“Groundswell” is another upbeat sermon on the ecological, personal, cultural and global benefits of turning the world back towards “regenerative agriculture,” the idea that “the old ways” were better. Because farming on a smaller scale, with a mix of pastures, cultivated fields, varied types of livestock and patches of trees has always been more efficient, more productive and healthier for farmers, customers and Mother Earth.
The third film in a trilogy that began with “Kiss the Ground” (2020) and continued with “Common Ground” (2023), this Golden Globe winner captures a changing tide in attitudes towards soil preservation and nurturing via carbon and water sequestration.
This outing just bubbles over with hope for a planet overheating and losing arable land to deserts and vital rain forests to short term oligarchical cashing in. Because regenerative farming — crop and cattle pastures, pig pen etc. rotation — is catching on.
The Demi Moore-produced doc — she and lifelong eco-activist Woody Harrelson narrate it — takes us to pilot projects that have morphed into policy and practice, with efforts to re-green Australia, Kenya, Uganda, Colombia, India, Brazil, the U.K. and the U.S. pushing back or shoring up the “green wall” on the edge of deserts as farmers discover better lives and bigger profits from higher yields, “carbon bank” incentives and the like all over the world.
“Soil is not your property,” Indian activist/eco-guru Sadhguru preaches. “It is your legacy.”
We meet the Harris family of White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia, lifelong industrial farmers who converted their, huge, inhumane “industrial:” cattle operation into a multi-livestock and grain rotation enterprise that feeds the soil and generates profits.
They literally tower over their not-yet-converted neighbors. Will Harris stands on the edge of his ranch turned farm, where the soil is several feet deeper and higher than the monocultural industrial farm operation next door.
Scientists and activists by the score preach this message — healthy soil, healthy food, healthy people, healthy planet. And despite everything awful going on in the world with anti-science ignoramuses running too many countries to count, it’s evolved from a dream into a plan that farmers working some 250 million acres worldwide are putting into practice. .
Books and news articles in the ’60s heralded “The Green Revolution,” which was about chemical science’s ability to raise food production all over the world and feed a growing world population. But some while back, that fertilizer/hybrid species revolution hit the wall and the declining returns and desertification of Australia, India, parts of America and most of sub-Saharan Africa were proof.
We see Indian planners re-direct land-use energy and policy towards preparing for a “once in thirty years” rain event, capturing a monsoon downpoor and allowing arid land to revert to green even in a drier climate.
Ugandans and Kenyans reintroduce grasses and carve “smile berms” — crescent shaped dirt eddies — into any slope, slowing rainwater so that it sinks into the soil, making grasses grow which reflect light and deflect heat and preserve moisture as well.
Elephants’ role in grassland creation and maintenance is discussed and charted.
And married filmmakers Rebecca and Joshua Tickell treat us to a parade of “before” and “after” footage, letting us see Niger and “the green ocean” of Brazil, Kenya and Australia turn green in places that were all but lost to encroaching desert and/or deforestation.
Some of the more damning statistics trotted out here by farmer turned activist Gabe Brown and “that soil guy from ‘Clarkson’s Farm'” (Andy Cato) and others have to do with farmers’ health.
All these pesticides, all that plowing, all stress and working in the baking sun has been killing farmers. All that debt Indian farmers had to take on to become “green revolutionaries” led to vast spikes in the suicide rate.
The film’s rhetorical “action step” is aimed at consumers, who can start with “buy local” behavioral changes with regards to meat and produce and vote with their wallets with their morning addiction by drinking coffee grown in diverse, recreated rainforest environments.
It’s never as easy as documentaries like “The Biggest Little Farm” and its many “back to the old ways” imitators make it seem. Markets, labor costs and fickle consumers play their roles in whether this revolution in eating-our-way-out-of-climate change comes to pass.
But as I write this review in the middle of a soybean farm in south central Virginia, staring down what looks like another drought summer with exhausted soil you’d need a hammer and chisel to crack, “Groundswell” does give one a “part of the problem” pause.
The “Groundswell” of change may be getting us there, but there’s no sugar coating that we’re still several shades shy of realizing the “forest of green” it will take to slow climate change. Making carbon banks a worldwide phenomenon would be a big help.
Rating: PG
Cast: Gabe Brown, Santa Aber, Andy Cato, Salina Abraha, Jemma Allen, Lucy Abwo, Ruth Bennett, Jennie Harris, Will Harris, Sadhguru and many others, narrated by Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore.
Credits: Directed by Joshua Tickell and Rebeca Harrell Tickell, scripted by Johnny O’Hara. An Amazon/MGM release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:33
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