Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Regenerative agriculture is not just the solution to reinvigorating soil health and improving the way we eat. It can also address the long list of problems caused by humanity’s addiction to the extraction economy. Corinna Bellizzi sits down with Josh Tickell, an environmental activist and filmmaker behind the award-winning documentary “Common Ground.” He shares how he tackles the urgent need to embrace regenerative agriculture today through his film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and coming soon to Amazon Prime this April. Josh also discusses how the public can take action and join the regenerative movement, which aims to unlock better farming opportunities put an end to the use of destructive chemicals, and encourage people to eat more healthily.
About Josh Tickell
Josh Tickell is an environmental activist, acclaimed filmmaker, and bestselling author. A renowned speaker and authority on regeneration and climate change, he frequently appears on CNN, Discovery, Reuters, NBC, Fox, and NPR. With his wife, Rebecca Harrell Tickell, he co-founded Big Picture Ranch, a regenerative farm and film studio creating impactful environmental films. Their latest documentary, Common Ground, narrated by Jason Momoa, Laura Dern, Donald Glover, Rosario Dawson, and Ian Somerhalder, is the sequel to Kiss the Ground. Directed and produced by Josh and Rebecca, the film premiered at the Tribeca Festival, earning the Human/Nature Award for its powerful message about regenerative agriculture and its potential to combat climate change.
Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshtickell/
Guest Website:
https://www.bigpictureranch.com
https://kissthegroundmovie.com
Guest Social:
https://www.instagram.com/joshtickell
https://www.facebook.com/EcoDude
https://www.instagram.com/commongroundfilm
https://www.youtube.com/@commongroundfilm
https://instagram.com/kisstheground
https://www.youtube.com/@KissTheGround
Show Notes: Raw audio
- Raising Awareness About Regenerative Agriculture – 05:23
- How To Start Eating A Lot Healthier – 19:30
- The Sad Reality Of Animals In Cages – 28:33
- Insights About Different Certifications – 33:10
- How Josh’s Films Come Together – 38:56
- Why Regeneration Means Setting Politics Aside – 51:45
- Closing Words And Episode Wrap-up – 59:24
—
Pushing Regenerative Agriculture To The Mainstream With Josh Tickell
In this episode, we’re going to dig back into the topic of regenerative agriculture as I introduce you to Josh Tickell. Josh is an environmental activist, acclaimed filmmaker, bestselling author, and sought-after speaker. He’s become an authority on regeneration and climate change, and frequently appears on CNN, Discovery, Reuters, NBC, Fox, and NPR. He co-founded Big Picture Ranch, a regenerative farm and film studio with his wife, Rebecca Harrell Tickell.
Together, they create impactful environmental films, including Kiss the Ground and the would-be sequel, Common Ground, which is narrated by Jason Momoa, Laura Dern, Donald Glover, Rosario Dawson, and Ian Somerhalder. Common Ground premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, earning the Human/Nature Award for its powerful message about regenerative agriculture and its potential to combat climate change. Josh Tickell, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me. It’s nice to see you and nice to be here.
Finally. We’ve had a bit of a stumble or two because the wildfires have been ravaging Southern California and I know that’s impacting you. I wondered if you could share a moment, a thought, or a prayer for what’s happening there.
Everybody in Southern California has friends and family who are affected. Prayers go out to everybody. Nobody anticipates being part of a natural disaster. When it happens, it usually happens quickly. There are many people impacted and many organizations working. Many opportunities to volunteer and contribute. Hopefully, folks reading do that.
On top of that, it’s a real wake-up call. It’s one thing when we see climate-related disasters in places we consider the developing world or the low and middle-income countries. It’s another thing when we see it in the thriving metropolis of Los Angeles, Tinseltown, the place where dreams are made. That will inspire a new dialogue with a new community about not just why we are at the impact of these climate-related catastrophes but also what the mechanism for building resilience is. Hopefully, regeneration comes into that conversation.
I have seen some media coverage of homes that survived the fire, some of which integrated things like living roofs with earth and structures incorporated. The soil helps protect the home. There are new technologies coming about and sometimes old technologies as well that can support things like reversing this climate issue. We’re going to get into that. As we get started, I have to say it was amazing to have the opportunity to screen Common Ground at Expo West in 2024.
I got the chance to briefly meet you and see you speak on stage with some of the others involved in the project. Gabe Brown was there. He’s wearing that red cape on the cover of your poster for Common Ground, our would-be hero of regenerative agriculture. John Roulac was there, who was the executive producer for Kiss the Ground. I’ve featured him on this show before. Kelly Ryerson, The Glyphosate Girl, who I also have interviewed on the show. It feels like I’ve been on this journey already with you for some time. I’m so appreciative we finally get to have this conversation.
Likewise. You’re in the mix of the people who are involved in these films already. That’s exciting.
Raising Awareness About Regenerative Agriculture
It’s great work. I have so many questions for you. First, I thought I would offer you the floor to share what drives you to share this regenerative agriculture story in particular through film.
My story goes back further than that. The Kiss the Ground journey began a few years ago but my personal journey into the area of environmentalism and regeneration began when I moved to America. I was nine years old. I moved from Australia to Louisiana to a place called Cancer Alley, where there are 150 petrochemical facilities and a 100-mile stretch of land. That area has cancer rates, according to the Louisiana newspaper, the Times-Picayune, that is 800 times the national average.
I watched people that I cared about getting sick from pollution from an extractive industry. I became interested in what the solutions are. What are the ways that we can have the modern lifestyle but we can mitigate these tremendous costs that are largely hidden from view? That set me on a lifetime journey. I have been very much involved in the environmental and climate movement ever since.
It’s an inspiring story indeed. Have you seen many changes occur in that particular area? Are the cancer rates down or are we seeing more of the same?
Cancer rates are not down in Louisiana.
That’s what I expected.
Let’s face it. This enters us into a larger conversation about what is regeneration and why on a global scale is this an important conversation. We have an economy that is fundamentally based on extraction. You pull a resource out of the crust of the earth, use it, and dispose of it. Sometimes that ends up in the atmosphere, sometimes that ends up in our waterways, and sometimes that ends up in our soil. It has to end up somewhere if you extract it and use it in a non-circular system.
Regeneration says, “Let’s not even take the idea that we can sustain a system in which we’re endlessly extracting resources from a finite system or planet. Let’s create economies in which they’re not only circular but you’re improving the base, which is ultimately ecology.” You’re improving the ecology in which we all live.
That could be the soil, air, water, ecosystem, or culture that was there beforehand. Usually, it’s a combination of all of those things. How do you leave something better than you found it? That’s the core question of regeneration. In essence, we are talking about regenerative agriculture in Common Ground, the film, which is coming out on April 22nd, 2025 on Amazon Prime Global. I’m very excited about that.
I’m so happy to get that streaming deal. That’s amazing.
We’re all thrilled. For everybody who’s worked on the projects, it’s a huge moment. Largely, what we’re talking about is a new era of human design and thinking when it comes to not just how we grow our food, which is massive, Maslow’s basic needs, water and food being at the basis of those needs but how do we design economies, communities, and cities so that they’re resilient and regenerative.
They are constantly getting better, not worse. It’s a big question. It’s almost a question that seems unattainable but it’s not because once you start diving into this, the food system that we have and the way to grow food regeneratively becomes an incredible example of how to do all of these other things in our modern world.
I was thinking about Kiss the Ground and Common Ground. I’ve seen both films and the story that was told from one to the other. I felt like with Kiss the Ground, you invited people to fall in love with soil. I was thinking about the impact that that film has already had. Yes, you involve some very big names in the project, which brings attention. You had Woody Harrelson and several others featured in there, including Paul Hawken, who I’ve interviewed on this show before. It felt perfect, especially with that focus on regeneration. Paul Stamets was also featured if I recall correctly.
You were able to create such this focus on soil that someone I never expected to take on that mantle, Sadhguru, started his whole program trying to educate the world about how concerned we have to be about topsoil, erosion, and the sorts of things that we need to do to invigorate soil health again. The bigger question is what do we need to stop? How much glyphosate is thrown onto our soils? How many chemicals end up in our waterways?
You have all of these individuals joining this movement to try and help the populace understand how big this issue is, which is no small feat. This is a big ask to get people to understand agriculture again when so many live in cement jungles. We’re not as connected to farming as we once were. With Kiss the Ground, you get people to fall in love with soil. It is about helping us reach a common ground and understand how we can move this to the mainstream. Where do you think we are in that phase? How do you see Common Ground helping us get there?
It’s exciting. To preface for the readers who aren’t familiar with these films, there are two films. The first is called Kiss the Ground and the second is called Common Ground. They’ll both be on Amazon Prime Global on April 22nd, 2025. You can find more information at KissTheGroundMovie.com and CommonGroundFilm.org. The interesting thing about being on this trajectory is seeing the transition.
When we began and launched Common Ground, there were less than 250,000 acres of regenerative agriculture in the United States. That number is somewhere in the range of 34 million acres. Bear in mind, it took 50 years to get 5 million acres into USDA-certified organic. It gives you a sense of the scale that we’re moving at and the speed of change.
There are small and medium farms that are involved but there are big companies involved, too. If you’re in the food space and food economy, food in North America is a $1 trillion-a-year industry. This is a serious total area market. This is a very big industry. The problem in the food space is largely profits have been stagnating. Organic was a profit generator for a while.
Even from a capitalistic greed perspective, food companies are looking for the next thing. Regeneration is clearly the next thing. They’re also aware of this reality. As time goes on, soils, as they deplete, produce less per acre. We have synthetically changed that temporarily in the United States by putting on more chemicals per acre over time. What we’re doing is artificially increasing the calories that an acre can produce.
You can do that for a while but eventually, the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t make sense. You’re putting so many chemicals onto a given field to sustain the number of calories while your soil goes down that your costs have gone up so much that the only way to grow is through subsidies. That’s how we grow in the United States. That’s why the majority of our acreage grows field corn, a product not edible by humans.
The majority of acres in the greatest agricultural producer by calories in the world are grown as a mono-crop of something that humans cannot eat that is rapidly depleting the soil at such a rate that synthetically we need to prop up that caloric production with chemicals. A truly insane system is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
The big food and ag companies know this. To some degree, they’ve been complicit because they’re making money on these chemicals that they’re putting on these fields. More fertilizer, more synthetic nitrate, more glyphosate, more of these very en masse toxic chemicals to the ecosystem and our biology as humans but they’re very profitable.
Petrochemicals are trying to find more places to put oil.
We’ve shifted the extraction from oil to food. We live in a Loctite economic system where to produce food, you have to extract oil. In the United States, the numbers range but it’s somewhere in the range of 2.8 calories of oil necessary to produce 1 calorie of food. That is an extremely inefficient system. We are essentially eating oil.
It’s transferred through field corn that becomes all of these products that we consume and we think that that’s food or nutrition. It’s not. It’s calories. That becomes the new American sickness. Whatever that derivative is we’re getting palliative health care to deal with because we’ve ingested not just empty calories but empty calories loaded with biotoxicity. We’re loading our systems constantly with that.
If you look at that system as a food company or somebody involved in the food space, certainly there’s money to be made in regenerative but if you have even a little bit of a conscience, you’re going go, “This is a crazy system.” We’re poisoning ourselves to grow more calories to destroy our soils, waterways, and climate. For what? It’s so we can make money. We can make money in other ways. I’ve got news.
That’s what regeneration is. It is a total system disruption. It begins with food because that’s the most degenerative system we have. Food is the number one way that humans interact with the planet and the climate. We address that first but when you start to see, you can take a monocropped soy in a massive farm and transition it to regenerative agriculture to a multiple species, biological, thriving ecosystem within 3 to 5 years. You’re building soil and equity in that farm for the next generation. What else is possible?
That’s what Common Ground shows. It breaks that mold and says, “Look what we can do over and over again.” It’s US-centric. There is a third film coming. I’m going to go ahead and give that away. That is international in nature and that’s coming out maybe in 2026. It’s the basic DNA, understanding of what is regeneration and what is available from a human standpoint in terms of healthy food for ourselves and our children.
1 in 4 Americans have a chronic food-related condition, including our children. That’s unprecedented. What would our population look like with regenerative healthy food? What would our land, water supplies, and climate look like? These are questions that we’re probing into in Common Ground, the film that comes out in April 2025.
One in four Americans have chronic food-related conditions, including the children.
How To Start Eating A Lot Healthier
It’s an exceptional film. I feel like it helps people understand how big the issue is and how we farm can be part of this solution for our climate crisis. We can reverse global warming. One of the things that Paul Hawken said when I had him on the show is we need to name the problem. The problem is that we’re making the planet too hot. Let’s name the problem and then work to fix it.
This sounds so simple but when you have an entire media system that is in crisis mode seemingly continually, they can’t even think about solutions. How do you think we can help people come on this journey and get a little bit more involved, thinking about how they spend their dollars and how they eat? If you have a perspective on the right diet, if there is one for the planet, I’d also love for you to offer your perspective there.
You hit the nail on the head about media. We are entering an era of new media, where the responsibility to share this information falls on the individual. If you’ve got Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, or TikTok, it’s up to you to share this information. This is critical. The information that we are consuming is 1 billion pounds of glyphosate.
It’s such a huge number. It’s so upsetting.
It’s completely unnecessary.
I laugh about it because it’s so gross.
It’s for weed control. Let’s face it. It’s a drug pushed by largely drug pushers. It interacts with the body on a cellular level. This is the kind of information that needs to get out there. The first thing to do is we need to begin to look at what we’re putting in our bodies. It affects your mental state, performance, and cognitive ability if you are eating garbage or the prescribed American garbage diet, the things that are in the middle of the grocery store. I guarantee you, it is affecting your health.
The first thing is to look at your pantry. You’re not going to transition your diet in a day. Most people aren’t. If you do, chances are you’ll go back. This is an iterative process where you learn change. What we want to do is begin to look at how we can do a meal a week that’s sourced from regenerative food. You might say, “That’s going to be expensive.”
First things first. Most of our food in America comes from a bag, box, carton, or bottle. Sixty-five percent of the American diet is hyper-processed food. It’s stuff that’s never been grown. If you’re eating food that has been grown, things like cabbage, lettuce, and sweet potatoes, right there, you’ve changed the balance of your diet. If you go one step further, go to a farmer’s market, and begin to ask farmers, “Where do you grow your food. Do you use glyphosate or these chemicals? Do you use atrazine or all of this? Are you regenerative,” that begins a new conversation.
65% of the American diet is hyper-processed food that has never been grown.
People are like, “Farmers markets, this is a privileged thing. It’s expensive.” I’ve never been to a grocery store and been able to bargain for a cucumber but if you say to a farmer, “I’m supporting a large family. I’m a single parent. I’ve got this much money,” the farmer is going to work with you. Most farmers markets in California will double EBT money so they’ll double food stamp money. You don’t get that in a grocery store or if you’re buying Coca-Cola and Cheetos.
In our local one here, I go to the farmers market and they have tokens for SNAP or EBT. It goes further.
It is not an issue of budget. It is an issue of commitment, forethought, and planning. I grew up on food stamps. I’m one of the few people I know in the modern environmental movement who physically got food stamps in Louisiana. That’s what we got as kids.
Here too. I did as well in Southern Oregon.
It’s an important program and it is critical that we take care of people who can’t afford it, especially children. The vast majority of those who are on the poverty line and hover below the poverty line each year are children in this country. Rethinking food from the standpoint of a child who may not have access is critical, especially for parents. We can think that through as well.
Rethinking your diet so you have the best cognitive ability you can so that your body is as strong as it can be and you’re eating as few toxins as possible will get you thinking about how to do more stuff for the world. Those are a couple of tips. There are plenty more tips in the Kiss the Ground book as well, which is available on Amazon. Those are some good food choice vectors. Kiss the Ground is the nonprofit organization of which we’re big fans. It has great food resources as well.
I want people to think when you started to talk about the monocropping of corn, not for human consumption. Who do you think’s consuming it? It’s the cattle and pork. It’s all of these meats that are not organic. Essentially, you can’t feed glyphosate-treated corn to organic certified animals. If you are eating meat, consider forking out a little extra cash for something that is organic because that animal will have been healthier and you’re not going to get that bioaccumulation of glyphosate being rocketed into your system, which is connected to all sorts of cancers.
If we see a rise in cancers in humans, how much of it is coming from one environment versus the other? We know the glyphosates in our water tables. That’s a big problem. If you’re eating the animals that ate glyphosate-enriched corn, enriched, I shouldn’t use that word but you get what I’m saying, you’re bioaccumulating even more of it. I’ve shifted from my family to buying from regenerative farms for the animal meats. That supports regenerative organic certifications and things like that.
The 34 million acres of regeneratively farmed land can improve more quickly because people with resources like myself are funding it in that way. We’re choosing to buy the meats that are more responsible for our families and myself. I’m mostly plant-based so consuming foods that are grown within 100 miles of my door is a privilege to be able to do that.
I’m here in California and we grow a lot of the produce that is otherwise shipped around the country. There are simple ways to do this. I love the resources that you’ve recommended. I have a recipe for an Indian lentil-inspired dish that I created after watching a TikTok video and trying to explore more vegan recipes and ways to get more protein into my diet without having to consume meat. There are other ways to do that, too.
For fork’s sake, if you’re going to eat meat that’s not fed corn, specifically in the United States, it’s interesting if you track the incidence of heart disease in the US. It tracks 1 to 1 against the introduction of corn as a feedlot staple. We’ve come to sell meat with the idea that these fat striations are what’s desirable. Those fat striations you will not find in grass-finished beef. The fat striations come from the seed oil that is inherent in corn.
What’s happening is we’re feeding corn to chickens, cows, and pigs. We’re eating it. That seed oil is essentially toxic in the human body. You can say that the correlation is spurious. There are many factors but to see a 1 to 1 tracking over time, that should at least wake people up to the possibility that it’s not necessarily the meat. It’s the how. It’s what the meat is eating.
The Sad Reality Of Animals In Cages
The sad thing about the way we treat animals in the United States is animals are part of the ecosystem. You can’t go to any thriving ecosystem on Earth and find a place with no animals. You can go to the United States and find a place where we’ve moved most of the four-legged creatures into pens. That is insane. Here are creatures that can participate in regenerating land but we’ve taken off the land. The land is turning to desert. It’s desertifying. We’ve stuffed the animals in cages.
Sometimes the human addiction to thinking that we know the best way and that nature had it wrong is counterproductive. We’re very handy so we’re toolmakers as a species. We love to come up with solutions. We don’t often come up with elegant solutions. We often come up with very complicated solutions that themselves create so many problems, i.e. rivers of effluent, massive pollution issues, and cancer.
The human addiction to think that we know the best way and nature had it wrong is often counterproductive.
We need all sorts of new solutions for the problem that we created by undoing the thing that nature does well, which is why regenerative agriculture, sorry to beat this drum but it’s what we’re talking about, is so powerful. It’s why Common Ground is such a powerful film because we show that you take the animals out of the feedlots and pulse them over the land in packs or herds.
How do animals move in nature? Herd animals move together. As an effect of predation or predators following, they move quickly. They don’t stay in one place. They don’t eat all the grass. They don’t destroy it down to the level of dirt and soil. They’re moving constantly. Regenerative ranchers and farmers have to use a lot of perceptive tools. They have to look at the height of the grass, and the amount of precipitation they’ve gotten. They look at the entire ecosystem and the watershed. What are the available water sources?
It’s not a cut-and-dry formula but when they get into it and learn to do it, the regeneration is visual. On a year-to-year basis, you can see an increase in soil mass on that same land. Whereas neighbor’s lands, the soil will be going down and down. It’s not rocket science but it does require a deeper level of ecological understanding. Once that ecological understanding is in place, you can transform deserts back into ecosystems. That’s why I’m still fired up about regeneration after doing this for over a decade.
I’m fired up about it too but an open space preserve. My property looks out on cattle that are grazing. They move them from one part of the field to another and rotate them so that they don’t overgraze. There are two reasons. One, they’re trying to preserve a California grass that is endangered to ensure that it can continue to propagate. Another is there’s a beetle that’s on the land. It is the Scottish dung beetle. It’s very regionally specific. It hunts by sight and it needs ruminants on the land grazing so that it can see and do its thing.
Those are a couple of things but those cows are regeneratively farmed. Every year, I see when their new babies come out. The day-old calves are right there grazing along with mama and a part of the herd. They move as a group from one specific area to the other over the course of their growing season. They look healthy. You can buy half of a cow or a quarter cow from these local regenerative farmers who are working in collaboration with open space preserves and the park system to be able to do this.
Insights About Different Certifications
It is a community effort. We’re involving multiple parties that are serving the ecosystem as well as providing a food source. It’s different than a lot of the others that you might see out there that are much larger as an operation. Thinking through the whole regenerative story, there are a couple of certifying bodies coming out to be able to help regulate or help people understand that this product is regeneratively ground.
You’ve got the regenerative organic certification, which Patagonia is coming out in support of as well as the Dr. Bronner’s people. Also, Gabe Brown, who you featured in your film. The certification is called Regenified. These two certifications are things that people can look for on products that they might buy, the methods that they use, or what they consider as certifiable. It’s maybe a little different on the organic side.
Regenerative organic requires that the producer already be organic certified and then they’re layering on regenerative. With regenified, you don’t necessarily have to already be organic certified. You’re moving towards it. There’s some infighting between these perspectives. I wonder where you stand on the whole story there.
Consumers report tremendous confusion at the grocery store because there are so many little labels.
There are so many edges.
Grass-fed, does that mean that it ate corn for the last year of its life? It can. Grass-fed can mean it was fed grass until the last year, which is typically what they do. They feed a cow grass and then the last year, they feed corn. There’s that. There’s fair trade. There are so many labels. We’re going to have regenerative labels. Consumers aren’t exactly excited but you should be. How else do we know if a brand is doing the work?
There’s a reason why we created 100MillionAcres.org. Check it out. It’s online. The reason that was created with the Common Ground film was to have a place for companies to showcase their commitment to regeneration. All of the major certifiers that are for real in North America are there. You mentioned Regenified and ROC. There’s a third that we feature as one of the silver signatories and that’s land to market. Those three are the ones that we feel hold the most weight.
There are others listed, which are also good. If people are looking for labels, I’ve noticed, even in regular grocery stores, they’re starting to be regeneratively grown potato chips and regeneratively grown this. We need to see one of these logos. Regenerative by itself, what does that mean? Says who? How did you certify? How do we know?
The reason 100 Million Acres is important is it quantifies the number of acres that are in a certification program that we can look at and that has transparency. The methods and outcomes are transparent. We understand what’s happening. These are real acres. They’re not fabricated acres. They’re GIS-able. They exist. They’re farmed. They’re in the United States. Should we manage to achieve the 100 Million Acres objective, which I believe will happen. We have a plan to increase that number and make it global.
My stance on this is we need all of the great people to work together. We need all of the great certifiers to be together on this. This is a David and Goliath story. We don’t want all the Davids fighting among themselves. It’s too small a movement and it’s too nascent. That’s why 100 Million Acres is a collaborative effort between the various certifiers.
Having the unique experience of living and working in this industry, I’ve seen a lot of invitations from different certifying bodies. Part of that is you have a market space. People are vying for control of the market but you also have that consumer mind issue where they’re like, “It’s a lot. This is too much.” You have sixteen badges on a bag of potato chips, the potato chip example.
What I love about Gabe Brown’s perspective with Regenified is that they have a system to integrate and bring in farmers who weren’t already organic and bring them along that primrose path to get there, away from the glyphosate to something more. To me, that’s a truly progressive movement that is an invitation in and that can show them success along the way.
I love how in your film Common Ground, you were able to so visually juxtapose what can happen when you’re farming in this way, using cover crops, not plowing the soil, bringing in livestock at an appropriate time, and being sensitive to how this all contributes to a healthy thriving ecosystem. You see the dirt patch next door. It’s so stark and obvious.
Yet the farmers who have grown up through generations doing it the old way, there can be a lot of resistance. You come in with this perspective that it must be organic first. Suddenly, you could be alienating these farmers as you’re working to get to 100 million acres or more. What’s happening is truly beautiful. We are moving in a direction of something that is healthy, good, and better. I know that your films play a part in this.
How Josh’s Films Come Together
I’m thrilled to see that on April 22nd, 2025. People can watch Common Ground and Kiss the Ground on Amazon Prime. They’re broadly available. Most households in the United States have access to Amazon Prime, be it on your phone, online, or with an Amazon stick. That’s wonderful. I wonder if you could help us understand moving from Kiss the Ground to Common Ground and then this next international film, and how this whole story is going to come forward. What can we learn from it or bring forward to help more people understand the story?
No one has a crystal ball. If they do, they’re probably trying to sell you something. As much as I’d love to predict the future, the reason why we set the number at 100 million acres is that the United States has 900 million acres of what’s called production agriculture. That is 900 million acres dedicated to growing foodstuffs. The smallest part of that is pulses, vegetables, and fruits, which is what we specialize in California and doing. The vast majority of those acres are dedicated to monocrops and ranching. Many of the acres in the United States like in other countries are not appropriate for growing annuals. You can’t grow lettuce in the Southwest of New Mexico without tremendous water resources, which they don’t have.
It’s too arid.
It’s the right agriculture performed in the right ecology for the right regeneration. You have to think about all of those things together. What is the ecology able to support? What is the food that can be grown there? What is going to be the regenerative impact of that food? It turns out that when you think about acreage that way, we can produce the same or generally speaking, more calories per acre than we do with the monocrop system we have.
To determine the right food to grow in a particular region that will yield the right impact, you must get the right combination of the right ecology and regeneration.
One of the big points in Common Ground is farmers make on average $0.4 on the dollar that we spend at the grocery store. That doesn’t make sense. The person growing the food who takes all the risk and has to put up the land and lawns is making $0.4 on the dollar. Something’s wrong with the system. Who makes all the rest? The film goes into that too.
Economically speaking, and then if you look at what’s the cost to the American person, the taxpayer, we’re spending additional money on top of the food dollar. We spend some of the least per capita in the world on food. We spend some of the least per capita per calorie. We have among the highest medical costs per calorie in the world.
Just because you’re getting a calorie of poison for cheap doesn’t mean there’s not an ancillary cost that you’re not going to pay. You are going to pay for it. You’re going to pay in fact more than they pay in Europe but you’re going to pay in fact more than is paid in South America. You’re going to pay for that poison in medical bills or life costs. What does it cost to be in a hospital bed? What does it cost to be with a chronic disease or sickness for your life?
What’s the value of a life? We have a different conversation. Not what’s the value of a calorie but what’s your life worth? What’s your life worth if you have chronic arthritis, ADD, ADHD, or early-onset Alzheimer’s? None of these things are caused by food alone but as we understand genomics and the role of food and poison in the body, what we understand is that the genome that we have may be the gun but it’s the food or the poison that pulls the trigger.
What is the thing that catalyzes disease is often toxicity in the body and inflammation. Much of this is related to the poison that we eat because we’ve got a mono-crop system that relies on fossil fuel to extract as much as possible and build as many calories as possible out of the shortest period and destroy the soil and the water resource.
We’ve added the next component, which is life, and what the value of life is. This is where that system completely breaks down. Yes, it makes a lot of money and pays for synthetic chemicals but ultimately, it is a bio side. The system itself is a poison against life, human life, microbial life in the soil, animal life, plant life, and ultimately earth life. That’s where are we going with the story that began with Kiss the Ground and we advanced with Common Ground.
We’re going to a different economic model. We’re going to a model where the people who safeguard life, the largest way that we interact per acreage planetarily is with our food system. Who interacts? Do we who live in cities do that? No. It’s through a group of middle people called farmers and ranchers. Those are the people who directly interact. In the United States, it’s a million people. A million people effectively grow the food for the rest of us.
In India, there are a million regenerative farmers already to give you a sense of how quickly this can scale. We only have a million farmers and ranchers in the whole country that provide the calories for the rest of us. That is an easily changeable number but the economics have to change, too, meaning they can’t get $0.04 on the dollar. Meanwhile, these big chemical ag companies are the ones raking in the profit.
Inside the trajectory that we’re proposing, we’re looking at ways of shortening the distance between what is grown and what is on your plate. We’re looking at ways of how we create transparency so that if you are a food company, you’re being honest about not just the food but the money. It’s great to have regenerative food but if you’re still bankrupting the farmer, that means you’re bankrupting the community and the land.
It’s moving back to this circular system, where they enforce life. Life is left in a better position than when we began. That is going to start to translate into financial institutions. If I’m a bank and I’m giving a loan to a farmer, a collective loan to a farming enterprise, or a large company, or I’m helping to float certain financial instruments that keep the market alive, what are my criteria? The criteria is to destroy the planet and make as much money as possible.
If I begin to look at that regeneratively as a regenerative economic model, I’m going, “I’m going to give you this loan but you’re going to have to show me that on the 200,000 acres that you do business, there’s more biodiversity in the soil after the loan has been spent. There’s more carbon in the soil. The people who live and work on that land, including the people who were originally working and living on that land before Europeans showed up in this country, are better off than they were before.” I’m using a financial instrument to regenerate the Earth and the people who live there. That’s power. That is changing an extractive economic model to a model that is effectively providing regenerative services. This is what I mean when I say we are on a journey that is both economic and biologically based.
It has to be in a way.
It starts with Kiss the Ground and it goes through Common Ground. It’s going to go to the third film. I hope everybody comes on this journey because it is food but it’s deeper and broader than food. We spent hundreds and hundreds of years extracting the resources of the planet to build the society that we have. For some reason, we’re still in the addictive model of wrapping everything we can in plastic that gets thrown away. We’re addicted to extraction.
We have spent hundreds of years extracting the planet’s resources to build the society we have today. But for some reason, we are still addicted to wrapping everything we can with plastic that gets thrown away.
There are two things that you’ve brought up for me. One, the soil is a living organism. We’re killing our own microbiome by eating this terrible way, continuing on these extractive avenues, eating foods that come in plastic and boxes almost exclusively, not shopping mostly perimeter of the store, and not shopping for foods that aren’t concentrated on soy and corn.
If we shift away from that, two things happen. One, a lot of the big packaged food companies are going to be struggling for profits all of a sudden. These are massive companies. You’re talking about Nabisco. They’re huge. Even within the natural products industry and the somewhat smaller but still very large slice of that trillion-dollar food annual market size.
We are then shifting habits to people being more closely connected to their food. That means that you can build in more profits than the 4% that the farmers are presently seeing because we’re not just shuttling that money over to branded, finished goods products that are full of trans fats and other gross stuff that we don’t need to get into.
They essentially are coming from an extractive principle and race to the bottom pricing to create something that they can sell truckloads of quite easily moving away from this perspective of a calorie being mostly you’re paying for gas and oil to one of truly paying for the nutrition that is coming into your body that supports your microbiome, the earth’s microbiome, the soil health, and the entire ecosystem that sequesters carbon that essentially makes everything healthier.
Why Regeneration Means Setting Politics Aside
It’s a monumental change in how we’ve moved things. We’re saying, “No, we need to go back in a very big way.” Hearing you talk about the finances of it and putting different markers in place, I’m like, “Yes and.” I want to do that as quickly as possible. I’m so bought in. I’ll be the cheerleader on the sideline helping to move that journey forward. Like many things, it’s difficult to change massive industries.
I’ve heard some say that with the incoming administration because Bobby Kennedy is involved, there could be some positive and silver lining pieces to this whole food and FDA drug, how we manage these things, and move in a healthier direction. I wonder what your thoughts are given the incoming administration if you have anything to share.
We place too much weight on various new leaders. “We don’t have the old leader. We don’t have the leader we like.” We have to think bigger than that. This is first of all a global movement. It’s well beyond the borders of the United States of America. Second of all, it essentially doesn’t matter in some ways whose name is on that office door.
Our job as a movement is to make regeneration happen. That means we need all of the leaders, not some of them, involved, regardless of the political stripe that they are. We need to depoliticize our future and the importance of life. It doesn’t matter what your political beliefs are. You still eat. You’re hopefully fortunate enough to have that. We need to take a humanistic approach to this and know that there will be changes in leadership. That is part of human nature that’s been happening.
It’s going to take longer than four years to move this anyway.
It’s been happening for thousands of years. It’s not going to stop. We need to take an approach that is extremely inclusive. Our future depends on it. The regenerative movement is extremely important and I’m going to tell you why. I’ve been in the environmental movement for many years. There are fewer and fewer of us that can say that.
I’ve protested. I’ve been arrested. I’ve been an activist. I’ve been loud and quiet. I’ve been on the front lines. I’ve been behind the camera. I’ve been behind the scenes. I’ve been to Washington. I’ve lobbied. I’ve done such a broad spectrum of stuff inside the movement. What I have not seen but I am seeing for the first time is a coalescence of social justice issues, BIPOC issues, earth-related issues, urban issues, suburban issues, rural issues, climate issues, food issues, health issues, and children’s issues all around a singular, powerful, monolithic banner.
That is regeneration. It is a highly inclusive open-source movement, which means it’s bound to be messy. There’s bound to be greenwashing. There are bound to be people tearing it apart, infiltrating it, and using it for other things but the amazing thing about regeneration is you can see it. You know when it’s happening because you’ve got a field that’s verdant and green. You can measure the life. You can scientifically measure the biodiversity in that field. You’ve got the other field right across the way that is dead and has a smidgen of the biodiversity.
Not only can we anecdotally, visually, and viscerally but we can hear it, see it, smell it, and taste it. Those are helpful indicators when it comes to human beings. We can measure it scientifically. Yes, the movement is messy and huge. It is a big banner but it’s the first time since the birth of the modern environmental movement that we have such an inclusive, powerful thing happening. It’s because it’s not just the environment. It’s not just an eco thing that happens in California. It touches all of us. In terms of your thoughts on where this goes and how this works out, if it works out, we balance the climate.
We thrive.
We create a regenerative food system that can feed ten billion people regardless of who gets elected here or there or when they leave office. Those things are transient. What we’re talking about is the next thousand years of civilization. How do we build a civilization that leaves each successive generation, leaves the planet better than they found it, and the financial equity of what that generation created is increased over the previous generation. That’s real wealth. Real wealth translates into quality of life. Quality of life translates into human experience. What is the value of a life well lived? That’s the real question. Can we provide that value to the majority of human beings on this planet? We will have accomplished something that is evolutionarily speaking new.
That’s the perfect note on which to wrap up our conversation. I feel like you summarized for me my reasons for pursuing my PhD in sustainability. I am hyper-focused on the intersection of nutrition and health, sustainability, and how we educate the masses. Perhaps, you and I can stay connected on that front. A layer of what you’re doing could end up in my dissertation.
That would be an honor. I’d love to stay connected, Corinna.
Hats off to you. I had my Common Ground hat. I was going to wear it for this interview but I ended up gifting it to a friend who is in love with the film and the hat.
It’s a popular hat. I know.
Moving it on, the trucker caps.
Ian Somerhalder wore it on TikTok and it blew up. It went crazy.
Closing Words And Episode Wrap-up
It was a perfect swag item for the event. Thank you so much for everything you do.
Instagram, @CommonGroundFilm, and then my Instagram @JoshTickell.
I’ll be sure to tag everything through and through, whether or not TikTok goes away, I’ll hopefully put something up there. We will see. Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it so much.
‐‐‐
Please join our newsletter. For every new subscriber, we’re planting a tree through our partnership with ForestPlanet. Thank you for being a part of this show and community because together, we can do so much more. We can care more. We can be better. We can support our precious planet, grow, and enjoy truly regenerative food, and reverse global warming. Thank you.
Important Links
- Big Picture Ranch
- Kiss the Ground
- Common Ground
- Regenerative Agriculture, Soil Health and Carbon Sequestration with John Roulac, Executive Producer of Kiss The Ground – Past episode
- Freeing The Soil Of Glyphosate With Kelly Ryerson – Past episode
- The Ecosystem Wilting Point Threshold and Defining Regeneration with Paul Hawken – Past episode
- Kiss the Ground
- 100MillionAcres.org
- Common Ground Film on Instagram
- Common Ground on YouTube
- Kiss the Ground on Instagram
- Kiss the Ground on YouTube
- Josh Tickell on Instagram
- Josh Tickell on LinkedIn
- Josh Tickell on Facebook
