The importance of regenerative organic agriculture

I watched the documentaries Kiss the Ground, it's sequel Common Ground, and the third film Groundswell on Amazon Prime and I found these documentaries enlightening. Allow me to share some information from the documentaries:

Tilling is the agricultural practice of breaking up and turning soil. Americans started aggressively tilling soil in the early 1900s which actually was a primary cause to the dust bowl in 1934. The issue with tilling is that it actually kills the microbes in the soil. Soil microbes are needed because they cycle carbon, form networks of roots within the soil, and naturally control disease and pests for crops. They are essential to the soil ecosystem.

Below is a picture of what tilling looks like:

When agricultural farms use tilling, they are destroying soil structure and killing the microbes so they have to use pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides to control pests, disease, and weeds that thrive in unhealthy soil.

Something I learned from the documentary is that Fritz Haber invented pesticides in the 1920s. The pesticide formula was later used as the primary poison in the gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz. When WWII ended, the US chemical companies brought Haber's poisons to the US and sold them as pesticides. Yikes! So a formula related to pesticides was actually used in Nazi gas chambers.

Another interesting point that came up is that Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018. Monsanto's popular weed-killer Roundup is known for causing non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Interestingly, Bayer also sold drugs for non-Hodgkin lymphoma and is known for manufacturing cancer treatment drugs. So yea, Bayer's product causes cancer and then they sold drugs to treat cancer. Pretty wild, right?

Farmers use pesticides in order to grow crops from unhealthy soil. So instead of farming healthy soil, farmers started mass producing food by using more and more chemicals. The documentary says that it takes more nitrogen fertilizer now than it did to grow grain in the 1960s. Thus, pesticides are masking degraded soil. Corn, the biggest crop in the US is almost entirely glyphosate, a chemical suspected of causing cancer. There are over 200 peer reviewed studies that correlate the effects of these chemicals to ADD in children, pediatric cancers, and birth defects. Toxic chemicals kill the microbes in the soil but they also kill the microbes in our bodies. See my other blog post about the dangers of pesticides here.

Since chemical agriculture ramped up in the 1970s, we've lost one-third of the Earth's topsoil. Healthy soil absorbs carbon dioxide but when we destroy soil, it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This dries the soil and turns it into dust. This is called desertification. It means the land is turning into desert. By turning healthy soil into desert, it creates extreme temperatures like a desert that gets cold at night and hot during the day. About two-thirds of the world is currently desertifying. By 2050 it's expected that 1 billion people will be refugees of soil desertification. According to the United Nations, the world's top soil will be gone in 60 years.

The documentary says that biosequestration, the storage and removal of carbon from the atmosphere by photosynthetic plants or bacteria is actually a solution to global warming. It's using plants, trees, and farming techniques to drawdown carbon into the soil. If we scaled methods we already have, we can reverse global warming within 30 years. Simply put, more desert is bad and more greenery is good!

Essentially, due to the amount of carbon dioxide we've loaded into the environment since the industrial revolution, we need to use renewable clean energy but also regeneration, the renewal or restoration of a biological system.

The definition of regenerative farming is:

• no tilling - not using plows or tillers to break up and overturn soil

• growing cover crops - cover crops are crops used to keep the soil healthy. They also allow the soil to hold water which leads to more plant growth and then more inland waterfall.

• no chemicals - not using chemicals or insecticides but instead using healthy soil to resist pests

• animal grazing - integrating animals to eat weeds and fertilize soil

Regenerative farms often generate twice the profits as conventional farms. The documentary says that 88% of farmers interviewed say that since they started practicing soil health, they were making more money. When I looked online, I found the same information saying that a 2018 study found regenerative farmers were nearly 80% more profitable than conventional farmers (reference here).

Here is what a regenerative farm looks like. It's very green with different crops, and animals grazing.

Politically, the issue is the pesticide and insecticide companies have a lot of power in Washington. Major pesticide manufacturers and agrochemical firms generate over $150 billion in revenue annually globally (reference here). On the other hand, farmers are in huge debt. Farm debt in America is $426 billion, so what's happening is that agrochemical companies are making all the money on genetically modified seeds and pesticides. The documentary says that farmers only get 8 cents on the dollar so they are paying large companies for the seeds and pesticides and going into debt. This is causing surging suicide rates among farmers. Suicide rates among farmers are 5x higher than other jobs.

We need farmers to become more educated about how to use regenerative farming techniques. In addition, our political organizations need to focus on regenerative farming, instead of taking handouts from agrochemical companies. As more people say NO to pesticides and large conventional farming, we can create change. For example in 2026, activists joined forces with political representatives to remove language from the Farm Bill which would have protected pesticide companies from lawsuits related to those that get cancer from their products (reference here).

The key to all this is educating people about desertification, and the issues of tilling and pesticides. This isn't just about farms but it's about the food we put in our bodies and the future of the human species on this planet. We can reverse global warming and build a thriving planet. We have the tools to reverse the damage we've caused. It's important for all of us to understand this information so that we choose organic food which creates a higher demand for food without pesticides, and choose leaders that talk about regenerative agriculture and getting rid of pesticides all together.

I definitely recommend watching these documentaries on Amazon Prime. They were very informative but also entertaining due to the amazing videography.