A Brief Summary of Egregious Flaws in the movie Kiss the Ground

To be frank, the movie Kiss the Ground uses reductionist thinking and razzle dazzle movie making to lead viewers to think that the main problem with modern agriculture is that farmers lack a focus on “soil health” i.e. “regenerative practices.” Miraculously, we as consumers can seek out regeneratively produced food, and we as farmers can change our farming techniques and actually be more profitable, end of story. All will be well if consumers change their diets to be more healthy and farmers change their operations to be more regenerative, thus more profitable!

Why doesn’t the movie be honest about the economic realities in a free market system that brought about the calamity of the Dust Bowl and today’s “industrial agriculture”? Why isn’t it honest about the change in economic rules by the Roosevelt administration that assured the buyers of farm commodities pay farmers a fair price—parity—and farmers weren’t faced with the imperative to answer declining incomes with increasing yields and farming more land at all cost? Why doesn’t the movie explain that the lessons learned from the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression were intentionally obscured and lied about by agribusiness to fashion the “market oriented” free-for-all that has resulted in what we see as the appalling features of modern agriculture? Why doesn’t the movie explain that the inevitable evolution under free market rules is the bifurcation of agriculture with almost all livestock being owned by corporations one the one hand, and their feed, cheap corn and soybean meal, produced industrially from anyplace on the planet? Shouldn’t Kiss the Ground explain that in a globalized market, farmers are left with their only hope of survival is to specialize in mono-cropping of corn and soybeans without the option of crop rotations that would be logical on more diversified farms with livestock on the land? In other words why doesn’t the movie explain how the logic of free markets led to the evolution of a monstrous, inhumane agriculture, and that the rules need to change through a political process that confronts the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet?

Instead, we are led to believe it’s just a matter of consumers and farmers seeing how a focus on soil health will solve everything.

The movie actually gives conventional farming a free pass by implying that conventional farmers can switch to no-till and put livestock on the land. First of all, conventional no-till makes chemical weed control mandatory. An agronomist in a hilly erosion-prone area of Iowa told me that a typical chemical weed program—burndown and post—uses five contact and residual chemicals. I looked at the official label of Zidua Pro that says farmers must avoid surface water contamination because it is very harmful to aquatic life. Such contamination would be very likely on hilly ground where no-till is commonly applied in over half of the state of Iowa. The 2012 ISU Weed Guide says, “History has shown that a weed control program that depends solely on chemicals is bound to fail.” That not only describes conventional no-till, but, also conventional tillage farms, because free market evolution results in farms that are so large, chemical sprays are the only way to control weeds. Typical conventional farms today don’t even own row crop cultivators, rotary hoes, or harrows.

In its emphasis on the importance of livestock on the land, the Kiss the Ground offers views of arid rocky land in the Bay Area and other marginal landscapes where row crop production wouldn’t even be a consideration. Why doesn’t the movie recognize that the champions of soil health—organic and small conventional dairy farms in the Driftless Area, New England, Upstate New York, and Appalachia—have been going out of business in droves because of low milk prices resulting from the destruction of the Roosevelt parity policies? Where’s the pictures of fake organic vertically integrated dairies with cows confined to CAFOs where the responsibility to produce the feedstuffs are somebody else’s responsibility? What do you think happens when these small dairy farms sell their cows? Hay and pasture land is plowed up to produce corn and soybeans on very erodible soil (right up to the foundations of beautiful, empty dairy barns).

By focusing on a select few individual farmers, like Gabe Brown, the film does not recognize the need for systemic change so that all farmers can farm agroecologically. One unique farm in North Dakota that somehow depends on direct marketing does not offer a model that most farmers can duplicate.

Kiss the Ground ignores modern economic reality and makes numerous factual errors.

The Globalization of agricultural markets is not mentioned. The disastrous corn-soy-CAFO system depends on the destruction of Food Sovereignty and consequently the unfettered international markets for supplies of feedstuffs, chemicals, and fertilizers on the one hand and brainless consumer markets on the other—commerce carried on by giant multinational corporations who use their political clout to maintain the status quo. I mentioned to a procurement officer of a prominent organic meat processor that having cattle on my organic farm would be ideal to include carbon sequestering grasses and legumes in my rotation. Would there be any chance I could raise organic beef for their company? The reply was astonishing: “Oh, we buy all our beef from Uruguay. We can call up 4 different organic processors and get whatever we want.”

The land manager in the movie from the Bay Area mentions guaranteed prices and subsidies for corn and soybeans being the reason for their prodigious production. Her chart includes the loan rate for corn at $1.94 per bushel, the loan rate that prevailed from 1980 until a few years ago (now it’s a little over $2). Since the Freedom to Farm Act of 1995, this loan rate was a “marketing loan rate” that didn’t even set a minimum price for the buyers of corn. I sold corn for as low as $1.35 per bushel under this regime. When hay, pasture, and small grains no longer make sense on a farm, there are no other crops that typical farmers can grow profitably other than storable commodities like corn and soybeans (or other feed grains and oilseeds appropriate for local soil and climate). A little over 12 million acres are used to grow fruits and vegetables in the US versus over 250 million acres of storable commodities. Subsidy payments are actually subsidies to the corporate consumers of these feedstuffs, while cheap feed continues CAFO livestock production, the attrition of farmers, and consolidation of everything. (Corn prices last year were 1/3 the price in real dollars that they were when I came back to the family farm in 1976—a real boon to corporate corn purchasers.)

In summation, I believe a film like Kiss the Ground actually does more harm than good by proposing simplistic answers to a more complex and challenging problem than most people realize. What is at stake is not only healthfulness of our diets, conservation of soil and water, the avoidance of polluting the ecosphere and destruction of biodiversity, but whether global citizens have a chance to democratically put an end to modern agriculture’s insanity and fashion a healthful, agroecological future for future generations and our planet. Parity policy through global democratic participation must be the answer, not enlightened consumerism.