At this moment, we have a huge agricultural crisis in The Netherlands. It’s one of the things that made our government fall this past week. This crisis inspires me to share a documentary that I’ve seen a while ago, one that tackles the global agricultural crisis we’re in. Today I’ll tell you more about the documentary: Kiss the Ground. A documentary that explains how we abuse our soils, which is part of the basis of life. But luckily, it also explains how we can use the soil in our advantage. Healthy soil can be the solution to the big environmental problems we face today.
Kiss the Ground
The documentary Kiss the Ground was released in 2020. It’s narrated by Woody Harrelson, someone I think many of you know (I know him mostly from the Hunger Games, haha). Kiss the Ground tells the story of people who think regenerative agriculture is the solution to the climate crisis. The documentary explains how our current agricultural system is broken. It identifies some major problems when it comes to conventional farming: pesticides, tilling, mono-cultures and over-fertilizing.
When you buy ‘normal’ products in a supermarket, all those practices are used for your food. But all of them are harmful to the soil and should be avoided. At the same time, we don’t realize how important the soil really is. Soil is crucial when it comes to taking up carbon, to name one example.
Organic food, compost, stop tilling and diversify
Kiss the Ground is a documentary which explains how simple the solutions to the problems I listed above can be. According to the film, there are four solutions, which we can implemented today. One is to switch to organic farming. No more pesticides, which are bad for our health and for biodiversity as well. This is where the choices we as consumers make are very important. We have to support organic farmers by buying their products, because they can’t carry the responsibility of transforming the soil all alone. We have to be willing to pay for a better soil on the long run.
Next up is composting: another thing we as consumers we can do. Compost your food scraps so that farmers (or yourself) can use it to improve the soils. This way they have to use no to less fertilizer. In most Dutch cities compost is collected by your local municipality. Also, farmers should stop tilling and diversity in crops. This is something farmers must do, but if we as consumers buy biodynamic, organic food, we assure this.
Efficiency argument
When the solution of organic food is proposed, there are always people who say that organic farming is less efficient. Yes, that is true in most cases. But not all, please dive in the concept of food forests. But even if it were true in all cases, I’d still argue in favor of organic food. Why? Because conventional farming destroys the soil. And as you can see in the documentary, this means that eventually the land can’t be used any longer. After a long period of conventional farming, the soil basically dies off, and the farmers needs to move on to another piece of land. This is not the case for organic farming, so organic farming is only inefficient if you look at it with a short-term view.
Panacea
I do have two points of criticism on the documentary Kiss the Ground. One is that it presents regenerative agriculture as the solution to the climate crisis. Well, I would love to believe that it is that simple. But the truth is that it’s not. Regenerative agriculture is amazing and I totally support it. However, it is not the only solution we need. What about the energy transition? And what about consumerism? And my other point of criticism: what about veganism?
Veganism
Veganism is not mentioned as a solution in this documentary. Animals are even mentioned as part of the solution. They can transform the land, the documentary explains. As a vegan, I believe we should not use animal for our own good. That’s one thing. And I doubt whether we truly need animals in the food system. And even if we did, we should not kill them once they’ve done their duty. They should die from old age then.
But what strikes me most is that we cannot feed the world, combat the climate crisis or have fully regenerative agriculture if we keep eating like we do. We use up 70% of all agricultural land to produce animal products. If we want regenerative agriculture, we should eat entirely or mostly plant-based. Which is far from the standard American diet (also called, the SAD-diet) or the standard Dutch diet. So, I’m just a little sad that the documentary does not mention this. It may lead you to think that we only need to change the way we farm. But we should change the way we eat too.
Kiss the Ground can be seen on Netflix.
Yours sincerely,
Romee