Kiss the Ground

Planet Earth, home to a growing number of Homo sapiens

and a whole lot of other creatures.

It's a great place to live.

When it comes to the future of our small planet…

Now to a dire warning about climate change.

Natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires…

An unprecedented decline in nature threatening humanity.

Sixth mass extinction event is already well underway…

There's so much bad news about our planet, it's overwhelming.

The fear that we're headed for a cliff

puts most of us into a state of paralysis.

The truth is…

I've given up.

And the odds are so have you.

But what if there was another path?

This is the story of a simple solution, a way to heal our planet

and keep our species off the extinction list.

In fact, the solution I'm talking about is right under our feet,

and it's as old as dirt.

We call it soil, earth, or ground.

And due to its vast scale,

and its ability to sequester immense quantities of greenhouse gases,

it could just be the one thing that can balance our climate,

replenish our fresh water supplies,

and feed the world.

That's why some people are racing to save our soil

in hopes our soil just might…

save us.

I am a conservation agronomist.

I have been in every state,

all the way from Alaska, to Puerto Rico, to Hawaii.

I've also been asked to go speak in Europe, Australia…

I just haven't had the time.

If we get the soil right, we can fix a lot of our issues.

Healthy soils lead to a healthy plant.

Healthy plant, healthy animal, healthy human,

healthy water, healthy climate.

This is what this is about today.

Learning how the soil works and learning how to farm like nature does.

I have learned my job is to drop a seed.

And the more you farm like nature, the more we can reduce your inputs,

and the more money you can make.

It's my calling. Just as simple as that.

Actually, this is one…

I've lived in four or five states.

Everywhere I go and work, we're still having the same problem.

Massive erosion.

Erosion is when soil becomes dirt.

Rapid erosion began long ago when humans developed the plow.

Its purpose was to break the soil in order to sow seeds.

By the Bronze Age,

vast areas around cities were plowed up to plant grains.

But as their soils eroded,

those once-great empires vanished into dust.

But we don't have to look back thousands of years

to see the dangers of erosion.

In the 1930s,

America experienced the largest man-made environmental disaster

in history.

It was called the Dust Bowl.

It was largely caused by farmers tilling the once-fertile Midwestern Plains

and leaving the soil exposed.

By the end of 1934,

roughly 200 million acres of cropland were permanently damaged.

On a whistle stop train tour, President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw

the destruction of America's soil firsthand.

In response, he created the Soil Conservation Service

to save the nation's soil.

What I have seen confirms me

in the belief that I've had for a long time…

that we're going to win on this problem.

It relates to working out a plan of cooperation with nature

instead of going along with what we've been doing in the past

trying to buck nature.

The practice of plowing and tilling the soil

continues to this day.

But so does Franklin D. Roosevelt's Soil Conservation Service.

It was made part of the US Department of Agriculture,

and it's now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service,

the NRCS.

We want the water to leave through a living plant.

Today, the NRC has field agents, like Ray,

trying to teach farmers to reduce tilling…

Microbes live in there, and that's called the porous sphere.

…a Nd reduce the spraying of industrial chemicals

that damage the soil.

Tillage is one of the most intrusive things we do

in modern agriculture.

It is not our friend.

The message is simple,

but getting that message out… is difficult.

We have a social problem. We have an education issue.

And until we get that right, we can't fix our ecological issues.

I have been in NRCS for 31 years.

It's kind of amazing to me as I was teaching all over the country.

I'm going, wow, our producers don't really know how the soil works.

They don't understand the basic ecological principles.

Everything runs by carbon.

We're built by carbon. The soil microbes run by carbon.

Carbon is the driving engine.

It runs the system.

But when it comes to the role of carbon in our world,

there's… a bit of confusion.

To be specific, carbon dioxide is a gas.

We breathe it out, and plants breathe it in.

We also make carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels.

But carbon isn't bad.

In fact, it's the basis for all life on Earth.

There's a tendency right now for us to be at war with carbon.

Carbon's the bad guy.

And I think this is a lost opportunity. Carbon's the good guy.

We're carbon.

I'm-I'm 16 percent carbon,

and all of it came from eating vegetation

and things that eat vegetation.

Plants use sunlight as energy,

and they pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,

they turn it into a carbon fuel,

and that's how they grow.

But 40 percent of that carbon fuel, they send down to their roots.

They're leaking it out in a very strategic way to soil microorganisms.

Plants are feeding soil microorganisms carbon,

and the soil microorganisms are bringing plants mineral nutrients.

And in the process of all that,

those soil microorganisms make a carbon glue out of that carbon fuel.

And they make habitat in the soil.

They make little pockets in the soil to control the flow of air and water.

And that's one of the ways that carbon gets fixed in the soil.

In other words, soil has the unique ability

to sequester carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

That's a big deal.

And what's even more amazing:

the soil contains an entire universe of life.

Here, I went to years of college, and I took soil science. I didn't know.

I really did not know how the soil worked.

It's alive.

In every handful of healthy soil,

there more organisms than the number of people who've ever lived

on planet Earth.

And those organisms are processing organic matter

that's in the soil

and putting the nutrients into a form that the plant needs.

Comparing the soil microbial diversity

to the microbial diversity we're now seeing inside the human organism,

you have more bacterial cells in your body than you have human cells.

Yeah, we're about one percent human and 99 percent microbes.

It's the truth.

The food that we eat,

we actually chew and break that food material down into little bits

that get eaten by the bacteria in our gut.

When you eat kale, let's say,

when you're eating kale, your body doesn't consume kale.

The bacteria consumed the kale.

And you feed off of what the bacteria have processed and released

by the consumption of that kale.

The key to health is eating dirt.

What I mean by that is we need to eat what's in the dirt

that's transferred to the plants, that then we eat and create health.

You know, my husband is an athlete for a living,

so he wants to provide his body with the best possible nutrients

so he can perform.

I beat my body down so much over the course of the season,

the last thing I want to do is add a bunch of food

that I won't be able to properly digest,

that won't be the kind of nutrition that I need

in order to repair and regenerate my body the way that it needs to be.

And, of course, the quality of the soil is huge

because it is the beginning of the quality of the food.

That quality of food provides quality health.

It all comes from the Earth. Big Mama.

Our health and the health of our planet are connected.

If we choose healthy food, there is a reciprocation.

Not only we feel better, we are healthier, but the Earth is healthier.

Taking care of the microbes in the soil is critical for human health.

But spraying the soil with toxic chemicals,

well, does something else.

All of our soils that are under chemical conventional agriculture

are almost completely devoid of microorganisms.

Spraying the soil with toxic chemicals

kills the very microbes we need to give us health,

and pull the carbon from the atmosphere.

The more tilling that's done, the weaker the soil gets,

and the more farmers feel compelled to use chemical sprays.

This is the vicious cycle of industrial agriculture.

And that cycle was developed as a result of war.

The roots of industrial agriculture go back to a German scientist

named Fritz Haber.

Haber invented a process for making synthetic nitrogen fertilizer

that increased food production.

His other scientific breakthrough was the creation of poisons

known as pesticides.

Haber used his pesticides as the first chemical weapons in history.

Then he developed the poison used in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

When the war ended,

US chemical companies brought Haber's poisons back to America

and rebranded his toxic chemicals as pesticides

for American farms.

Dow set out to demonstrate the effectiveness of its chemical killers

on a nationwide scale.

When the war ended,