Master My Garden Podcast
Master My Garden Podcast
- EP288 Josh Tickell Big Picture Ranch Chats: Soil Revolution: Regenerative Farming's Global Impact
Soil health emerges as the unlikely hero in our quest to feed a growing population, reverse climate change, and restore human health in this eye-opening conversation with documentary filmmaker Josh Tickell. As the creative force behind the acclaimed "Kiss the Ground" and "Common Ground" documentaries, Josh brings decades of environmental advocacy experience and firsthand observations from regenerative farms across the globe.
The conversation challenges fundamental assumptions about our food system. Josh reveals how 75% of global calories are actually produced by smallholder farmers working less than an acre, dispelling the myth that industrial agriculture is necessary to "feed the world." He exposes the true cost of our current system—where we burn 4-5 calories of fossil fuel to produce just one calorie of food in developed nations—and connects this inefficiency to broader health and environmental crises.
Perhaps most compelling is Josh's evidence of rapid change already underway. In just five years, regeneratively managed land in the US has increased from 5 million to over 50 million acres. This growth comes as consumers and companies alike recognize that the current system isn't just unsustainable—it's fundamentally broken. Through vivid examples from diverse global regions, Josh demonstrates how regenerative practices rebuild soil, produce abundant food, and create resilience against climate instability.
The conversation turns when Josh explains how our individual food choices represent powerful actions that reverberate through the marketplace. Every regenerative product purchased sends signals to boardrooms worldwide, accelerating the transition toward healthier systems. As Tickell puts it, "We're just edging up to the tipping point," suggesting we're witnessing the early stages of a profound transformation in how we grow food and relate to the land beneath our feet.
Watch "Kiss the Ground" and "Common Ground" now on Amazon Prime, and look for the trilogy's conclusion, "Groundswell," in 2026. Your garden, your shopping choices, and even your bare feet connecting with soil are all part of this revolution.
If there is any topic you would like covered in future episodes, please let me know.
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Until next week
Happy gardening
John
How's it going, everybody, and welcome to episode 288 of Master my Garden podcast. Now, this week's episode is one I've been looking forward to for a while. I'm just back from holidays and, as you do on holidays, you get a little bit of time to think about. You know different things and this is an episode I've been thinking about for a while. So for any of you that listen to the podcast and have listened to it over over the last number of years, you'll know that soil health is hugely important. You know it's something that we talk about on a regular basis. We talk about treating the soil with care and so on.
Speaker 1:You will also know that there's some documentaries that I've watched over the years that really kind of I connected with and what we talk about in the podcast. It relates very much to them, and one of those documentaries is Kiss the Ground. I've watched it multiple times up to 10 times at this stage and for this week's episode I'm delighted to be joined by the producer of those documentaries, and Josh DeKalb has created that Kiss the Ground documentary. He's also done the follow-on, which was Common Ground, and there's another one, a trilogy, coming out next year which is Groundswell, and all of these touch on, I suppose, the food systems, agriculture and regenerative farming, centered around soil health, and they're fascinating documentaries. As I say, I've watched Kiss the Ground up to 10 times, so it's a little bit different in terms of the content that we normally talk about on a week-to-week basis, but one that I think will resonate with all you guys, seeing as we talk so much about soil health and the importance of it. So, josh, you're very, very welcome to Mastering my Garden Podcast.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, john, and thanks to your viewers and your listeners for being interested in this topic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know it is. It's something that we've spoke about a lot and, as I've said, off air it's up to 10 times. I've watched this Kiss the Ground particularly and always get something out of it. It's obviously narrated brilliantly by Woody Harrelson. You know, and I suppose it's something that you highlight in some of your other interviews is that it's not all doom and gloom which sometimes these movies or these documentaries about environmental issues can be.
Speaker 1:There can be no kind of light at the end of the tunnel. But certainly with all of these there is a light at the end of the tunnel that is clearly narrated through. You definitely highlight the places that we're in now and where we need to go to, but there is, you know, ways shown and it's backed up scientifically, you know, with the, with the help of some very great farmers gabe brown obviously in the first one and you know that sort of gives light at the end of the tunnel, as as I said. But Kiss the Ground has been one that I've delved into so many times, really really love it. So honored, completely honored, to have you on the podcast.
Speaker 2:It's great to be here, so glad that you've got a lot of benefit from the film you know. As you know, Kiss the Ground now has Common Ground, which is the second film in the series. It's also on Amazon Prime for people who want to see that. And then working on a third film. Who knew that there would be three soil films spanning 13 years of life?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and Groundswell is going to be out next year. We might chat a little bit about that shortly. Obviously it's still in production works. But what really interests me know, there's some other of your documentaries that I haven't watched and but there is a particular team through that. So I'm kind of interested to know what is it? Obviously you're a filmmaker and you know documentary maker and those. Once you gets a topic that is resonating with the general public and there's a demand for it and an appetite for it, then you know it's it's easy to to go and make another one because you know that that demand and appetite is there. But obviously behind that there's, there's something that drives you to make this type of movie, because it seems to be a team through all of the ones you've made. So what is it that that you to you know?
Speaker 2:go for this type of a documentary stroke film. Well, I was born in Australia and then I moved to Louisiana. When I was nine I moved to a place called Cancer Alley or Cancer Corridor. It's the petrochemical refining center of the United States of America. There's 150 petrochemical facilities there. The average cancer incidence is 800 times the national average.
Speaker 2:So people have leukemia, lymphoma, all of these very, very, very strange diseases, but they have them in vast numbers. So I watched members of my family get sick and die from this stuff at a young age. Meanwhile, the environment itself was both beautiful and toxic. It was both beautiful and very polluted. So it was a lot at nine years of age to sort of make that mental transition, I think, from a pristine environment out back of Australia to one that had been, you know, largely just sabotaged and abandoned by toxic industries. And I thought at that point and I still do this is a bad way to do things. There must be a better way. You it, you know, never thought well, people shouldn't drive cars, or we shouldn't fly planes, or we shouldn't have civilization or society. I just thought why, you know why destroy the environment and why make people sick to accomplish the things we need to do it just. It just seemed lazy or poorly thought out, and so that's been my ethos for 40 years.
Speaker 2:I've been in the environmental movement for over 40 years and the idea that I come with is very simple To every problem there's a solution, and if we haven't figured out the solution, we just haven't worked hard enough. You know we haven't wrapped our heads around the problem. Generally speaking, we're looking at the problem through two small lens. We need to expand the view. You know, like with climate change or oil pollution. You know oil dependence or oil pollution. You know oil dependence. These things tend to have occurred because of a very small, myopic understanding of the world, and that led me on a crazy wild journey, you know, from organic farming and wolfing when I was younger, in my teens and 20s, across Europe and you know, parts of Central America, to finding biodiesel and seeing Rudolf Steiner's original journals in the you know man Museum archives in Germany and realizing that he designed the diesel engine to run on vegetable oil. To building a veggie van and getting fryer grease out of used cooking oil restaurants, mcdonald's, kfc across the US and being on the Today Show. You know, at 17 years old to you know, writing my first book about biodiesel, my second book and working for the biofuels industry. I ended up working for, you know, some of the biggest agricultural conglomerates in the world and going to DC and you know being part of efforts on uh in Congress and seeing everything the whole span from the farm all the way to you know, the the halls of power, and realizing after all that journey that the problem is still the same whether it's agriculture or oil.
Speaker 2:And we often trade one for another because in our modern society, you know, the most efficient countries, the most efficient countries, are spending about 1.5 to 2 calories of fossil fuel energy to create one calorie of food. That's in the developing world. Now, in the developed world, in the developing world, it's very different. There are countries, numerous countries, where smallholder farmers are the majority of food, where they're using far less than one calorie of fossil energy and they're producing more than that in food calories. So that should tell us something Like wait, why is a country like Uganda more efficient on a per-calorie basis at growing food than a country like the United States with all of our modern technology and GPS and satellite?
Speaker 2:And the reason is we're cheating, and when you cheat at the gambling table. You can make anything look good, right? And so the way we make food is we're just eating fossil fuel. It's very simple we just eat four or five calories of fossil fuel to get one calorie of food. That's it, and so the two are intrinsically linked, right? You cannot, in the modern world, based on the design that we bought into, have the society that we have without fossil fuels, because we have to eat fossil fuels. We're literally eating fossil energy, but that has a knock-on effect called climate, right? So there's, you know, the system is a system and you can't cheat because the rules are very set. And so that leads us to a question regardless of if you start with energy or food, you still get to the same question is how do we feed 10 billion people?
Speaker 2:yeah and stabilize the climate and have a functioning society and a healthy economy and have healthy people. Uh, and and to? To answer that question, we've got to get out of the little silos of like me, me, me me. Solar climate change, electric cars you know, and you've got to get into a big picture and you've got to look at it as a system, and when you do that, the answer gets really clear, really fast yeah, and it is.
Speaker 1:I've been in rooms, in boardrooms, listening to the talk from an angle of um, you know the chemical industry and I've heard it being said that it isn't possible to feed the world into not possible yeah can't do it, can't do it, can't do it.
Speaker 2:We tried, we tried. We did that in 1956.
Speaker 1:Herbert.
Speaker 2:Grace, the founder of the company, he did it.
Speaker 1:He tried, didn't work, got to use fossil fuels and it's very easy to knock somebody who asks a question around that by saying it's not possible to feed anybody.
Speaker 2:It's so hard to disprove a negative, and that's how. That's the myopic sort of very limited vision that runs much of the extractive machine, the corporate machine inside which we all live. Right, it's like, well, somebody tried that at some stage. I know they did, because otherwise why would we be here? It's like, did you ever think that if you start asking questions and start pulling the thread, the fabric might pull apart and the wool will come off your eyes? And all of a sudden you're looking at a system in which you're just perpetuating a myth.
Speaker 2:And that's what regenerative agriculture is. It is literally the flip side of the myth. It's the reality of the biogenic cycle in which we live, taken into a system that actually functions for our health and that is like for the corporate extractive economy, which is based on limited resources. Anytime you limit a resource and you make the resource very valuable, everybody wants it right. So now there's competition, and so now whoever controls the resource wins. That's the model, that's modern, that's modern economy, that's Adam Smith economics, right. But if you go, well, what if there was a totally different system, in which abundance was the engine? Calories were not limited by your fossil fuel extraction. They were limited only by your imagination and your ability to use solar energy, and if you're able to use the tools that have been here for thousands and thousands of years, since humans began to cultivate, you could have as many calories as you want for 10 billion people, and you could build the soil while you do it.
Speaker 2:And you could sequester all the carbon that you accidentally put in the atmosphere. Wow, that would be a different economic model. Now we're talking about regenerative economics, which is even one step above the agricultural idea itself, and we can go back to the agriculture and go back to the soil. But again, if you want to solve a big problem, your context has to get bigger than the problem, and we've got a lot of people right now thinking to try and constrain these problems in small context, which is why it's failing. It's why the environmental movement has largely not been able to succeed for the four decades that I've participated in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we will take a step backwards in a second. Firstly, you mentioned something there about cheating at the roulette table. I think you said, and what you're talking about here is basically heavily subsidised, the system that we have now heavily subsidised food production with the use of chemicals, fertilisers etc. And that's the cheating element that you're talking about and we will talk about. You know, in Kiss the Ground there's a few great examples of large scale examples of how regenerative farming can work and does work. Interestingly enough, that has just sparked something in my mind.
Speaker 1:A couple of years ago I covered an episode on the podcast again after coming back from holidays, which is typically in that part of July, and it was it was two weeks in Tuscany in Italy, and I spoke about I spoke about on that on that episode about there was there was a food production area all around us, but there was. We used to go out on the bikes and in the daytime there was a beautiful little farm shop. Now there wasn't a lot of houses around or notable amount of houses around, but inside in the farm shop you had so much choice of food. 99% of it was produced on the land or on neighbor's land and it was very much a community element to it. It was a case. Now this is small scale to a certain extent, but it just gives an example of what I think is perfect food system.
Speaker 1:There was a lady inside in the shop.
Speaker 1:She was running the shop.
Speaker 1:There was beautiful pumpkins, melons, tomatoes, onions, and there was the husband in the background on a little mini tractor and every so often she would go out and say I need x, y and z, and off he'd go into the field or the next field and he'd come back with what she wanted and the shop got stocked up and during a continuous because I watched it for four or five hours just out of interest and it was amazing the amount of people as I say, there's no obvious houses around, but the amount of people that came over that period of time took away what looked like their week of ingredients and it was all being topped up all the time from within a very, very small radius.
Speaker 1:Now, at that small scale, I saw something similar this year in Croatia. How can we get to a situation where I suppose we can make that into a bigger scale, because those growers are brilliant and they work to do are brilliant, but it does need to be on a huger scale you know the likes of Gabe Brown's scale for it to truly work in terms of feeding everybody doesn't it yes and no.
Speaker 2:Okay, 75% of calories on Earth are grown by smallholder farmers, so we're talking less than an acre for the most part.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there is a misnomer how do we feed 10 billion people? We need to scale up. We need to make everything industrial. You know there's no evidence to support that. The evidence supports the opposite, right? So if we're really going to ask the question, then we actually have to look at the evidence. We have to do an investigation, right?
Speaker 2:We have to look at the data, and what the data shows is, first of all, the type of caloric intake that we do in the United States is totally insane. 65% of our calories are from ultra-processed food. Processed and ultra-processed foods Bags, boxes, cartons and containers in the middle of the grocery store. The vast majority of that is just corn, soy and wheat that has been repackaged. So you know why are we spending $2 billion in food stamps on Coke and Pepsi fizzy products that contain sugar that creates diabetes? We have prenatal diabetes that didn't exist prior to putting corn syrup into fizzy drinks. Right, we're literally as taxpayers. We pay to make sure that people don't go hungry, but what that actually means is, you know, big soft drink companies make billions of dollars from people eating sugar to make them sick, so that then we can spend trillions of dollars in the healthcare. So when people go oh, we don't have enough money or we don't have enough land. It's like let's look at the system, because right now you're spending what just in the United States? A trillion, $2 trillion on palliative healthcare to deal with your food system which, by the way, healthcare to deal with your food system. Which, by the way, you're tax subsidizing companies to produce food to make people sick. I don't know, I don't know about you, but that doesn't seem like a there's zero logic in that system whatsoever. That is a profit driven system to make people sick to make money, right?
Speaker 2:And so the objective of the current food system, the industrial food system, is to make people as sick and fat as possible, as fast as possible, and then to make as much money on the pharmaceutical side as possible. And, by the way, a lot of those companies are the same company, right? Bayer makes Roundup, it makes glyphosate, and then Bayer makes a product for cancer, to treat the non-Hodgkin's lymphoma which you get from Roundup, right? So the more Roundup you use, the more people get sick, the more money they make. And so when you really peel apart the chemical food system, you realize that these companies are, if not the same companies, they're very interlinked. They share board members, they share resources, they share pipelines, they share infrastructure and largely the chemical, sick pharmaceutical industrial complex is the same as the chemical food industrial complex.
Speaker 2:Right, and so you go well, oh, but we feed people. We feed them a lot of calories, you go well. No, you feed a small number of the human population a lot of empty calories, mostly carbohydrates, which, the more science we do, reality of distortion, because 75% of human population is not fed by that right. So now we go to the larger question, which is could we in effect have some kind of hybrid diet where we build from ancient knowledge? What did ancient people eat? You know, ancient being pre-industrial, right, and what modern tools could we use to do that? And it turns out that when we look at protein specifically, when we look at animal protein specifically, we in the Western world know very little about animal protein, how to raise animals. Well, we, we do one of two things we either stick them in factory farms and feed them corn, yeah, and then we eat them.
Speaker 2:Makes everybody sick. It's a terrible system. Or we let them free range, we just let them graze. Both systems create desertification, both. Both systems ruin soil. Both systems release the carbon that's in the soil up into the atmosphere. If you see five or six cows in a paddock just grazing, or sheep, as you would in the UK, that's desertification. That is destroying the soil. It's also lazy farming. I'm sorry to say I'm not a farmer. It's a. It's a hard job. Yeah, it's a. It's an incredibly humbling task.
Speaker 2:We tried to run a five acre ranch here in Ohio, california, for many years, um, unsuccessfully and successfully. But I've documented no less than a hundred regenerative operations around the world in australia, kenya, uganda, asia, africa, um, india, the uk, america, colombia, south america and they, they're all consistent. They mob graze, they put the animals together and they move them, just like a wolf would when four-legged animals are moved, as they were in nature. With a predator type mentality, they build soil. If you let them free, graze and do whatever they want, they'll take the best plants, they'll take the new plants and those are the plants that destroy the soil. That's the grass that you actually need. Destroyed the soil, that's the grass that you actually need. They'll selectively graze on what they want versus being forced, as they would in nature, to move across a landscape, fertilize that landscape and keep moving and not come back for at least six months.
Speaker 2:Most of the world, like over 80%, need the six month rest period between grazings, and most ranchers get that wrong, even regenerative ranchers. I see them getting it wrong all the time. They're like why is my soil degraded? You're overgrazing. It's so simple.
Speaker 2:So all of that is to say that when you pack those animals together and move them across the landscape, you have higher herd density, meaning many more animals. So we're actually growing. This is true in the UK too. I've seen it. I've never seen grazing like the UK, and the UK ironically exported its system to the rest of the world. Because you get rain all the time, so you have grass, so it looks green. So, oh, we'll just put a handful of sheep, a handful of cattle and we'll just let them be in the paddock forever, meanwhile soil resources gone down right. So what we actually need in globally is higher stock density, which generally means more animals, and less time on the ground, which means moving faster, and less time on the ground, which means moving faster. When you really do the numbers, there's far more protein available than what we're growing today, and that's a stunning, shocking, controversial thing to say, especially with the sort of move toward a more plant-based plate. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:But you know, there's a reason why lewis and clark came across the americas and and when they, when they found the cherokee, when they found the native people and the denae and all of the different tribes, they were stunned because here were these small, white, kind of emaciated english people who were literally small in stature. And they came upon these indigenous people who were huge and muscular and tall and they realized, oh, they eat bison. It's simple and that's pretty much what they ate. That was it. They didn't do a lot of greens.
Speaker 2:And the irony of that whole thing is we think the indigenous people didn't do agriculture and meanwhile they were changing entire landscapes, they were managing forests. There's now evidence that the Amazon forest itself was seeded and created by indigenous people. So some of the great forests on earth that are producing our oxygen were probably at least with the data that we have now, probably and very likely they were the result of regenerative agriculture. So we think about it, it's like, okay, ancient people far more carnivorous diet. They built soil, they built forests, they built landscapes. And this new Western model of erasing trees and erasing landscapes and then turning them into grazing grounds that's the model that we're still working off of and monocrops, not a biodiverse species approach. And now we have a question called how do we feed people? How do we feed 10 billion people with that model? You don't, because that model is broken.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's the system we have. We're here in Ireland and that's the system we have. We have loads of rain, but it is that system. It's intensive, it's heavy, overstocking, overgrazing, soil quality is poor. Yeah, it's.
Speaker 2:They don't move the animals. They do not move the animals. I've been. Your country is absolutely stunning. By the way, ireland is so beautiful, people are so friendly, unbelievable, but literally I've never seen animals move less. They move as much as they move in a feedlot.
Speaker 1:It's like yeah, no, it's small paddocks and eat everything in the paddock, then move at whatever period of time that it's, and no rest no rest.
Speaker 2:They'll have another herd in that paddock again before you know it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, and you're. So you know these because you're you're creating documentaries. You can't just create them, state things and have no evidence to back them up. So you're obviously gathering and compiling, you know, with the help of others, this evidence that you know this, this regenerative system can and does work.
Speaker 2:I have a thousand hours of footage. It's literally a pentabyte of storage, a pentabyte of examples. And yes, there are white papers and yes, there are scientific studies about this stuff now. But it's one thing to argue a science paper you get with a bunch of scientists and it's like being with theologians. They're like how many fairies can dance on the tip of a pinhead? You're like, okay, fine, look at this example that we filmed. We haven't filmed it once, we filmed it hundreds of times and you can't argue with reality.
Speaker 1:You just can't argue with reality, you just can't, yeah, and you're doing it in so many locations with different climatic pulls and drags. So it's, you know the system works and it's just a case of implementing it elsewhere. In light of that, and in light of you know who these systems are contradicting, I guess do you get much pushback. Is there resistance there? Is there pressure from higher powers, anything like that?
Speaker 2:The more evidence that this movement gains and the louder it gets, the more the opposition gets interested. You know we're going up against a multi-trillion dollar industry in North America. You know, when you add pharmaceuticals and food, you're up well over two trillion, and a lot of that's profit. So you know there's people that stand to lose a tremendous amount when this becomes mainstream not if, when because there's no other way to feed 10 billion people and there's kind of. We're reaching an inflection point where I think companies really are thinking about legacy, not just the next year, not just the next quarterly profit posting, but they're thinking both in terms of reality. How brittle is your supply chain If you're a chocolate company, if you're a coffee company, if you're a, I don't care if you produce wheat, soy or corn how brittle is your supply chain?
Speaker 2:You know the US just lost a tremendous amount of corn to rust. Why? Because it's the same genetic variety for thousands of miles. It's one gene, one genome of corn. Right, it's like okay, whose idea was that? There is no resilience in that? Some smart little creature, whether it's a fungus or or an insect, they figure that genome out and you're done, your whole crop's done so. There's no food security in that, and it's actually an issue of international military security when you're thinking about feeding billions of people.
Speaker 2:So we need to think as we enter a connected world, as we enter sort of this time of extremely long supply chains I mean, look at what happened in Europe with the Ukraine-Russia crisis, right I mean we need to begin to think about bioregionalism, which is, what's the strength of a food-producing region, what's the strength of Ireland as a food-producing region?
Speaker 2:What's the strength of California or the Midwest in the United States, mexico, different countries internally as to themselves? If a food borne problem stretches across a land, that could be mad cow disease, it could be a wheat problem. How do we feed people in regions, right? So we need to think like that. And then we need to think how brittle are our supply chains, moving out from this year to two years to five years to 10 years to 15 years? Right, because ultimately we're always going to import and export. It's just the way it works. But when those supply chains are so brittle that we literally can't guarantee coffee or protein in five years, then that's a real problem for a multi-billion dollar company and I think companies are starting to feel that burn and it's shifting them and they're becoming very interested in regenerative agriculture, not because they want to do good for the world, they just want to keep their jobs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is understandable, yeah it's human nature and it's the nature of economics, it's the nature of business, it's what drives all of that and I suppose, yeah, we understand that. If you take it back to grassroots level and to you know, you and I, walking into a supermarket there was quite a good study done in the UK, which I'm sure it's similar in Ireland, I'm sure it's the same in the US, I'm sure it's the same in Australia, when back in the 1970s and you talked about ancient diets earlier on, but even if you go back not so ancient, go back to the 1980s, you know that's for most people right now, that's ancient.
Speaker 2:We're dating ourselves here, John.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. But the study was brilliant because it showed the typical shopping basket for a month in the 1980s and the typical shopping basket today, over the same period.
Speaker 1:And what it did was it took all the items and it laid them out on the floor of a farm shed. And what you saw on the 1980s one was and I forget the exact figure, but it was, roughly speaking 90% ingredients on the floor, so things like meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, nuts, components of food, and then on the opposite side, that figure now is down to 30 or 40% Again, I'm not certain on the exact figures, but you know, in that region. So that meant that the remaining 60% was processed and during that same period, as you alluded to, most diseases have, you know, spiraled upwards uncontrollably, and so there's a direct correlation between those, no matter what anybody says. Yeah, I think the sooner that you know, the joe public really sees that as as the thing. How, how do you convince them to to start making the change? Because you have to make a conscious choice, because when you walk into a supermarket, that supermarket is designed for you to pick up as much processed, packaged food as possible. That's the design.
Speaker 2:That's where the profit is. That's where the profit is.
Speaker 1:That's where the profit is, and they have psychologists working on positioning in stores, pricing in stores, journey through the store. All of that is not happening by accident, so we have to consciously be aware or we have to learn what's happening here and then we have to choose. But it probably is difficult today to choose to move fully away from the dependency on. On that, am I right in saying that? Or what would you see as on that, am I right in saying?
Speaker 2:that or what would you see? As I would say absolutely it's difficult, you know, and acknowledging the difficulty is important because when you start down this path, you're like, why is it so hard to continue to make healthy choices and to continue to shop healthily and to continue to get my kids to eat this stuff? Because society is designed around the other right. It's designed around the fat, sick and almost dead model. So you want to shift your family, you want to shift yourself, you want to shift your family. First thing I'd say is give yourself some grace. It's. This is not a one day journey, it's, it's an everyday journey. You're going to get, you're going to move forward. Then you're going to get stuff back that you know it's nonlinear. Um, if you have a spouse that you're working with in this process, now you've got two people with very different backgrounds and what you ate in your household, what's normal for you, what's healthy for you, what's your idea. Know that every choice is an action and those actions they are cumulative and brands are paying attention and it doesn't actually take that many people to shift a brand.
Speaker 2:I think Wild Farmed is a great example in the UK of what can happen with a very small number of people. That's a bright company. Andy Cato, who's the former Groove Armada DJ, you know famous DJ. He helped co-found that company. And look, I'm not the number one person to go tell people to eat bread, quite the opposite. But what they have done with getting small farmers involved and what they have done in getting bread under the shelves and getting consumers to choose, that is no small feat and it sets a model where, yeah, your choice of the grocery store makes a difference. In fact that directly impacts what somebody grows. And there's all the old adages shop around the edges of the store. It's true in the UK as well as the US. First thing I go, the first thing I like to do when I get to a new country, I like to go to the grocery store. I do, I love it, I love to see all the different things, and they're all now universally organized, even in developing world countries.
Speaker 2:Right, it's the edges of the idea that processed and hyper-processed food is better for us. Companies will continue to sell that mystical burger made in a factory, the weird milk that's made from some strange thing, and on and on and on and on milk that's made from some strange thing, and on, and on and on and on. Like you said, go back to the 70s and 80s. People ate butter, milk, cheese, meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds. That's what human beings have largely been eating for millennia. Why did we come up with the concept that eating something else would be better? It's not. It's just not.
Speaker 2:And so yeah, we got to get away from seed oils. You know, these are the oils that are being put in our food, that come from corn soy largely, but canola as well. Totally toxic, completely toxic. And and anyone who begins this journey, you're gonna have setbacks and you're gonna find that the entire system is stacked against you making those choices. But every single time you make a choice, you're choosing health for yourself, you're choosing health for your family and, believe it or not, those choices are being heard in boardrooms around the world and we're just edging up to the tipping point. So don't give up. Those choices are being heard in boardrooms around the world and it's just, we're just edging up to the tipping point. So, you know, don't give up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, don't give up. So I said we could go in different directions on the conversation and we already have. But to take it back to the trilogy of documentaries, just talk us through and I know the end. One in the trilogy is Groundswell and that's going to come out next year. So maybe just touch on Kiss the Ground for anyone that hasn't watched it. As I say, as the host, I've encouraged the listeners to watch this before, so I'm sure many of them have. But take us on that journey. Kiss the Ground came out and Common Ground and now Groundswell is coming in 2026. So obviously there's a theme through those, but there's also, I guess, what you're seeing. You're probably seeing changes happen as a result of those. So talk us through the started trilogy and the idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we'll talk through the films first.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then we'll talk about the change that's occurring and what you can do. And, and the films, you know, follow a pathway of learning and knowledge, but they also follow the movement itself in real time, right, yeah, so kiss the ground. It's the framework, it's the basis, it's the sort of. It's the framework, it's the basis, it's the 101, it's the first class and it forms a very fundamental understanding of regenerative agriculture. It's very much based on Western models of agriculture. Right, how do we grow these crops doing regenerative practices? It brings carbon into the soil, and so we, we, we sort of we formulate all the the big basic pieces. Common Ground. The second film, you know, was made during COVID and it was made in a lot of ways as a reaction to how people dealt with the information from the first film. Right, they didn't. A lot of people had questions about scale. Could it scale? Is there scalability? Right, people had questions about farmers, what you know. How are farmers gonna participate in this? Will they be incentivized by profits? What's really going on with farmers? And then people had questions about the economy. You know, how is this being dealt with at an economic level? And it all boils down to the same question can we do this right. So, common ground, we go deeper and we get more specific and more granular, and so you learn more about the farming system, what locks farmers into the current system and how they can break out and what it looks like when they do break out, what it looks like when they do break out, and we learn about farmer suicides. We learned about some of the real stressors that are occurring. We go into the pharmaceutical system and we look a little bit about how that money is playing with the money of chemicals. Because, again, the flip side of can we do this is why aren't we doing this? Common ground answers both of those questions. By the end of the film, you're like oh, it's totally scalable, we can totally do it and it's totally profitable, right, and? And now you know why we're not doing it at the end of the second film, yeah, money, very simple, easy.
Speaker 2:The third film, groundswell, which were, I'd say, were about 90, 95% filmed and we're probably edging up to 80, 80% edited. It's a global journey. We go to 10, 12 countries. We look at regeneration from all different perspectives. We look at it from an economic perspective, a forestry perspective, a deserts perspective, a regenerating landscapes perspective, a food perspective and we're looking at vastly different ecosystems from South America all the way through India, all the way around the globe Not just equatorial systems, right and the UK.
Speaker 2:We spent a lot of time in the UK and I can tell you, even though the film's not finished, there is no way, no way I don't care who you are, if you're a scientist that is dead set on the industrial food system there is no way that you can watch that much evidence in that film and go regenerative agriculture doesn't work or it won't work, unless you have the ability to have complete cognitive distance and to see reality and to say no, that's not real. I don't believe it. You know, the third film, the journey of making the film and the reality of what the film is becoming. The third film, the journey of making the film and the reality of what the film is becoming. It is definitive, it's just definitive. You know, and and we went with it when and as open a mind as possible around the world really like okay, if it's going to work, it better prove itself. It better prove itself on camera. And it did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's the journey, yeah, and so you're going to these countries and, over the course, have you? Have these people been farming regeneratively? And then you've just found them and tapped into their systems and, you know, tracked it over a period of time and seeing the results, yeah, and generally we film them and we film their neighbor.
Speaker 2:Same trick as in film one, you know, yeah, yeah, and generally we film them and we film their neighbor.
Speaker 2:Same trick as in film one, you know. Yeah, pretty easy. If it works, you're going to look different than your neighbor, you're going to have different soil, you're going to have different carbon, you're going to have different test results, da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and even the whole of their family. It's all over the world Same thing. And so, really, the thing that people can do is, every single time somebody views those films, that is an action of power, and every time you talk about the films, that is an action of power. And, believe it or not, all of that is adding up to some really big changes. When we began Kiss the Ground in the United States, there was less than five or six million acres of organic, certified organic, in production in the US. Today, we're well and truly north of 50 million acres of regenerative land in the US and easily that number two or three times globally.
Speaker 1:So that's in the US. You're talking about a 10 times increase in 10 X.
Speaker 2:10 X in five years, easily five years, or six and 10 X globally. Yeah, wow, yeah and so, and so I believe that when the third film comes out, we're going to see that double again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so an increase in the speed of transition.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So an increase in the speed of transition, yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, you know we talk about all of the co-benefits. Healthy soil leads to healthy plants, leads to healthy animals, leads to healthy humans, healthy air, healthy climate, healthy biomes, healthy, you know, microclimate regions, watersheds, water holding capacity all of these things are co-benefits, right, but none of those things will drive for-profit companies. Consumers drive companies. Consumers drive governments. You know citizens drive governments, right. So you know there's your garden and your family. What can you grow? What can you create for your family?
Speaker 2:And in the US, you know, we grew 50% of our food. We grew in front yards, backyards and unused baseball fields during World War II. 50%. That's called real bioregionalism. I mean, they handed out pamphlets about what to do with seeds and how to manage chickens in your yard, right, yeah, so it's doable, you know.
Speaker 2:And that's without internet and technology and sharing and like, oh, what's your soil type? And that was just people putting some seeds in the ground and growing some stuff. Right, very, very, very loose. We can easily do, easily, you know, uh, close to 100% bioregionally, not just in this country but globally. So your garden matters, your soil matters. If you watch the earthing movie you'll learn. You know, putting your hands in the soil has an electromagnetic benefit for your body, but more and more science also shows it has a bacterial benefit, and so all of these things matter for our health. Can you begin with a planter box? Can you begin with a plant? And can we grow a revolution from? You know, pots and planter boxes and backyards? I believe the answer is yes. I believe it's already happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, and it's. You know, it's great to see that. And, as I said at the start, there is. You know, sometimes you watch environmental movies or movies of those teams or documentaries of those teams and the. You know there isn't a clear light at the end of the tunnel or a way to get to that light at the end of the tunnel, the end of the tunnel or a way to get to that light at the end of the tunnel. But all of the, you know, the two that have released so far, definitely show that there is a way and the fact that it's evidence-based and you're filming this evidence, you know it, it can't be, can't be disputed, can't be contradicted, I guess. So so that's huge. Um, before we finish off, uh, the grounding movie, just out of pure personal interest, I've, I've watched that one as well. Again, it's one of one of my favorites and it's a practice that we do here quite regularly. Do you do it yourself? Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:All the time yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know, yeah, sometimes, when I'm traveling in a big city not every day, but every day, when I'm not in a, you know, when I'm not in a concrete jungle, and even when I'm in a concrete jungle, you might find me in the, in the little strip of grass in the park, you know, barefoot.
Speaker 1:And it's huge, Like here in Ireland. There's a huge amount of people now practicing grounding, whereas five years ago it wasn't heard of at all.
Speaker 2:Look, you know, even if you don't buy the science, and I get it. It's pretty cutting edge stuff. So you know, fine, I will tell you this, having done this on and off my whole life, I will tell you this, having done this on and off my whole life, I get off a plane, I get out of a you know meeting or something, putting my bare feet on the ground, and if there's a tree, that's even a bonus. Little little, you know time with the tree it's. It does something to the parasympathetic nervous system nervous system. It gets us out of the sort of hyper intrusive, very, very, very intensive amount of visual and auditory stimuli that we have, especially in cities, and it puts the parasympathetic nervous system back into a calming state. It takes a minute you got to breathe, et cetera. So that we know, we know from so many studies over the years that that too much stimulation puts us into fight or flight, right, um?
Speaker 2:So if that's all it does, wouldn't that be a benefit? Yeah for sure. If human beings did that, wouldn't that be a great thing? And it costs nothing. No one makes money from this. It's not like well, put your feet on the ground, oh, big company's going to make money Easy. Reconnect with nature. It will help you see things in a different light.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, josh. It's been a really interesting chat. As I said, the conversation could and did go in kind of different directions. Groundswell is due out in 2026, q1 or Q2, you were saying beforehand the other movies. So Kiss the Ground is on Netflix, common Ground.
Speaker 2:Both of them on Prime now.
Speaker 1:Both of them on Prime now.
Speaker 2:No more Red N. That's gone. Okay, so that's gone Just. Amazon Prime.
Speaker 1:Amazon Prime now and Groundswell likely to be there as well. Yeah, agreed. Where can people check out your other movies? So Big Picture Ranch is the production company.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so check out bigpictureranchcom and, folks who want to get more information, commongroundfilmorg so many PDFs, downloadable things, links. I mean the resource section is very deep. Uh, you can check out my sub stack, josh Tickell. And yeah, look forward to talking again. John, really appreciate your, your viewers and your listeners and their interest and their dedication to getting some dirt under their fingernails.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, and from my perspective, thank you very much for producing one of my favorite, as I said, documentaries. A little bit of a fanboy here today, but, yeah, brilliant to have you on and thank you very, very much for coming on. Master, my garden podcast it's been an honor.
Speaker 1:Thank you, john that's been this week's episode. Some really, as I said, we've gone slightly off topic in terms of our normal week to week gardening uh content, but still huge connection between what we normally talk about and you know what josh's joshosh's documentaries are speaking of. They're really worth checking out. You know the what we spoke about there in terms of consumer choice. That really is up to us. You know that's. You know that's where this starts is with ourselves. Choose your farmer's market, choose growing your own.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, from a health perspective, from an environmental perspective, for all those reasons, it's hugely important that we do start to make those choices ourselves. That is what's going to make the difference. We've seen, you know, in the case of five years, an increase from 5 million acres in the US to 50 million today in organic growing and evidence backed to say that it will work and will feed, you know, future populations. So it's hugely important that we make those choices as well. But really, really interesting topic. And that's been this week's episode. Thanks for listening and until the next time, happy gardening, thank you.