New Documentary Highlights Regenerative Agriculture and Climate Change

Are you familiar with the term “regenerative agriculture”? Essentially, it is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to land management and food production and is the focus of the documentary Common Ground. Unlike industrial agriculture, this approach focuses on topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, enhancing ecosystem services, supporting bio-sequestration, increasing resilience to climate change, and strengthening the health and vitality of farm soil.

As Siri Chilukuri explains in her review of the film, regenerative agriculture uses a variety of methods to promote healthy, living soil, which in turn promotes healthy crops that are more pest resistant and require less or no chemical pesticides. This is in sharp contrast to industrial farming which encourages the heavy use of synthetic pesticides and herbicides, causing an array of illnesses and damage ecosystems. Regenerative agriculture also mitigates climate change through carbon dioxide removal, i.e. it draws carbon from the atmosphere and sequesters it. 

While Common Ground focuses on food and farming systems, it can also prompt viewers to think more broadly and globally about our relationship with the land and the need to heal it. The idea of land regeneration, for example, is consistent with the push to restore additional degraded lands such as brownfields and oilfields into parks, open space, and other land uses that generate multiple benefits to communities.

To learn more about movie and the merits of the regenerative approach, please read the source article.