A Review of the New Netflix Documentary, “Kiss The Ground”
Kiss The Ground is a new Netflix documentary narrated by Woody Harrelson. The documentary is all about the importance of soil, and more specifically, how we can take care of the soil so the soil will take care of us. The documentary talks about the U.S.’s long history of destroying the soil and what we can do to fix it.
After Wood Harrelson starts the narration, the film opens on Ray Archuleta, a certified soil scientist. Ray travels around the country and teaches farmers the importance of no-till farming practices. He talks about the importance of the soil, and more specifically, the importance of carbon-rich soil. Ray sets the scene for the film to talk about the importance of regenerative agriculture and the importance of giving back to the soil, as well as how to spread the message.
The documentary also touches on the importance of eating food to feed your gut and the importance of getting the good microbes from the soil into your gut. And of course, you really can’t talk about the damage done to the soil without mentioning pesticides and GMOs. It’s a vicious cycle, says Harrelson. “The more tilling that’s done the weaker the soil gets, and the more compelled farmers feel to use chemical sprays”.
Field corn, our most common crop in the U.S., is genetically modified and sprayed with glyphosate. Glyphosate is known to cause cancer and is so overused it’s found its way into our drinking water. Three pounds of toxic chemicals are sprayed per person onto or food, each year.
“A big reason these chemicals make us sick is because just as toxic chemicals kill the microbes in the soil, they kill the microbes in our bodies.”
As is pointed out in the documentary, our topsoil in its current condition has about 60 harvests left, and if that doesn’t terrify you, then you’re not paying enough attention. After going through the history of the damage we’ve done, the documentary establishes an important message: It’s not too late. They dive into regenerative practices that feed the earth, sustainable farming, the importance of cover crops, the importance of composting, and so much more.
From the damage done by the Dust Bowl to the German Scientist who originally invented pesticides, to the importance of the bacteria in our soil, I’d say the documentary does a pretty good job of covering the history of soil degradation and informing viewers as to why it’s so important that we fix this problem.
Even you’re pretty well versed with our current environmental crisis, this documentary is still worth a watch. The documentary covers a lot of ground (no pun intended). The way the film covers the importance of taking care of the Earth with how it relates to taking care of our own bodies is something that is not often seen in more mainstream content. I couldn’t even begin to cover all the important points made in the documentary in one review. The film reminded us of how important it is that we keep working to achieve a better, cleaner Earth.
Kiss The Ground is available on Netflix. If the film or even this article has inspired you to learn more about what you can to do help, from a health perspective, we recommend eating as clean as possible. By focusing on gut health, and eating an organic, diverse diet, you can do more than just improve your own health, you can improve the health of the Earth.
Glyphosate Isn’t Even the Worst Thing in Roundup
Much of the uproar surrounding the herbicide has focused on the active ingredient, glyphosate. But for glyphosate to penetrate plant cells, it needs an adjuvant. If you’re familiar with vaccine adjuvants like mercury or aluminum, you probably have a sinking feeling in your gut. And guess what?
You’re right!
Say hello to polyethoxylated tallow amine or polyoxyethyleneamine (POEA). POEA is derived from tallow, or animal fat (usually beef or sheep). It’s a detergent that constitutes 15% of Roundup formulations, and it’s one of the reasons roundup works as well as it does. When glyphosate-based products that don’t contain an ethoxylated tallow amine (ETA) formulation are used, water is more easily able to wash the herbicide off the plant. This renders the formula 6% effective.
So why would farmers have to do without that extra 6% effectiveness? Easy answer there – the European Union banned POEAs in 2016. In their scientific assessment, the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) said,
Therefore the exposure assessment for operators, workers, bystanders, residents and consumers could not be performed. Compared to glyphosate, a higher toxicity of the POE-tallowamine was observed on all endpoints investigated.”
As a result, human poisoning with this herbicide is not with the active ingredient alone but with complex and variable mixtures. Therefore, It is difficult to separate the toxicity of glyphosate from that of the formulation as a whole or to determine the contribution of surfactants to overall toxicity. Experimental studies suggest that the toxicity of the surfactant, polyoxyethyleneamine (POEA), is greater than the toxicity of glyphosate alone and commercial formulations alone.”
To be clear, POEA and other similarly formulated adjuvants are more toxic than glyphosate, yet regulators have no way of measuring how much exposure you’ve had because it isn’t the formula’s active ingredient. Yet studies that were done on fish and aquatic animals have found that Roundup formulations are significantly more toxic than glyphosate alone. Original Roundup was 10-40 times more toxic than glyphosate alone in fish species and 10-50 times more toxic in frogs. A fruit fly study in January 2020 found that fruit flies exposed to less than lethal amounts of both Roundup Concentrate Plus and POEA had decreased fertility.
POEA isn’t the active ingredient in Roundup, which is the reasoning used to explain why this substance has not been tested to the extent glyphosate has been. All that companies need to do is provide documentation saying an ingredient doesn’t kill weeds or insects for regulating agencies to see no need to ask for safety studies. Much of media coverage of the dangers of Roundup has focused on glyphosate because it has been labeled a probable carcinogen by a major worldwide health organization. What would POEAs be labeled if regulators actually looked into it?
Scientists from Australia and China recently released a study examining the effectiveness of CRISPR gene editing in rice plants. The developers involved in the project attempted to approve the yield of already high-yield rice by disrupting a semi-dwarfing gene in the plant (SD1). While the scientists used small gene inserts and deletions in the genome to accomplish this, analysis in the study published in the Journal of Genetics and Genomics found large insertions, deletions, and rearrangements in the rice’s DNA.
Given these findings, the likelihood of unpredictable changes in multiple gene functions leading to altered biochemistry in gene-edited food plants, with consequent health risks (toxicity, allergenicity) is very real.”
In addition to the large and unpredicted insertions and deletions, the CRISPR rice did not show an increased yield. The plants were reduced in height, but scientists were not able to achieve their second goal.
New Study Links Consumption of Fermented Vegetables to Low COVID-19 Mortality Rates
Through researching the relationship between diet and COVID-19 death rates, researchers have found a positive correlation between the consumption of fermented food and COVID-19 mortality rates.
Although aspects such as age structure, the timing of interventions, employment type, and housing conditions are likely to be the most relevant factors, other potentially relevant factors such as nutrition should not be overlooked, say Bousquet and colleagues.
The study, which was conducted by Jean Bousquet, looked at COVID-19 mortality rates based on data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. For information on fermented food consumption, researchers looked at the Comprehensive European Food consumption Database to assess the consumption of different fermented foods from each European country.
The study found that “For each gram per day increase in the average national consumption of fermented vegetables, the risk for COVID-19 mortality fell by 35.4%.” Of all the fermented foods, only fermented vegetables made a significant impact on mortality rates. The study looked at the consumption of a variety of different fermented foods, including vegetables, milk, yogurt, sour milk, and pickled/marinated vegetables.
Researchers believe that changes in the microbiota, fueled by less fermented foods and less diversity, may contribute to increased spread or severity of COVID-19.
FDA Needs To Reconsider GMO Salmon Approval, Says Federal Judge
The Food and Drug Administration approved biotechnology company AquaBounty’s application to make and sell genetically engineered salmon in 2015, and now a federal judge is on the verge of ordering the government agency to take another look. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria is presiding over a case filed by the Center for Food Safety against the salmon’s approval, and he expressed concerns on Tuesday that the FDA’s approval of the salmon could inspire AquaBounty to expand their AquaAdvantage salmon program without fully considering the ecological impacts of it.
I’m not saying it opens the floodgates or sets the standards, but perhaps it pushes us in a direction and future agency action will likely be informed by this agency action…Shouldn’t the FDA in this case have considered the fact that this was the first such facility and future decisions would be building on this facility?”
The AquaAdvantage salmon is the first genetically engineered food animal that the FDA has approved for raising and selling. The fish is a genetic mix of an ocean pout and Pacific Chinook salmon, a combination that leads to higher growth hormone in the blood. The company plans to breed the salmon at a hatchery on Prince Edward Island in Canada before moving the eggs to their facility in Indiana.
When the agency completed their assessment of the salmon, they listed the salmon as having “no significant impact,” and Department of Justice attorney Marissa Piropato said that…
AquaBounty has no guarantee that the FDA is going to accept whatever comes down the pike…”
Environmental groups have a different take on the approval and current impact status of the modified salmon that echoed Judge Chhabria sentiments. The treatment and regulation of the AquaBounty salmon sets the precedent for the future of gentically engineered food animals.
Whatever they do here is going to inform the approval for those other applications and is going to inform what the FDA does for all GE animals going forward…If the analysis they are doing here is inadequate that means it’s never going to be enough. It’s not going to get better.”
Earthjustice attorney Brettny Hardy
New Study Shows your Avocado Oil May Not Be Pure
A new study in the journal Food Control shows that the avocado oil you purchased may not be 100% pure avocado oil. Like with olive oil the standards are not widely regulated and some comapnies are ripping off health-conscious customers. Scientists analyzed 22 different kinds of commercially available avocado oil to find that 15 had gone rancid before their sell-by date, while six were likely cut with large quantities of cheaper oils.
The study found that many of the oils labeled extra virgin and refined were adulterated with other oils, and 82% of oils went bad before their expiration date, indicating they were of poor quality. Three out of the 22 oils tested were almost 100% adulterated with other oils, like soybean oil. Co-author of the study, Selina Wang said some adulteration was expected but not at such a high level.
When an oil is exposed to oxygen, peroxides and other oxidation products form, thereby giving the oil undesirable odors and flavors. While not as conspicuous as the FFA values, the trend toward high oxidation was also evident. In other words, many of the oils were rancid well before their “best by” date.
Oil is considered authentic when no other additives or oils are added, and the contents of the oil match the label. Oil quality is determined by the extraction process, the quality of the raw food, storage of the oil, and the hydrolysis of the fruit and oxidation of the oil. Many of the oils tested were of low quality. This could explain some of the quality issues as this oil may have improper storage or extreme processing conditions, and the fruit used to make the oil could potentially be rotten or damaged.
Healthy levels of free fatty acidity (FFA) for avocado oil is between 0.1 and 0.055%. Three of the 22 oils sampled had FFA around 2.5%, with extra virgin oils having FFA levels ranging from 0.03%-2.69%, the average being 1.31%. The avocado oils tested also showed high levels of vitamin E content which can suggest that soybean oil may have been added.
Interview With Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms
Joel Salatin is an American farmer and author. He owns Polyface Farms, which is known for its small scale unconventional farming methods. Months ago I heard Joel on a Joe Rogan podcast and was immediately blown away. It’s not very often that we hear people discuss the gut microbiome on one of the most popular podcasts in the country.
Here’s that podcast. I highly recommend listening to it if you have the time.
Along with discussing the gut microbiome, Joel talked about his farm, Polyface Farms. Polyface Farms is located in Virginia, and they do things a little differently than most. The land that is now Polyface farms was purchased by Joel’s parents in 1961. They’re all about regenerative farming through sustainable practices, like pasture-raised meat, carbon sequestration, and working in a seasonal cycle.
In short, it’s a dream come true for someone like myself who is all about organic eco-friendly agriculture, so naturally, I had to ask Joel a couple of questions.
The older generation is a big fan of talking about life when they were young. My grandfather loves to talk about the fact that he was raised on cow’s milk, and he turned out “just fine.” The difference, of course, is that the milk he was raised on was unpasteurized small scale cows milk. What encouraged you to get into small scale sustainable farming? Does it relate back to how you were raised or did you have some sort of revelation in life? Feel free to comment on how things have changed if you have any thoughts on that.
My paternal grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine when it came out in the late 1940s. He always wanted to farm but never did. He had a very large garden, though, and sold extra produce to neighbors and corner grocers. My dad received his no-chemical indoctrination, then, from Grandpa, so I’m the third generation in the compost tradition. My Dad was a financial wizard and did accounting work all his life. After flying Navy bombers in WWII, he went to Indiana University on the GI bill and then headed off to Venezuela, South America as a bilingual accountant with Texas Oil Company. His long-range goal was a farm in a developing country and Venezuela seemed as good as any. After about 7 years he’d saved up enough to buy 1,000 acres in the highlands of Venezuela and began farming. The goal was dairy and broilers. My older brother and I were born during that time, and things looked bright. But then came a junta and the ouster of Peres Jimenez and animosity toward anything American; we fled the back door as the machine guns came in the front door; lost everything and after exhausting all attempts at protection, (we) came back to the U.S. Easter Sunday 1961, landing in Philadelphia. Mom grew up in Ohio and Texas and all their family was in Ohio and Indiana, but Dad’s heart was still in Venezuela and he hoped after the political turmoil settled to be able to return to our farm.
With that in mind, he wanted to be within a day’s drive of Washington D.C. so he could get to the Venezuelan Embassy quickly and easily to do paperwork and return. That never happened, but it’s why we ended up in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. When I hit 41, I remember thinking: “If I lost it all, would I start over?” That’s what Dad and Mom did in 1961. I was 4. Dad did his accounting work, and Mom was a high school health and physical ed teacher; that off-farm income paid the mortgage and within 10 years the land was paid off. Dad combined his ecology with his economic understanding to create some broad principles: animals move; mobile infrastructure; direct marketing; carbon-driven fertility. I had my first flock of laying hens when I was 10 years old and then added a garden. By 14 years old, I was our main salesman at the local Curb Market, a Depression-era hold-over that foreshadowed today’s farmers’ markets. With only 3 vendors, it struggled but after a couple of years, we had a growing and steady clientele for our pastured meats, poultry, eggs, produce, and dairy products (yogurt, butter, cottage cheese). We closed it down when I went off to college and the other two elderly matrons at the market quite as well so by the time I came home, that market and all of its wonderful grandfathered food safety exemptions were gone forever.
I’ve always said we were about 20 years ahead of our time. Operating that market during my teen years of early 1970s as the nascent back-to-the-land hippie movement germinated was not easy, but the lessons were invaluable when I returned to the farm and started building a clientele on my own in 1980, long before modern farmers’ markets. Teresa and I married in 1980, remodeled the attic of the farmhouse, and lived there for 7 years until Mom and Dad moved out from downstairs to a mobile home parked outside the yard. My Mom’s mother had lived there for 10 years and passed away, making that spot available. As an investigative reporter at the local daily newspaper, I realized every business was desperate for people who would show up on time, put in a full days’ work without whining, and actually creatively think through better ways of doing things all made me highly employable. Living on $300 a month, driving a $50 car, growing all of our own, cutting our own firewood for winter warmth, not having a TV—all these things enabled us even without a high salary to squirrel away half the paycheck. Within a couple of years we had saved enough to live on for a year. I walked out of that office Sept. 24, 1982, with a one-year cash nest egg and the jeering of every person I knew” “He’s throwing his life away.” “All that talent and he’s going to waste it on a farm.” “Don’t you know you can’t make any money farming?”
We succeeded.
While we were watching the podcast you did with Joe Rogan, my dad and I had several “Wow!” moments listening to you. One of us would be in the kitchen, and we would run into the living room where the podcast was playing, and share a look of absolute awe. “This guy is talking about the stuff that we talk about! And he’s on Joe Rogan!” We don’t know many people who talk about gut health the way we do. How did you learn about the importance of the body’s microbiome? Is there a correlation between your knowledge of the microbiome and how you run your farm?
Perhaps the most profound truth in life is that everything we see floats in an ocean of invisible beings. With electronic microscopes, we can now see many of these things, but because we can’t see them with the naked eye, they are not in our momentary conscience. It’s hard to forget the microbes floating in the air, on our skin, in our eyes, nostrils, and intestines. Our farm’s wellness philosophy stems from Antoine Béchamp, the French contemporary and nemesis of Louis Pasteur. While Pasteur promoted the germ theory and busied himself destroying and sterilizing, Beauchamp advanced the terrain theory and encouraged people to think about basic immunity. Rather than sterilization, he encouraged sanitation. He encouraged folks to get more sleep, drink more and better water (much of the water at that time was putrid) and eat better food. Along came Sir Albert Howard half a century later adding the soil dimension to this basic wellness premise.
In general, we believe nature’s default position is fundamentally wellness and if it’s not well, we humans probably did something to mess it up. That’s a far cry from assuming wellness is like catching lightning in a bottle, and some sort of sickness fairy hovers over the planet dropping viral stardust willy nilly. Sickness and disease, whether in humans, plants, or animals are not the problem in and of themselves; they simply manifest weaknesses developed in the unseen world. Every sickness or disease we’ve ever had on our farm was our fault. We may have selected the wrong seedstock, crowded things, created incubators for pathogens. You can stress things a lot of different ways. But our assumption when confronted with non-wellness is not to assume we missed a vaccine or a pharmaceutical, but rather to ask “what did we do to break down the immunological function of this plant or animal?” That leads to far more profound truth than assuming we didn’t select the right connection from the chemistry lab.
The fact that today people actually talk about the microbiome in polite company is a fantastic societal breakthrough. Hopefully, it will continue.
The current “pandemic” resulted in a total collapse of our food chain at big grocery stores. While things have since calmed down and straightened out, many people are now aware of just how weak our food supply chain is. The obvious solution- buy small- scale, buy local. The obvious problem- buying meat the right way, (small scale and local) is expensive. Here where I am in Detroit we’ve got a great meat guy, but a couple of weeks ago I found myself at the Dekalb farmers market in Atlanta. I spent $9 for one pound of organic, grass-fed ground beef. What are your thoughts for people who are concerned about the costs of shopping ethically? On a broader scale, do you have any solutions to this?
Price; it’s one of the biggest and most common questions. So let’s tackle it on several fronts.
1. Whenever someone says they can’t afford our food, I grab them by the arm and say “take me to your house.” Guess what I find there? Take-out, coffee, alcohol, sometimes tobacco, Netflix, People magazine, iPhones, flat-screen TV, tickets to Disney, lottery tickets—you get the drift. Very seldom does “I can’t afford it” carry any weight. We buy what we want, and that includes many folks below the poverty line.
2. Buy unprocessed. That $9 ground beef is still less than a fast food meal of equal nutritional value. Domestic culinary skills are the foundation of integrity food systems, and never have we had more techno-gadgetry to make our kitchens efficient. The average American spends fewer than 15 minutes a day in their kitchen. Nearly 80 percent of Americans have no clue at 4 p.m. what’s for dinner. In fact, the new catchphrase for millennials is “what’s dinner?” not “what’s for dinner?” So cooking from scratch is the number one way to reduce costs. Right now you can buy a whole Polyface pastured broiler, world-class, for less a pound than boneless skinless breast Tyson chicken at Wal-Mart. The most expensive heirloom Peruvian blue potato at New York City green markets is less per pound than Lay’s potato chips across the street. It’s about the processing.
3. Buy bulk. Get a freeze and buy half a beef or 20 chickens at a time. Buy a bushel of green beans and can them. We buy 10 bushels of apples every fall and spend two days making applesauce; it’s cheaper than watery junk at the supermarket and is real food. That’s not a waste of time; it’s kitchen camaraderie. On our farm, we give big price breaks for volume purchasing because it’s simply more efficient to handle a $500 transaction than 25 $20 transactions. This means, of course, that you must have a savings plan. Half of all Americans can’t put their hands on $400 in cash. That’s not an expensive food problem; that’s an endemic and profound failure to plan
Q: Here at OLM we’re a big fan of systems. We also have 10,000 square foot urban farm right in our back yard and are getting chickens very soon. Developing a farm feels a bit like an optimal opportunity to create the “perfect” system. I’m curious as to how the farm is systemized to be self-sustainable. I’m wondering if the farm is carbon neutral or carbon negative? Do you let your chickens work on your compost pile? Do you monitor cow grazing for optimum carbon sequestration? What advice do you have for the many people including us, who have just started growing our food after the current crisis?
Perhaps the starting point is to think of integration rather than segregation. How many different species of things can you hook together for symbiosis? So we follow the cows with the laying hens in Eggmobiles to scratch through the cow dung, spread out the manure as fertilizer, and eat the fly larvae out of the cowpats (this mimics the way birds always follow herbivores in nature). We build compost with pigs (we call them pig aerators). We have chickens underneath rabbit cages, generating $10,000 a year in a space the size of a 2-car garage and making the most superb compost in the world. We see trees as carbon sinks to integrate with open land; industrial commercial chippers enable us to chip crooked, diseased, and dying trees for compost carbon. The kitchen and gardening scraps go to the chickens. Hoop houses for rabbits, pigs, and chickens in the winter double up as vegetable production in the spring, summer, and fall, creating pathogen dead-ends for the plants and animals growing there at different times of the year. Integration is everything.
In half a century, we’ve moved our soil organic matter from 1 percent to 8.2 percent. I don’t know if we’re overall carbon-neutral, but we’ve done this without buying an ounce of chemical fertilizer and using 800 percent less depreciable infrastructure per gross income dollar than the average U.S. farm. That creates resilience. Over the years we’ve installed 8 miles of waterlines from permaculture style high ponds that catch surface run-off and gravity feed to the farmland below. And the rocks and gullies now grow vegetation where none grew before. This is not pride; it’s a humble acknowledgment of a Creator’s benevolent and abundant design; it’s our responsibility to caress this magnificent womb.