Kiss The Ground Documentary: Why We Need to Address Soil Degradation
Source: Big Picture Ranch
If you haven’t seen Netflix’s 2020 Kiss the Ground, it’s a must see. If you’d rather pick up a quick synopsis of some of the crucial points this film touches on; buckle up! Activists, scientists, and farmers alike banded together in this information-packed documentary to highlight one of the biggest human impacts on climate change; the degradation of our soils. In Part I of our dissection, we’ll look at the film’s description of how this became such a big problem, and Part II will explain how to break the vicious cycle that’s been created.
Now, we can’t talk about soil degradation without the history of industrial food production. The industrial agriculture revolution was born in the wake of WWII, when German scientists invented synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which drastically boosted growth of crops. They also converted what they used as poisonous gas in the chambers of the Holocaust into pesticides, which have been bought and used in the United States ever since.
Once farmers started using these synthetic fertilizers and pesticides while tilling their fields, yields exploded. For the first few seasons, business was booming! Farmers were encouraged by government subsidies of commodity crops to grow only one type of food in their fields, which guaranteed them money back when it came time to harvest. However, when only one type of food grows in fields pumped with nitrogen fixing fertilizer, all of the nutrients from the soil are depleted with little to no time to build back before the next harvest.
And those pesticides and herbicides that kill all of the harmful insects and weeds? They kill all of the good microorganisms and plants, too. The same field that has been aggressively tilled, fed synthetic nitrogen, and “protected” by pesticides for a few years is now devoid of life. Scientists call this process “desertification” for a reason.
Source: Stock image on Canva
Today, almost 1/3 of our soils on Earth, just like that field, have undergone desertification. They are depleted of nutrients, cannot retain water, and have since released all of their carbon stores into the atmosphere. When areas that were once rich with life become desertified from industrial agriculture, local water cycles become disrupted, leading to droughts or extreme weather events. Desertified land changes the microclimate of the area, and when you take a step back to look at the way we practice agriculture globally, this adds up to a massive impact. All of the carbon that was so effectively stored in our soil is now in our atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.
Considering climate change, we know that CO2 in our atmosphere is a main factor in global warming. The French Minister of Agriculture Stephane le Foll claims that since the industrial revolution began in 1705, 1,000 billion tons (or 1,000 Gigatons) of carbon have been released into the atmosphere. However, like Soil Conservationist Ray Archuleta says, “Carbon is not the bad guy.” Carbon is the building block of all life on Earth and the key to healthy ecosystems.
In Part II, we will discuss how to effectively return the carbon from our atmosphere back to the soil in a process called biosequestration, and how with global effort, we can save our planet using what’s right under our feet!