this guy just lays down this argument of what can happen when we work. with farming regeneratively. When we, instead of degrading or even trying to sustain what little we have left, we actually rebuild the soil by helping plants pump carbon into the soil and it rebuild it. It helps the water cycle, helps biodiversity, helps the nutrient uptake of plants. So this gets laid out and it was that same night, we go back to Rylan's house and I was like, if this is all true, this is literally the biggest solution because everything up until that point was how do we go off the cliff slower? That was it. That's all. That's all. That's all. That's all.

That's what we most of us have still. That all seems like is yes, the ball's already rolling. There's no stopping it. We're all just going to go a little slower. And this was the only solution that was taking us to say we can regenerate. And it didn't mean all going back and living in caves or anything. It's like, no, with these practical solutions, with these leaders. So we hit the books in Ryland's garage.

I lived right down the street. And we just dove all the way. And we said, if this is true, we have to dedicate our lives because there's nothing more prolific than this solution right now. And within a year and a half, we met the directors, Josh and and convince them to make the film kiss the ground with us. And the rest is really history. It was just... Yeah, I mean, the miracle truth of it, and really, I'm going to say it is a miracle.

Yeah. And it's been a miracle path of how it has happened in that I moved into a little apartment in Venice to Open Cafe Gratitude, and that apartment was Josh and Rebecca's apartment that they had built a film studio in the garage, and they were moving to Ohio. I moved in, started building a nonprofit, and then that garage that was their film studio became the nonprofit and then collaborated to then having these films be made. And if I can add just one thing is the, for us, you know, I was in music touring as an activist and very active in a lot of ways, Rhineland in restaurants. But we were basically like, we're not the scientists, we're not the farmers, and we're not the indigenous leaders who know this stuff. But we can and we are champions.

And so we really saw, instead of just being like, oh, be on the bleachers and say yay to what they're doing, we could make sure that this idea becomes something that the world gets access to. And we said, look, if it happened to us, it can happen to anybody. And that's where really, I think the strength of Kiss the Ground, the organization has been, is we're saying we're going to help to make the story available. We're going to help make the education available to the world. And that's what we've been doing for almost 13 years. And it's because we said, you know, we're not going to make this exclusive.

We're willing to talk to anybody and get them to connect it to this because like Rylan, like he's gone on a complete trajectory change of like, wow, animals are a part of this healing. Well, explain that to me because, I mean, you were saying I was a vegan and then had this aha moment. How does, why does regenerative farming affect your perspective of being vegan? Because, I mean, it seems like you're growing plants. Plants are vegan. So what is it? Well, that's actually not true. No?

Okay. So vegetables aren't vegan in many cases. Okay. So the way that soil gets created is in the greatest capacity around the world is in the collaboration and the symbiotic relationship between grass-eating animals, bovines, and perennial grasses. So whether it's in the center of this country or in the savannah in Africa, where there's, you know, large amounts of soil organic matter, healthy soil, which is ultimately, what become agricultural lands that can produce a lot of food. It is through that partnership of

grass-eating animals, grazing, pooping and peeing, and then moving away for a year that ultimately is adding financial, organic matter capital into that bank account that then has the capacity to grow life, grow plants, grow food. And animals are essentially the perfect technology to make that rotational movement on land such that land can get continuously healthy. And I just want to say it was inconvenient for me as a decade-long restaurateur family that was running vegan restaurants in Los Angeles, serving millions of vegan meals to then realize, you know, as we started to, well, the big idea was, well, let's grow some vegetables for our vegan restaurants.

My dad started to do that, and as he did that, he realized, wow, to get these vegetables to grow, I need to add things like cow manure that's coming from a CAFO feedlot. Right. Right. I need blood meal, bone meal, fish emulsion, even calcium supplement. Calcium supplement. Calcium is only alchemized through the body of a biological being. So if we're getting calcium, it's actually alchemized by something living that then does. died and then became something that our body could uptake.

And I want to, as someone who hasn't been a vegan nearly as much as Rylan, I wanted to make a quick observation. The people who are doing that are very justifiably trying to help and doing something that's not very easy to do. I agree. To make a lifestyle change. And all the credit to that. I think the important thing is to look at progression in any sense to say, wait a minute, we're looking at a solution here that is both economically viable and both such a big ecological. change and as Maryland is talking about, grasslands cover half of the world, and most of the grasslands are what are turning to desert very quickly. It's because those environments are brittle.

It just so happens grasslands make brittle environments where it doesn't rain. It's not very moist, habitable. That's what adapted there. That's what evolved there. That's not where trees naturally evolved. So you have to say in regenerative agriculture, it's context, context, context. Yes, in some areas in South America and even the United States, you can have places where ecology systems work without many animals involved. Can they help? Yes, but it doesn't have to be large-scale grazing operations. The point is, are you trying to create regeneration, the system that is currently broken, not functioning, regaining its functionality, getting better over time. And to do that, lots of times animals are super important. Other times they're less

necessary as an agroforestry system can show. But the big point is you can't be siloed in your thinking. You have to be able to look at your context and your environment and say, where are we? What is this land asking us to do? And what does the water system want to do? What does all these things want to do? And then you're enhancing that ability to function at its highest level. And I just want to say one more thing, which is that we oftentimes think, oh, we just need to plant some trees, right? That's kind of the go-to environmental thing, plant trees. Much of the planet doesn't have the rainfall to actually sustain tree canopy. So grassland Savannah is what is its primary healthy balanced ecosystem and to just fence that off

and say that's going to be conservation rewild without the grass-eating animal partnership it actually will continue to degrade to some of what we're seeing in the Netherlands and I want to get into that a minute where it's like well no this has got to go back to being forests it's not farmland or whatever and having government step in which is something that you know I'm really struggling with but before I get into that what really sort of led me to this conversation was I interviewed Zach Bush a couple of years ago, and he really, like, sort of woke up my perspective because I was really struggling with the fact that I've always called myself an

environmentalist, but I'm not down with authoritarian carbon credit scoring, you know, world economic forum rules that are going to govern how we all move through this world. And he sort of tied this together in a way that I thought really crossed all sort of barriers in lines. Just take a look. This is a little piece from that interview. The lungs of the planet is the soil. Yes, trees, yes that, but you don't get trees respirating

if you don't have the microbiome and the mycelium in the soil doing its work. And so what happened in the 1970s is we started to poison the microbiome of the soil systems and create dirt on a scale that is now, again, back then, unbelievable. But the current estimates are that 97% of the arable farmland in the world has now been depleted or severely depleted, which means 97% of the lungs of the earth are now in its end stage of emphysema. There is no surface area left.

There you go. So one of the points that he was making there that I found interesting is he got into, you know, when we talk about CO2 causing climate change, global warming, whatever you're saying about it, you know, he said that wouldn't even be a problem. You know, sure, trees take in so many gigatons and the ocean absorbs so many gigatons, but the vast amount of CO2 is really absorbed by the

earth, which is something that we are, you know, when I talk, we talk about medicine all the time, we talk about vaccines, all these issues, the gut biome being now becoming more and more important, right? We are recognizing that, you know, there's all sorts of products in every grocery store now to try and get more of a stronger gut biome going, you know, bacteria in my stomach. the dirt is the same. And so when we want balance, there's these microbes that are eating and absorbing CO2, that that's what they work on. That's how they feed the plants, right?

On what Zach was saying, I think a super important thing for anybody watching today is go to Google Earth and check out the world and see for yourself how much land is in agriculture. It's pretty obvious. There's usually little squares and different things. But you look at that. And then you look at a little closer, and you see these fenced off areas that are obviously no longer in farm production because they're too degraded to use anymore. Those used to be, if they were fenced off grazing land. No one's going to fence off the desert and graze land because that would be pointless.

The point is it used to be grazing land. And turn into desert. In area, 30 million acres a year, the size of England, become too degraded to farm anymore. Even propping them up with chemicals like phosphorus and nitrogen, they're just too degraded. So that's the rate of loss of fertile land that we have. Now, what makes land fertile is when it is full of soil organic matter. So organic matter happens to be 50% carbon. So what Zach is saying is so true.

If we're going to balance the climate, we have to look at the land as where is the carbon going to go. Now, so much of my frustration with the climate conversation and the obvious reason why people reject it often is that it's basically putting all the blame onto CO2 in the atmosphere. Yes, technically. Carbon, tonalization. Yeah. Carbon up there does create a thermal blanket. Yeah, cool. But when we look at the problems we're facing from that, we have to say, wait a minute. If the land is broken, if you say, oh, Syria's drought and flooding is all because of CO2 in the atmosphere. You'd be like, hold the pause for a minute. That doesn't make any sense. In the 1960s, the nationalized the land. A bunch of people who've never farmed before degraded the land in a decade, turned it

to desert. Now it doesn't work anymore. They flooded into the cities, and the land is completely degenerating by itself now. And you're like, there's no trees, there's no grass, there's nothing covering the land. Wait, now it floods, and the rain hits a solid block of dirt. That water runs off

into the rivers and streams completely muddy, taking usually five tons of top soil per acre per year out to sea. It's just worse. And so you're like, oh, we had a big rain. It was great. We had a big rain. None of it infiltrates into the ground.

The soil sponge is broken. What used to happen is it hits a plant, trickles into the soil sponge, and regenerates your water supplies. All of your springs and your aquifers are being recharged. Now, when you have 90% of the land degraded, most of that water is quickly running off into the oceans within a couple days of a big storm. You're back to a drought. So many of these places in Africa, in western United States, we say, we finally got a big rain.

California, I'm talking to the government. Like, God, we must be landing on cement and just rolling right in the ocean. We might as well be landing on cement. All that bare ground, when the sun hits it, is heat island. We say, oh, yeah, the cities, the cement, that makes sense that it's heat island. But no one's counting the heat that is radiating up from the surface of millions and millions and millions of acres. Then you say, wait a minute, where's all the water? If a half an inch, sorry, if an acre of land that Gabe Brown, one of the guys from the film has,

can now hold 100,000 gallons more of water, one acre, because he's built the soil back. Yeah. So he's built the soil sponge. Yeah. You're basically saying, well, all that water that used to be in the degraded land, where is it now? And we know water vapor is one of the biggest contributors to climate catastrophes as well as heating. It's not being absorbed. So we're just not counting enough.

When we talk about the climate equation, we're just like degraded land, heat island effect, plus the water, where is it? If we start talking like that in the climate, I think a lot more people would be like, yeah, let's fix it. Well, I would say, I mean, in many ways, I would say you could really just say that we're talking, the climate problem is really just the blood coming out of a wound, right? Let's fix the wound. Like, it really isn't an issue. All it is is showing we have a symptomatic, you know, a symptom based on a lack of balance with how this Earth is supposed to be a lot. Someone's, you know, fifth degree, third degree burns on the hospital bed with all these inputs going in. We're like, let's keep that alive. That's what we're doing right now.

Instead of like, what if this person fully heals so they function again? Right. That's regeneration. That's our land analogy. I mean, I think to just weave it back to the Zach Bush thing, the soil is the microbiome of the earth. Yeah. And we know that we can be doctoring all over the body. But if we-patching it, patching it, taking drugs, vaccines like everything we can.

If we don't have the system that can actually balance and is supporting the immune function of the body, we're ultimately just going to be doing patchwork drawing on the mirror versus actually addressing the patient and the problem. So right now the soil, as I think he said, 97% has been degraded. So it's very difficult to create balance if the microbiome, again, if we're on the human health to get balance, we have to heal that part and then we can start to heal the larger piece and one other thing is that when plants came on land and started creating soil and the skin of the earth became green, there was a nine, again, this is a fact that I believe

that someone said, so I'm just, you know, stated that way. You know, it was a reduction of about 80 to 90 percent of carbon or greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that came down to create this beautiful, you know, climate and livable ecology that was a reduction. that we have been seeing over the last 10,000 years when human beings have been in existence. So that was the technology of photosynthesizing plants, trees and grasses, pulling and creating that carbon to come down and create a livable system.

We say it has 500 million years of research and development at its back. Well, and that's what's so annoying is what, you know, when I look at Bill Gates, who's now like, sort of like, now an environmentalist, I guess. And the entire answer, like you're saying, is let's just leave the burn victim alone. answer is like chemicals like let's go ahead make fake meats fake this fake that growing

them inside hydroponics inside light inside of buildings instead of wait a minute what you know what about all the farmland as someone who cares about health and especially our rural communities that are so impacted by health on farmland as well as as human health when you're looking at it it's still who wins with all these systems that are being put out by the global elites let's call them for a second you're like wait a minute who really wins here because when people are healthy They don't need as much, pharmaceuticals, et cetera. They're not going into debt with their hospital bills. When the farmland is healthy, it doesn't need.

And so when you look at the farmer debt, for example, how much they're taking out every year just to prop themselves up, the chemicals, the inputs, et cetera. And then their health using all those chemicals. And you're like, with regeneration, we are seeing it. I have been there. Rhineland has been there. We know these leaders.

You guys actually have some great footage. Why don't we take a look at the farmer? You guys just splice. Take a look at this. This is how this entire farming process works for just one farmer. Rick Clark is one of the first farmers to crack the code of large-scale, no-till regenerative organic agriculture. To do this, Rick uses two special machines. The best tool we bought was a roller crimper.

This is our roller crimper. This is what I call my baby. A roller crimper is like a steamroller. It smashes the cover crop down. The dead cover crop protects against weeds. and becomes food for the microbes. That's our mat to suppress weeds so we no longer need to spray roundup. The other machine, called an airseater,

aka no-till drill, plants the seeds without tilling the soil. Industrial agriculture uses expensive chemicals to fertilize crops and kill weeds. But regenerative agriculture uses free microcontractors. and cover crops to bring nutrients into the soil. Right now where we're standing in Midwest America, there's thousands of pounds of phosphorus and potassium right below our feet.

We just need to get the cover crops out there, unlock them, bring them to the surface, and regenerate them. We've got biomass covering the soil. Biomass is the layer of cover crops protecting the soil. We've got the microbial biome working in high gear. The microbial biome is the life in the soil. We've got aggregate stability that's eight inches deep. Aggregates are how the microbes build soil.

We've got 1.5 million earthworms per acre. Earthworms turn plant matter into soil. The more earthworms, the healthier your soil. We've got water infiltration rates of 20 inches an hour. an hour. And infiltration is how much water the soil can hold instead of running off. The deeper the soil organic matter, and thus the more carbon

that soil has, the more water the soil will hold. We've eliminated seed treatments. We've eliminated insecticides. We've eliminated pesticides, herbicides. We are saving upwards of $400 an acre on input costs. works out to be about $2 million a year in savings. That is serious cash. All right.

The film is called Common Ground. Super fascinating. And I get it when I'm looking at this. So one of the things that I want to talk about is I'm concerned. I'm concerned about doing topics like this because we see what happened in Sri Lanka, where the government decides we're going to be the greenest, you know, country in the world. and all farmers are getting rid of all the fertilizers and things that this guy just said, I don't have to use any of that stuff.

But they just take it away and say, good luck with that. And farmers are starving, ultimately started killing themselves because it couldn't grow anything. So how do we do this on a large scale? How do we move without the government coming in, ultimately just destroying farms, not teaching anyone how to actually farm this? How do we do this at a scale that it could actually make a difference? question and I'm so glad you asked it and when when we look at these phenomenon that are essentially taking a crisis and then having people who aren't asking the right other people how to solve the problem and I think the

same thing happens similar in the US one of the reasons I had Rick Clark who you just saw there testify at the first ever hearing at the House Ag Committee on regenerative agriculture is because he's showing up and saying I've been on this trajectory and I know what it takes and I know how to get there but you have have so many people who are out there training, undergrad's going into USDA, getting jobs, but don't have enough evidence themselves, don't have enough experience to be actually giving the idea. So Gabe Brown, who's also featured in this film Common Ground, has a company called Understanding

Ag. And they are currently helping transition 34 million acres in the U.S. alone. So they are leaders. Just give that some perspective on scale? So the organic agriculture sector, which has been probably since, you know, probably since 67 years of development is still less than 1% of American ag land, whereas that number, 34 million acres, is somewhere between 4 and 5%. That has actually scaled in the last six years.

In the last six years. So we're looking at an option where we're saying, wait a minute, pause and check in. So in these scenarios around the world, we're saying, oh, this is bad, here's the solution. Any of these regenerative experts, and again, we are the champions, we are not the expert, ourselves but we work day in and day out with these folks different sides of the spectrum on so many of the issues but we work together in common ground on the soil stuff and they're saying yeah if you're gonna get off nitrogen it's a drug you can't just cut off you you have to have a rehabilitation process and

you have to get expertise from people of how to do that quickly now what used to take eight or ten years or twenty years sometimes because of the expertise that's come together over the last decade or 20 years we can do what we used to do in 20 years in three to four. So the pace is getting much better. It does look much better for farmers and ranchers. That's why they're coming to this in droves now because they're saying, I can actually get off the drip faster. I'm not going to cut nitrogen in my first year. I'm not going to cut these herbicides necessarily my first year, but they see a practical, economically viable pathway that isn't 20 years long, which takes a heck of a lot of dedication. It is two or three or four

years that they're able to go on this trajectory and save 30 percent on their end. input cost to your boy. I mean, that seems like that's where, like, it always comes down to finances. It comes down to money. I was on a, you know, I was doing a tour on the vaccine issue with Vax. And I remember I did a phone, you know, interview on a radio show. And the guy was with me, like, you know, he's conservative, loved everything. Yeah, we should have a right to, you know, control goes into our body.

And they said, it's just like glyphosate, just like, 90%, you know, glyphosate's on 90% of our crops. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know. You know, I don't know, like, we're, I think we're in Iowa or Ohio, wherever he says. Like, I'm in the middle of farmland here. man, and you know, that doesn't go over well here. We love our glyphosate. We don't want someone just destroy.

Well, there's no proof that that's toxic. And, you know, farmers need to make living. That's how they make living. And I really got something I had not thought about, which is when we talk about issues like this, there are the people that are going to have to shift the farmers, who, by the way, they're great, great grandparents for probably doing it just like this. But they're so far away now. It's like I'm sure they feel like you're about to blindfold me.

my hands behind my back and then tell me yeah I mean is there communities the peer thing which has been when I've gone to these events these conferences and in the middle of the country and many other places they're saying you know we need more support from people who are willing to take this jump because they're communities their friends their uncles like oh their uncles the chemical sales and they're not going to buy my chemicals but I just wanted to set something here as someone who's left and and working with someone like Rick Clark all the time he's on the right you know things but that's what's so cool

about this movement is you have people who are no pardon I don't know if I'm allowed to say that here but they're saying they're saying look let's put these ideologies aside and Rick isn't saying you got to cut this today immediately right and isn't fanatical and many of us are saying this is a practical solution first and foremost its economics second it's resilience third it's water fourth it's biodiversity fifth six six maybe climate is seventh or eighth in the topic of what it's doing but that's not what we're with. And that's not the reason it's being picked up and exciting a huge generation of farmers right now to say, I can do this and it doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum I'm on. I can believe in this because the leaders who are being pointed to are practical thinkers.

And they're not doing that silo just because they're saying there's a way to get here. I'm not forcing you to do it now, but I can show you how to do it and how to make it economically viable. And I think what's really exciting is that this is being a farmer. land movement, whereas organic was somewhat a business, CPG company-driven marketing campaign, and it's even classified, organics classified as like a marketing term, whereas regenerative agriculture, I think, really speaks to the DNA of the farmer culture of America, which is more sovereignty.

More self-sufficient. More self-sufficient. I don't need to be buying everything from outside. I can get my own land regenerating itself. That's right. And when they actually see how they can actually do that and make more money doing it, all the other things of the letting go of the chemicals, on some level they are doing that because they feel like their hands are tied in many cases.

And so, yeah, it ultimately gives a vision of hope. And, you know, seeing over the last six years this huge insurgents of adoption and participation in this movement is very exciting. It just figures-wise for economics. We're talking about, like, for grow crop, at least 80%, 78 to 80% more profits for farmers doing this in row crop. Wow. 350% more for ranchers who are doing regenerative.

So, I mean, the economics just speak for themselves, and that's part of the big reason. Amazing. You have a ton of celebrities in this documentary. It feels like, you know, we just listened to Laura Dern, you know, was putting the V-O-on there, Woody Harrelson, And why are celebrities, why were they attracted to this? I mean, is it just, did you pitch it as an environmental issue?

Or is it different for each person that you got involved with the film? I mean, I would say it's, there's obviously some variation between all those that are participating. But I would say, you know, the energy of our infectious, passionate, enthusiastic optimism. Yeah. and showing them something that they hadn't, you know, everybody wants to be a champion of something good, you know? And I think there's a lot of disenchantment in the good solutions that we've been bought and sold on. And soil and nature being a system that is inherently healing and how do we support that system is, I think, a compelling idea at the philosophical, spiritual and human level. So, you know, Woody Harrelson, I've known him 20 years.

He got married in my mom's house in Kippahulu and Maui. And, you know, he's a staunch vegan. Yeah. And I think when he said yes to me, he didn't know what he was saying yes to. But I think he trusts over our 20-year relationship that what I'm passionate about, you know, that we're hopefully evolving and growing and willing to shift our understanding of things. and he got it. And he was able, he said, okay, wow, the upside is more powerful than my sort of dogmatic stance,

and he was willing to come to the table and, you know, jump in on this common ground. Well, he did Kiss the Ground. He narrated Kiss the Ground by himself, which is the first movie, which is available on Netflix. Common Ground's coming to streaming in September, by the way, for folks out there. But I think it was important when we worked with Woody the first time was a big thing that we noticed. and we had a powwow about it before the final narration, which was like, Woody Harrelson, as much as he's been a really amazing activist all his life,

was sitting in a state of the same state I was in. Wait a minute, we're all just going to go off the cliff slower. And so when he caught on to the regenerative solution, it did give him hope. And that was something that for all of us, we got moved, and we're like, we've got to put that on camera and have him expressing that change in him that happened with. This is actually hope versus just,

a little less bad. He said to me personally, I've been an activist for 40 years, and I mostly think it was, you know, it was inconsequential. And my participation in Kiss the Ground actually is one of the first things that has me feel like,

wow, I'm doing something that is, you know, moving and contributing. You know, he told me, he was like, I had a surreal moment where King Charles met him, and he said, Kiss the Ground. That's one of my favorite movie. I've sent that to a thousand people.

And he's like, out of all the things I've done, this is actually something. Look, I mean, of all the things that I've done, like one of my, you know, we've gone a couple times to Joel Salatin's farm. I got to, like, dig my hands down into the dirt there, very much like you see in that film. And he'll show you. I mean, and honestly, like right across the dirt road at the neighboring farm, it is desolate. There's like, it looks like a dust storm blowing by. And the cows are just like, I'm like, what are they eating over there? And over here it's like fern golly, you know, like every, like you can feel the water in the dirt that's still there.

And I just thought, why isn't everyone doing this? Well, this is the kicker. And I have a little short film I made with Dr. Alan Williams, who's one of my favorite. He works with Gabe Brown, who's one of the stars of both movies. But he was basically expressing, like, people have the assumption that farmers and ranchers just know this inherently. And we want that because we respect people in all professions. But the same way you probably like assume doctors, but no, no, no, they don't know. Right.

So it's, good, good. But we have to assume on the side of like, wait, maybe people don't know. And when we tried that on 13 years ago, like, I didn't know, I was a no at all environmentalist when I was 29. And I had zero idea. So we'd be like, well, probably, maybe Al Gore doesn't know. Rylan got Al Gore to turn on this. We went out with that very clear thing. And when I'm in the Senate, when I'm in the House, when I'm talking with these people, they've been on the Ag Committee for 15.

years, everyone would assume they know. They don't know. The farmers don't know. So this is a cool idea, both for the actors we work with who are environmentalists, aside from Woody, a lot of amazing environmentalist people who have been doing great work, they didn't know either. So we always start from like, we didn't know, probably people don't know. Turns out we learned from the experts, farmers and ranchers don't know. So that's the beauty of this. It isn't an aged old, tired, revolutionary solution that no one's been listening to. It's actually something that people actually don't get. And once they get it, I just watched a clip of Gabe Brown from another little piece. He was basically saying when they're training farmers, they have zero go back.

So when they're taking, you know, I said 34 million acres, they're helping transition. Anyone who goes through their stuff, they don't go backwards. They don't say, eh, four years in, I'm going back. None of them go back. Because they get that this is a trajectory that helps. And I wanted to mention one thing that really hits my heart. When I went through ranching and it's 350% more profitable, right, for ranching. But the number one reason ranchers are asking for assistance from folks like Gabe Brown and these other rock stars is for the birds.

They used to have birds 30, 40 years ago. The birds are gone, and they want their birds back. Wow. And you're like, it's not just money. It's like, where are my streams, where my fish, where my birds, and that's something that's like... Yeah. It's huge.

Huge for everybody. Yeah. It's going to require that we keep stepping up to the plate and bigger arenas. So one of the reasons we had Regenerate America was a campaign we've run for the last two years from Kiss the Ground. We have 135 organizations working with us, farm groups, and businesses. But we've been going to D.C. because if you don't show up and you don't get the audience with these folks and you don't click their brains or their staffers' brains into this idea, they are being not controlled, but they are being super influenced by the people who've been super influencing them. for a very long time. And they're starting to play the chum chum game.

Oh yeah, we're gonna be on regenerative sides. You have them going to the DC also talking about this. And that's where if you don't show up, if you don't bring the farmers and ranchers along with you to speak that reality to the power, you're ultimately gonna just get squashed. So we have been pushing forward. So people, if they wanna sign the petition for regenerate America,

it's at kiss the ground.com or regenerate America.com if you just put that in, if it's easier. But this is a way for you to say, I want regenerative ag in the farm bill. The farm bill's been delayed, as a lot of people know, and hopefully will pass this year. But we have to demand it. We've made huge progress, lots of marker bills involved, and had a lot of champions inside the House and Senate on both sides of the aisle. But we're still ultimately knowing that we weren't going to win against Big Ag today.

Maybe we've got to keep going, though. So this is where we have to keep pushing all of us. Well, look, I'm so psyched to be supporting this film. I'm psyched to be supporting this movement. To me, this really is. It's one of those solutions that, you know, when Zach first introduced it to me, I think this actually brings both sides, left and right together. This is our food. This is what we're eating.

This is what's going into our children's bodies. And instead of, and one of the things, can you imagine a country where if all of our farmers move in this direction, then it's not just the elitist that can afford the organic food aisle at Whole Foods. Everybody is eating this way. I mean, we really need to start dreaming into that future and to hear that, you know, more and more farmers are moving. being in this direction. You can move, you know, tens of millions of acres and get it done in a few years. It's really, really something that I think is probably the most exciting piece of, you know, of the food world, of getting big ag out of there, getting big chemical out of there, and let's get back to doing what we do best. I mean, hallelujah. I mean, really, that's why, that's why, you know,

some new age hippie guys from California have spent the last decade championing agriculture because really it was like wow that and it also speaks to that we there is a place in all of us that wants to love and wants to be an expression of love and what are the mechanisms to express our love and regeneration physically and spiritually is everything that we want to be participating in. And it gives us a framework and a pathway to do that. And you have to be inclusive. Because as you regenerate, your ecosystem capacity

increases. So instead of being like, I'm going to kill that thing now. That thing's my enemy. You have to inherently look holistically and be inclusive. And so you have this perpetual direction of understanding that everything is connected, understanding that it's all there. And I think it's so remarkable.

Everyone I talked to in this movement is just awestruck by. how much common ground really is. And that's why I love the name of the movie Common Ground, because it's so genuine. This is not just a couple guys who were on the West Coast started this up. This is so much a unified party of people

from very different political, religious backgrounds, whatever, races that are coming together and being like, no, no, this is it. Sorry those folks. This is what's happening in front of us, and it's so practical, scalable, economic, and it's real and it's happening. So.

Where do people see, Common Ground. Right now in theaters, check Common Ground Film.org or Kiss theground.com is the organization. You can find the schedules there. We just did a huge Earth Day showing last week. Seventy-five theaters across the country. But check it out. Kiss the Ground is still on Netflix, but streaming for Common Ground is going to happen in September. And yeah, we're just, we just also wanted to give a big shout out to Josh and Rebecca Takel, the directors who really made this happen at the end of the day. We've been a huge part of the production, bringing in all these faces and people into it. But they at the end of the day, made this terrific phenomenal film that really moves people. And so it's exciting. We're now working the last one called Groundspell, which is the international focus of the regenerative agriculture movement, which will be coming out in a couple of years. Kiss theground.com.

Is that the best way to sort of follow the work that you guys are doing? Do you have Twitter or anything like that? They're all kissed the ground, except for Facebook's Kiss the Ground CA because they started in California. All right. Well, keep up the good work. Thank you so much. Thank you for making the trip out here. Yeah, thank you so much.

Hey, everybody get out there. I mean, this is how we support, right? we vote with our dollars. Do you want this to be your future? Do you want, you know, regenerative farming? Do you want a biome that's going into your plants and therefore into your body? Less drugs, less chemicals. That's what we're all about here at the highway. So definitely support this film. Get out there. Take your friends and family and let's start this revolution in food.