Frequent Floor evaluate: What the regenerative agriculture documentary will get mistaken about our meals system

[ad_1] On Tuesday, a pair of documentaries landed on Amazon Prime that put forth a somewhat daring declare: By merely making a couple of tweaks to how we farm, humanity can reverse local weather change and all however eradicate a number of different issues stemming from our fashionable meals system.

The 2 movies — Kiss the Floor, which first got here out on Netflix in 2020, and its follow-up, Frequent Floor , which premiered on streaming this week — are essentially the most high-profile documentaries advocating for a widespread shift to “regenerative agriculture.”

This organic-adjacent method to agriculture focuses on utilizing a couple of farming strategies to enhance soil well being, which has been degraded during the last century largely as a result of industrialization of agriculture, with its bevy of artificial chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Deployed at scale, the movies argue, regenerative agriculture would enhance soil well being so significantly that farmers across the globe might draw down huge quantities of climate-warming greenhouse gases from the environment and retailer them in soil, largely fixing the local weather disaster.

“By changing our farmland to regenerative agriculture, the soil might sequester the entire carbon dioxide that humanity emits every year,” actor Jason Momoa claims in Frequent Floor . “That may convey our carbon emissions to internet zero. In different phrases, our planet’s soil might assist stabilize our local weather.”

Regenerative agriculture, in keeping with the movies, might additionally increase biodiversity, enrich struggling farmers, clear up polluted waterways, and finish the “human well being disaster.” (It’s unclear which human well being disaster they imply.)

<img alt="Common Ground director (left) poses with two of the documentary’s actor-narrators — Ian Somerhalder and Jason Momoa — at a Los Angeles screening in early 2024." data-chromatic="ignore" loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-nimg="fill" class="mvmjsc0" style="position:absolute;height:100%;width:100%;left:0;top:0;right:0;bottom:0;color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url("data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' %3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3C/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mN8+R8AAtcB6oaHtZcAAAAASUVORK5CYII='/%3E%3C/svg%3E")" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, (max-width: 1023px) 50vw, 700px" srcset="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=256 256w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=376 376w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=384 384w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=415 415w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=480 480w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=540 540w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=640 640w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=750 750w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=828 828w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1080 1080w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1200 1200w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1440 1440w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1920 1920w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2048 2048w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400 2400w" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1918197411.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400"/> Frequent Floor director (left) poses with two of the documentary’s actor-narrators — Ian Somerhalder and Jason Momoa — at a Los Angeles screening in early 2024. Gregg DeGuire/Selection by way of Getty Photographs

This simple, all-encompassing plan to repair among the world’s most depraved issues has been embraced by an eclectic set of US policymakers, A-list actors, celeb docs, and main environmental organizations. (The movies collectively additionally characteristic Rosario Dawson, Tom Brady, Laura Dern, and Donald Glover, amongst others.)

When Kiss the Floor was launched, its sweeping claims drew criticism as overly simplistic and scientifically dubious — a type of “magical considering,” as one environmental scientist put it in a evaluate of Kiss the Floor within the journal Biogeochemistry . The movies characteristic no critics or skeptics, solely fervent supporters.

Regenerative agriculture practices definitely have some environmental and social advantages. However the movies have interaction in a type of nostalgic utopianism, asserting that if it weren’t for grasping companies and subservient lawmakers, we might return to the outdated methods of farming, which might heal our damaged relationship with nature and usher in a more healthy future with a secure local weather.

In Kiss the Floor , actor-narrator Ian Somerhalder goes as far as to say that regenerative agriculture would “get the Earth again to the Backyard of Eden that it as soon as was.” Sadly, it’s not so easy.

The advantages — and limits — of regenerative agriculture

Our meals and farming system is, little doubt, in want of serious reform.

It’s America’s largest supply of water air pollution and animal suffering and accounts for greater than 10 p.c of our carbon footprint. Many farmers overapply artificial fertilizer to their crops, and federal regulators have been captured by companies that wield huge energy in politics. Many giant farmers flip a good-looking revenue because of nonsensical subsidies whereas small and midsized operations wrestle to remain afloat in US agriculture’s “ get big or get out ” mannequin. Farmworkers are handled as invisible cogs in a machine that pumps out unhealthy meals.

The documentaries do a fantastic sufficient job cataloguing these issues, although at instances they are often deceptive and alarmist. For instance, there’s no proof that the world has solely 60 harvests remaining , as actor Woody Harrelson narrates in Kiss the Floor . Interview topics, together with supermodel Gisele Bündchen, repeatedly declare that more healthy soils result in more healthy meals, and thus more healthy people, although the science isn’t clear on how a lot soil well being impacts meals’s nutrient content material.

So, what precisely is regenerative agriculture? There’s no universal definition , nevertheless it boils down to a couple key practices and objectives:

Drastically cut back or eradicate artificial chemical compounds: Trendy farmers routinely douse crops in artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Considerably decreasing or eliminating these chemical compounds can enhance soil well being, increase biodiversity, and cut back water air pollution. Eradicate tillage: Most farmers until, or disturb, their soil to eliminate weeds and make the soil extra porous, amongst different issues. However tillage may also launch carbon dioxide saved within the soil and hurt total soil well being, so regenerative farmers swear towards it. Plant cowl crops: Regenerative farmers plant “cowl crops,” like clover and rye, round fall harvest time, which improves soil well being in plenty of methods. Rotational grazing: “ When cattle are left to their very own units on pasture, they overgraze — trampling on and eroding the soil, and destroying vegetation,” as I wrote final 12 months. “However regenerative ranchers use rotational grazing…which entails periodically shifting cattle between plots of land. This can assist stop overgrazing as a result of vegetation is given time to regrow, leading to more healthy soil that [regenerative] advocates say can sequester giant quantities of carbon.” All of those practices have confirmed ecological advantages, and US regulators could be clever to incentivize extra farmers to take them up. However agriculture, like different environmentally delicate industries, is rife with tradeoffs, which Kiss the Floor and Frequent Floor fully ignore.

For instance, whereas chemical-laden agriculture has many drawbacks, it sometimes produces extra meals per acre, which suggests it requires much less land. The identical goes for conventionally raised cattle: grass-finished, regeneratively raised cattle require between two and two-and-a-half times extra land than these completed on feedlots.

A nationwide shift to regenerative agriculture would massively enhance demand for land — a important draw back to this fashion of farming. Agriculture is already extraordinarily land-intensive, utilizing up some 40 percent of US land, and every acre that may be spared from farming is an acre that may stay as habitat for wildlife.

Then there may be the declare that more healthy soil can draw down huge quantities of carbon dioxide from the environment and retailer it in farmland. Performed on a big scale, the movies say, regenerative agriculture might even draw down all of the carbon dioxide people emit every year.

However that is extremely inconceivable, as scientists don’t even have accurate and affordable instruments to measure how a lot carbon regenerative farms can sequester. No-till farming likely doesn’t sequester much carbon , and if a farmer decides to finally until that soil, a variety of the carbon they’d saved up could be launched. The speed at which farmland can sequester carbon additionally diminishes over time.

<img alt="About a dozen cattle ranchers stand in a large field with a few dozen cattle." data-chromatic="ignore" loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-nimg="fill" class="mvmjsc0" style="position:absolute;height:100%;width:100%;left:0;top:0;right:0;bottom:0;color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url("data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' %3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3C/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mN8+R8AAtcB6oaHtZcAAAAASUVORK5CYII='/%3E%3C/svg%3E")" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, (max-width: 1023px) 50vw, 700px" srcset="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=256 256w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=376 376w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=384 384w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=415 415w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=480 480w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=540 540w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=640 640w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=750 750w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=828 828w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1080 1080w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1200 1200w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1440 1440w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1920 1920w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2048 2048w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400 2400w" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1400578388-2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400"/> Ranchers at a regenerative cattle grazing coaching occasion in New Mexico. Mario Tama/Getty Photographs

And whereas rotationally grazing cattle has the potential to sequester among the huge quantities of greenhouse gases emitted by cattle, it’s far from all of a beef cattle’s emissions, as one supply in Kiss the Floor suggests. Beef, whether or not produced regeneratively or not, continues to be the world’s most carbon-intensive meals.

In the meantime, the movies fail to acknowledge the best method to slashing greenhouse fuel emissions from agriculture, which accounts for up to one-third of worldwide emissions. In line with a survey of greater than 200 local weather and agriculture specialists, one of the best ways to do this is to cut back meat and dairy manufacturing. (These identical specialists rated carbon sequestration as one of many least efficient approaches.) Decreasing meat and milk consumption in wealthy international locations just like the US would additionally reduce land demand , water pollution , and animal struggling, and sure improve human health .

Regardless of the undisputed advantages of regenerative agriculture, Kiss the Floor and Frequent Floor misleadingly market it as one bizarre trick that farmers in all places can deploy to heal the planet and humanity. It makes use of a forged of celebrities, advocate-experts, and farmers who make use of simplistic arguments and visuals to keep away from the nuanced and tough tradeoffs of agricultural manufacturing.

But the grandiose claims made in these movies have managed to realize severe traction in environmental and agricultural coverage circles, typically crowding out extra evidence-based options.

You’ll discover a respectable evaluation of what’s mistaken with our meals system, and loads of hope on how you can repair it, in these movies. However when the answer to issues as complicated as local weather change, diet-related power illness, farmer debt, mass air pollution, and biodiversity collapse is so simple as a couple of adjustments to how we farm, whoever’s selling it's in all probability standing on shaky floor.

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