Their influential documentary “Kiss the Ground” (2020) reached over a billion people globally and inspired the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to devote $20 billion toward the health of American soil.
Now, husband-and-wife co-directors Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell are out with their follow-up documentary “Common Ground,” which makes its D.C. premiere next week at the historic Miracle Theatre on Barracks Row just south of the Eastern Market Metro station in Southeast D.C. on Nov. 13, Nov. 14 and Nov. 15.
“Regenerative agriculture is a way of farming that grows soil,” Joshua Tickell told WTOP. “We’re building farmer profits, we’re getting farmers out of debt and we’re building healthy food. Those are all positive win-win things that everybody can agree on. … That’s something that Republicans can get behind, Democrats, Independents, everyone can buy into that future because that’s going to put America onto the road to a healthy, profitable society.”
What exactly is regenerative farming?
“It relies on four essential principles: you don’t till; you reduce the sprays, the toxic stuff; you integrate animals into the crops; and you put cover crops,” Tickell said. “You do all four, you don’t just do one. When you do that, you’re reducing the expensive stuff that you have to do, you’re reducing the toxic stuff that’s in the food, so the food itself is healthier, and because the soil is rebounding, you’re getting these crops that are incredibly nutritious.”
Winner of the Human/Nature Award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, the film unveils the dark web of money, power and politics behind our broken food system and exposes how farmers are literally dying to feed us.
“We’ve got about 200 million acres of grain agriculture in the U.S. and the farmers are currently going into debt in record numbers, suicide is five times higher than the national average,” Tickell said. “Around World War II, we converted war chemicals into farm chemicals, so there are companies making a lot of money selling toxic chemicals … You can reduce your chemical inputs by 50% in the first year; a farmer is going to say, ‘That’s awesome.'”
As an alternative, the film highlights a hopeful movement of white, Black and Indigenous farmers using new regenerative models of agriculture to balance the climate, improve consumer health and stabilize the economy.
“With regenerative agriculture, farmers make $100 to $400 more per acre — and multiply that times 200 million and you’ve got some serious cash going into farmers’ pockets,” Tickell said. “That changes the Midwest, that changes the tax bases and that reduces what we have to do in terms of subsidies, but beyond that, it sequesters carbon into the soil, so we’re turning farmers into our climate heroes as well as our food heroes.”
The star-studded documentary features Rosario Dawson, Laura Dern, Donald Glover, Woody Harrelson, Jason Momoa and Ian Somerhalder. Somerhalder will attend the D.C. screenings alongside the filmmakers.
“The film is a love letter to our children — and they all write it together and they voice it together,” Tickell said. “It is so beautiful. The film will give you hope. It will make you cry, but in a good way because this is about a good future we can all participate in … We’re gonna have some farmer heroes from the Midwest with congresspeople and with important VIPs from our government right there at the Miracle Theatre discussing this issue.”
Listen to our full conversation here.
