Sacred Cow: The Nutritional, Environmental and Ethical Case for Better Meat (2020) - full transcript

(people conversing)

- I always question myself,

how can we create something new?

I wanna know if the farmer did a good job.

Where did you get the animal?

Did the animal live well?

Is it well slaughtered in the right way?

All those things are very important.

I was raised in the butcher shop.

I was almost born in the butcher shop.

(calm music)



I wanna make everything transparent.

I want people to see the meat.

And everybody said, "Don't do it,

"because people don't eat meat anymore.

"Don't show it."

I said, "No, I'm a butcher.

"Let's put the meat in front and let's show them,"

and I did it anyway.

This is a Hereford from Ireland,

a Simmental, a Baviere from Germany.

This is West Flemish ones from our breeds.

So you see they all have the different ones that we work on.

Being a butcher is not only about cutting up meat,

but it's about trying to work nose to tail



to appreciate every little piece of that animal.

Nothing, nothing gets lost.

So this is like my playroom for maturing things.

It's all very fresh now.

Lamb, we salt it and we dry it again.

A lot of flavor again.

Fresh herbs we put on it.

That's why they say be creative in what you do.

So many little things to explore,

so it's Disneyland for me.

(metal scraping)

So I have two kinds of beef we're gonna taste.

So the West Flemish one.

(knife scraping)

And then we have a Holsteiner cow that's really a milk cow.

See this marbling?

Then we still have a matured pork

that we'll have matured for four weeks.

(meat sizzling)

- [Nick] There's a debate out there

about whether or not we should be eating meat.

(glasses clinking)

- Cheers. - Cheers.

- [Nick] It's a debate about our planet,

our ethics, and our health.

- [Crowd] There's no excuse for animal abuse!

(crowd chanting)

But what if we're arguing about the wrong thing?

(gate squeaking)

What if the very animals we're fighting about

are a key piece of fixing what's broken?

(pigs squealing)

(hooves clopping)

(cattle lowing)

(tranquil music)

To understand this debate, we have to know how we got here.

How did we become a nation

and a world obsessed with making as much food as possible,

seemingly without regard to consequence?

- We're in Northwest Indiana,

about a hundred miles from Chicago,

a hundred miles from Indianapolis,

and we're surrounded here by corn and soybean farmers.

(engine rumbling)

So yeah, this here has been a crop ground,

corn, bean, wheat rotation, for many, many, many years.

And far as you can see going that way

is just corn and beans.

Wherever you see trees is pretty much a hill

or it's a ditch.

Everything else has been cleared for farming.

Go ahead.

- Well, in high school actually,

we were high school sweethearts,

and Paul bought his first farm

when we were seniors in high school.

He just decided he wanted to be a farmer when he grew up,

so he bought a farm.

It was cheap, rough ground, and that's what he did.

And how much did you spend on your first equipment?

Like it was from the junkyard.

I mean, it was pretty rough. - Yeah, like $1,500.

(both laugh)

- It was pretty rough,

and so, (laughs) he became a good mechanic too.

(tranquil music)

(machinery clanks)

Most of 'em are GMO crops.

- [Paul] It's mainly corn and beans.

- [Joanne] Lots of corn and soybeans.

- [Paul] A little bit of wheat.

(engine rumbling)

- [Joanne] It's commercial agriculture,

so a lot of the spraying, the fungicides.

It's hot and heavy.

(engine roaring)

This is kind of the heart of it.

(engine rumbling)

Basically the only way you get ahead is just grow more

and more and more, and better yields, better yields.

The quality necessarily isn't important.

(building creaking)

- We have this absolute irony occurring

in that as we put more and more emphasis

on commodity agriculture production,

we're not only seeing the nutritional quality

of food significantly decline and human health decline,

but we're also seeing the economic health

of farmers and ranchers declining.

(engine rumbling)

- [Paul] We market our grain off the board of trade.

Then we market to the elevators here.

- You're subject to the commodity market.

You don't get to set your own price.

All the large farmers are subject to that.

You can do future trading

and try to take a price ahead of time,

pick a price, but it's...

- Risky.

- [Joanne] So it's a rough road for commercial farming.

(melancholy music)

- The average farmer is actually losing money

in their crop production, and on top of losing money,

they're using chemicals and synthetic fertilizers

that are degrading and eroding our soils

and our ecosystems around us.

(chicks chirping)

- [Joanne] The bills pile up,

and there's only so much money that comes in,

and a lot of times it comes in seasonally,

and so you get really good at begging for forgiveness

on the telephone and being really sweet to your creditors.

I want my kids to be strong and tough.

That legacy wasn't what I was wanting to pass on to them,

that black hole.

We want our farm not to be a black hole.

(wind whooshing)

(pensive music) (engine rumbling)

- [Nick] The current industrial agricultural system

has its roots in the aftermath of World War II,

when an urgent need to produce more food collided

with a new era of scientific discovery.

- The farming community that I am part of responded

at the end of the Second World War

to the food security emergency,

and the tools that they used were essentially chemistry.

The arrival of chemical fertilizers

and pesticides liberated farmers from the practice

which was standard all over the world,

namely building fertility with a succession of crops,

grain crops, vegetable crops, in a crop rotation,

and then grazed by livestock.

That was mixed farming.

And now we have chemically assisted monocultures.

(bright music)

(machine whirring)

- [Narrator] Today, agriculture is going far beyond nature

to produce new miracles

for an even better, more abundant life.

On the farm today, wherever you look,

you see the handiwork of scientists:

improved crops, more productive-

- That system has separated livestock production

from grain production.

It's had profound consequences for the way we produce food.

(ominous music)

- You look at the Midwest now in the United States,

this massive monoculture of corn and soy

and corn and corn and corn and soy, and more corn.

So this massive amount of monoculture

is having devastating effects on the environment.

What used to be great biodiversity is gone.

- [Nick] The industrialization of crop production,

the idea that every acre must produce as much as possible,

was also applied to livestock production.

- Animal agriculture simply doesn't fit

that sort of mechanistic model of industrialization.

They're biological beings.

You crowd the animals together

so they can't exhibit normal animal behavior,

and so the animals are under stress.

(chickens clucking)

If you have animals on the land

as they were most of history up until very recently,

then when you create the waste

and the waste goes back and is regenerated in the soil

and goes back to produce nutrients

for the crops that produce the feed,

and you have a regenerative process.

But when you concentrate those animals

in these large-scale operations,

you're concentrating your waste,

just like you do in any other industrial operation.

- [Nick] Industrialized agriculture was heralded

as a modern miracle.

Food scarcity turned into overabundance,

every step of the process tweaked for maximum efficiency.

- [Narrator] Each American farm worker feeds more people

than any other farmer on earth.

History teaches that a nation grows

according to its agriculture, the very basis of life.

- [Nick] And in laboratories,

food manufacturers were experimenting

with how to make food more convenient and more desirable.

- [Announcer] Birds Eye frozen instant baby foods.

Important natural vitamin and valuable-

- [Robb] The agricultural revolution has been transitioned

into the processed food revolution.

- [Announcer] Just add water.

No further cooking.

Ready in 20 seconds.

- We started adding more sugar to things like sodas.

The ability to make things like TV dinners

started ramping up, so we started thinking about,

how can we extend the shelf life in foods?

And so we started adding more sugar,

more salt, more flavor combinations.

♪ You grab 'em ♪

♪ Pop pop pop ♪

♪ You want 'em ♪

♪ Pop pop pop ♪

♪ You crunch 'em ♪

♪ Crunch 'em, crunch 'em, crunch 'em ♪

- [Nick] What began as a mission to feed America

became a mission to excite America's taste buds.

♪ Get some ♪

♪ Get some ♪

♪ Get some ♪

- Pringles. (lid pops)

- Our food has been designed to be addictive

by the food industry.

This is no accident, and it's intentional.

- We all have taste buds, but are we using them?

- Our brains are wired in a way

that makes us seek out really calorie-dense,

highly rewarding foods, and rewarding means something

that makes you wanna do it over and over and over again.

And the big food companies that sell these foods know that,

and they actually employ scientists

that make these foods as maximally addicting as possible.

- Cocoa Pebbles.

One spoonful, and those tiny pebbles

cover every single taste bud

with an avalanche of awesomeness.

(hip-hop music) So only Pebbles

rocks your whole mouth.

(pensive music) (cart rattling)

- We live in this ubiquitous food environment

with literally infinite palate and flavor experiences.

If we just walk into a standard convenience store,

we have more flavor and palate options

than literally any pharaoh of Egypt,

king of England has ever had at their disposal.

- [Nick] One of the unintended consequences

of this miracle is our failing health.

- It's no big secret why obesity rates are rising.

Farmers have known for thousands of years,

if you wanna fatten up your animals,

you put them in a pen where they can't run around

and get physical activity, and you feed them lots of grain.

Humans are like that too.

- [Nick] But instead of warning people

about the dangers of processed foods,

the government told us to eat less fat.

- [Announcer] When it comes to calories, fat is the enemy.

- For you, sir?

- I believe I'll have the turkey and avocado

on whole wheat, please.

- [Announcer] Choose fish as the main dish

instead of pork or beef or high-fat lunch meat.

Suffice it to say that fats

and cholesterol have long been recognized

as increasing the risk of heart disease and strokes.

More recently, high-fat diets have also been linked

to certain types of cancer.

- You think, "Who cares what the government recommends?

"Nobody goes to dot-gov website to look up their diet."

But what is recommended

by the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans

is actually incredibly powerful.

Nutritionists, dieticians, doctors, nurses,

any healthcare practitioner,

they take the dietary guidelines

and they just give it to the public.

(pensive music)

This is what determines school lunch programs.

They must meet those standards.

- So I looked at the school for today,

and they could have breakfast for lunch.

The kids can have pancakes, tater tots,

baked apple slices and syrup.

What's available?

Just carbs.

That doesn't fill you up, and it makes you want more.

The net carbs for this meal which is offered by the school

contains 23 teaspoons of sugar,

almost a half a cup of sugar for lunch.

- If we're mainly sticking to foods

that have minimal processing, most folks do okay on that.

It's when we highly process these foods

and start creating amazing flavor combinations

that people find it very difficult to avoid overeating.

You could make the case that if you're not fat,

sick, diabetic, and broken in the modern food environment,

you're kind of screwing up.

- If you look at the 30,000-foot view

of what happened in American health,

we said, "Stop eating fat, stop eating cholesterol,

"eat less meat, eat lean meat," and what happened?

Globally, we just got really, really obese.

We got diabetes.

We got metabolic syndrome.

That messaging just hasn't worked for our health.

- A warning if you frequent the supermarket deli section,

researchers have found a direct link

between eating processed meats-

- Processed meats cause cancer,

and red meat probably does too.

- [Nick] When this low-fat message led

to further declines in health,

the blame shifted to red meat.

- [Newscaster] Factor in developing cancer.

- Red meat is now worse for us in our minds

than fat ever could have been

because there are so many more reasons to avoid red meat,

not only for your health,

but also now for the goodness of others,

including not killing animals,

and for the good of the planet.

- [Woman] Hi, help save animals?

Thank you.

Would you like one?

Thanks.

- When I was 16, I met another teenage girl who was a vegan.

Her whole family were vegans.

Even at that young age, I was already somebody

who was extremely concerned about the planet

and about animals and about justice,

and I was very impassioned.

And here she came with her vegan world,

and it all made complete sense to me.

I grew up in a very sort of urban-suburban environment.

I had no idea where food came from,

and she told me all these horrible things

about the conditions of animals in factory farms,

and she's completely right about that.

I mean, none of that has gotten any better in my lifetime.

So I was utterly convinced,

and within a week or two, I had decided

that I was going to also be a vegan, and I did.

- What happens a lot of times when people cut out meat,

it's part of this sort of overhaul of their diet,

and they join a community.

They join a cause.

They eat more plants, which is generally a good idea

for almost every American.

That part of eating more plants I love.

It's the exclusion of key nutrients and key food

categories that just never really sits right with me.

(food sizzling)

- So I had all the good books, and I read them all,

and I thought that I had this all down.

I had little charts on the refrigerator,

like where you're gonna get your amino acids,

and lentils and black beans

and brown rice and this and that.

(melancholy music)

The things that went wrong for me,

immediately I ended up with terrible blood sugar problems.

So the blood sugar crashes

were happening almost immediately.

I just didn't know what it was.

So there was that problem.

About two years in,

I ended up with degenerative discs in my spine.

That's permanent.

You don't get your joints back once they're destroyed.

I've got multiple autoimmune diseases.

I also did quite a number on my reproductive organs.

I pretty much stopped menstruating

about a year into being a vegan,

but I just accepted it as just life,

like it didn't even occur to me

that I was doing it to myself.

- There are some people who seem to be healthy

on a vegan diet.

For most people, it seems to be only a matter of time

before something in their health suffers

and it drives them away from their vegan diet.

- There are many essential nutrients,

like B12, for example,

that are either exclusively found in animal foods

or are much more easily obtained from animal foods.

Other nutrients like iron and zinc and EPA and DHA,

which are the long-chain omega-3 fatty acids,

and calcium, which are found in plant foods,

but they're much more bioavailable,

which means absorbable, from animal foods.

Supplements often don't come in the same form

that you would get if you eat that nutrient in food.

Getting nutrients from food

should always be the first choice.

- [Newscaster] A major warning for red meat lovers,

the big announcement today putting meat

in the same category as cigarettes.

- Wow. - Despite clear evidence

that red meat provides essential nutrition,

you can't blame people for being confused.

- [Newscaster] That we have heard about as carcinogens.

- A kind of big, splashy news stories

in the news cycle a while back

that eating red meat was as bad for you

as smoking cigarettes, which is absolutely preposterous.

- [Nick] The problem with these news stories is

that observational studies

do not actually prove direct cause.

- If you get a bunch of people together and study them,

people who eat more red meat

on average are more likely to smoke cigarettes.

They're more likely not to exercise.

They're more likely not to eat fruits and vegetables.

They're more likely to be overweight,

have high blood pressure,

and have all of these other factors and behaviors

which would increase their risk of disease.

- So it's not the meat itself.

It's what the meat is eaten with, right?

So if you eat a whole-foods, plant-rich diet

and you consume meat as part of it,

there's no evidence it's really harmful.

I think we have unfortunately vilified meat

where there really is not strong evidence that we should.

- Animal products getting all the blame

is putting the whole attention

on division between plant foods and animal foods,

and the real elephant in the room

is the processed food industry.

We know that it's very harmful for public health,

and rather than tackling that,

we are just scapegoating meat.

- We're trying to blame meat

for the modern illnesses of obesity and diabetes

and cancer and heart disease.

It is far more likely

that modern food is responsible for modern illness,

not a substance that we have been eating

for 3 1/2 million years.

(machine whirring)

(meat thuds)

- [Nick] Another unintended consequence

of the seemingly miraculous food system

is a compromised morality.

Producing meat fast and cheap comes at a high price.

(machine whirring)

(pigs oinking)

- I used to believe that if you're gonna eat meat,

you need to be comfortable killing animals.

Come on, girls and boy.

I have since come to a point

where I recognize that there are a lot of things that people

do in other professions that I don't wanna do.

I think it is imperative that if you're gonna eat meat,

that you understand the process,

that you understand that that meat was a live animal,

that it was killed for your nutrition.

I probably worked on 20 farms

before we started our own farm.

They've been in here for a month and a half.

There's still grass in there,

but they're definitely digging up a lot of it,

getting a lot of poop out there, which is great.

I worked on veggie farms

and realized all the veggie farms, if they were organic,

were using animal products,

whether there were animals there or not.

They were trucking in manure or bone meal

or blood meal or feather meal.

If you don't have animals,

you've still gotta put nutrients in the soil somehow.

There isn't three feet of topsoil in the Midwest

because farmers were growing kale for 2,000 years.

It's 'cause there were bison roaming the plains and pooping.

And once I realized that, I was like,

"Well, I gotta learn how to grow animals then."

(animals chewing)

I like listening to 'em eat,

especially in the summer

when they're on grass and they move.

They're just as excited as they were today

every time you move 'em.

And then you can, you just hear 'em eating grass.

It's like one of the most satisfying things.

If my end goal is a closed system,

then the animals have to be there.

That has to be a part of it.

(tranquil music)

(roosters crowing)

I learn a lot on YouTube,

like I learned how to pull piglets out of a sow

that was struggling farrowing at 2:00 AM in the night

watching a video on YouTube. (laughs)

Next thing I knew, I was shoulder deep inside a pig,

pulling out a piglet.

(jaunty music)

The slaughter industry in New England is

a weak point in livestock production.

- We will be receiving animals through this door here.

The pen system in itself has incorporated all the guidelines

that Temple Grandin, who is the authority

as far as humane treatment in facilities

in the US and throughout the world.

It's a one shock.

It'll render the animal unconscious the first time

so that there's no suffering.

- This was started to solve a problem.

This is really the result.

This is a solution to a problem

that a group of local farmers had.

You're gonna cut that open when?

Later, right?

And they'll put

a cooler in there. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Probably by the time they get this-

- Most consumers don't really

give the meat processing a second thought.

However, the farmers do.

In Southern new England,

we don't have many quality processing options

that are USDA-inspected.

You see those three doors right there?

Those are the chutes that the animals will be coming in,

and then that's where the rail is

that the animals will then come on

and move through the process.

(cattle lowing)

- We had gotten to a point

where pretty much every time I left the slaughterhouse,

I would get home just furious about something.

I've watched my animals kicked.

We'd get ground beef back with bones ground into it.

And it's heartbreaking because we pour our souls

and pocketbooks into raising these animals,

and we're in control of every day except one.

Our dream processing facility

would honor the death of our animals the way

that we honor the life of our animals.

- The system is broken, and we're really hopeful

that with a new facility

that's coming from a farmer's perspective,

that it's gonna help change

and make a difference in everyone's life.

(bright music)

(people conversing)

- We have quite a few first-time customers

who have been vegetarian or vegan,

and with going to the doctor

or deciding that they need to introduce meat,

they come to us.

A lot of them haven't cooked meat before,

or they have, but it's been a really long time.

And here's our meat locker.

These are all hind legs,

so these are good for roast beef.

We use 'em for sandwiches.

- [Monica] We define local as

within 150 miles of the butcher shop.

- [Aaron] I have a couple of ribs over here.

- That means that the animals are raised within 150 miles.

They're slaughtered within 150 miles.

So we really try and keep it as tight as possible.

- And since we only get whole animals,

there's only a certain number of cuts per animal.

- [Monica] We realized that another cafe or restaurant

wasn't really what was needed in our community.

What was really needed was a place

where we could get meat that we could trust.

- The farms that we work with, we go through a long process

in terms of figuring out who we actually wanna work with.

We talk with the farmers and the ranchers

and just see what they do, how they do it.

- The thing about being a vegan is

that it's not just what you eat.

It becomes who you are, for most of us anyway.

It really becomes sort of the main sense

of our identity is being a vegan.

And what that means is it's really hard

to absorb counter-information.

Anything that would be threatening

to that vegan worldview really feels like

it's a threat to who you are.

- [Newscaster] Animal rights activists

from the group Direct Action Everywhere in Berkeley

have been targeting Whole Foods for several years now.

- Modernity said it was a good idea

if we got as many people as possible into towns and cities,

got them as far the hell away as we could from soil,

blood, killing, growing anything.

This was progress.

(crowd chanting)

Nobody thought this thing through.

What will people think about food

if they never have any contact with it?

And there's a lot of people who are just very confused.

- [Crowd] How many animals have to die?

- And they're trying to make really important moral

and ethical decisions about what they should eat

and how they should live,

but it's quite hard to make important moral

and ethical decisions if you don't know very much.

It's easy to fall for extreme, simple answers.

(woman shouting indistinctly)

- [Crowd] Animals do not want to die!

(woman shouting indistinctly)

Animals do not want to die!

(woman shouting indistinctly)

- In June of 2017, we had a Sunday night class,

and this particular class was a half hog butchery demo.

At that class, some protestors showed up

and came to our door, and they were dressed in all black,

and they had candles,

and it was like a candlelight vigil

for the animal that had passed.

- [Crowd] Animals do not want to die!

(woman shouting indistinctly)

- And over time, the protests got louder and bigger.

After the second or third protest,

I reached out to them via email

and asked to meet with them because I really didn't

understand what their end goal was.

I felt like we must have some common ground.

- We know that we are on the side of justice.

We're on the side of compassion and nonviolence.

We intend to liberate the city of Berkeley

by banning all violence towards animals,

in effect, banning meat in Berkeley.

- They basically told us that their end goal was

to make Berkeley a meat-free city by 2020,

and to shut us down.

- As we have moved away from a very visceral,

day-to-day dependency on our ecological womb,

we have become incredibly unreasonable

and un-common-sensical as to how this all works.

I don't see this whole thing about ethics of eating animals

as a new sacred search

into a spiritual cosmic understanding.

It's an incredible trademark

of a devolution into disconnectedness.

- We countered by saying, "Well, what are the compromises?

"What are our options to have these protests go away?"

They finally came back to us and said,

"We have some solutions."

The agreement was if we put the sign up,

they won't protest our store anymore.

So we took that option.

We were trying to keep the whole thing on the down-low

because we didn't want to give them a voice in the public,

but once we put the sign up, they took that as a win,

and they issued a press release,

and the press release went international.

- [Newscaster] Vegan activists rallied outside for months,

carrying out gruesome stunts.

- [Newscaster] Calling off the protestors

that have been outside their store weekly

for the last three months.

- The business is so fed up with all of it,

it's decided to throw the activists a bone.

- Posters saying that killing animals is violent and unjust.

- [Newscaster] Quote, attention:

Animals' lives are their right.

Killing them is violent and unjust, no matter how it's done.

- We had our best August ever after that press release.

I think that vegans and proponents of sustainable

ranching and sustainable livestock production

do have a lot in common.

The majority of meat produced in this country is

under such abhorrent conditions.

We both are making reactions to the same evil, if you will.

They're just different choices of how to do it.

(pensive music)

- [Nick] Some argue that rather than change the system,

we should get rid of cows and simply make meat ourselves.

- One of the ideas that has been floated is

we'll just grow meat in a lab.

But the irony to this,

to the notion of selling lab-grown meat

as a sustainable option,

is that nobody asked the question,

where do the nutrients come from to grow the meat?

The inputs are provided by row crop-centric agriculture

which are grown with fossil fuel inputs

and then introduced into a lab.

Then they are massively processed into vats

of essentially biological goo shipped around the world.

Somehow that's being marketed as a sustainable option.

- The Beyond Meat and the Impossible Burger folks

and others like them

have done an incredible public relations campaign

making people believe that these big vats

of fake product, they just happen.

I mean, I have this great big cylinder,

and it's brewing, you know, and it's just so cool,

and out the other end comes the Impossible Burger.

They have done a great job of presenting this

as something out of nothing, and it's not.

There are tractor trailer loads of crops that are grown with

big machinery and petroleum fertilizer,

and pesticides that are destroying the earthworms

and creating monocultures, that birds have no habitat,

pollinators have no habitat,

that are absolutely sterile on the landscape.

(ominous music)

(bright music)

- There's a legitimate case against farmers

that whatever they've been doing to the land

has resulted in less nature, less wild rivers.

We've just changed things too far and too much.

(sheep bleating)

We're here on our farm at the moment in Matterdale

in the Lake District in the far northwest of England.

The sheep that we have that go to the mountain,

we know that they have at least a-thousand-year-old DNA

in them from the Viking sheep.

The same sheep probably live on the same mountains

for maybe 4 1/2 thousand years.

(sheep bleating)

It's a pastoral tradition

about moving sheep from the mountains in summer

and down in winter, and the whole thing revolves

around the moving of the sheep and cattle.

It sometimes looks very anachronistic in the

modern world but I don't think it is anachronistic.

I think it matters as much now as ever.

(lively music)

(James whistles)

(James shouting indistinctly)

If you live in a big city

and you just want a lot more nature

and you're feeling quite despairing about ecology,

these landscapes look like they're empty.

Hey, let's just fill them with wilderness.

And sometimes this ideal of wilderness

and everything that humans do being bad

is just getting in the way of sense.

If we just stopped farming these places,

it doesn't go back to that.

We can actually create something more biodiverse and healthy

by thinking about how we've changed it,

thinking about how we can use our inevitable intrusions

and power to shape it in ways

that create those spaces for nature,

those habitats for nature.

We don't need a silly culture war between pure wilderness

and terrible farmers on the other side.

This is dreadful.

It's not good for nature.

It's not good for these places.

(sheep bleating)

(calm music)

Within a year of creating these river corridors,

we had an explosion of voles, field voles,

like little hairy mice.

The barn owls came back to our farm,

so these really beautiful iconic white owls that we love.

This is where a lot of the butterflies,

moths, and other stuff exist.

Some of the rarest stuff in Britain is in these spaces.

(James whistles)

(sheep bleating)

It's a false choice between it being wild

or it between farmed.

There's a much better option,

which is you persuade people like me to be good at both.

(whistles) Come on, come on.

(sheep bleating)

(birds chirping)

- [Nick] A third unintended consequence

of the miracle of industrialized agriculture

is our depleted soil.

- When we came in 1961,

we had large areas in the fields that were solid rock.

I can remember as a child walking the fields

and never setting foot on a piece of vegetation.

It was that barren.

Today, all those rocks are covered up

with 12 inches of soil,

and to have watched that in my lifetime,

it indicates, A, the capacity of humans to destroy,

but also the capacity of humans to heal.

These hands that hurt can also heal,

and that is a great message of hope.

(lively music)

All deep soils on the planet developed

under prairies because of the herbivore.

So how is that done?

We look at nature, and we see three things.

One is, the animals, they're always moving.

They don't stay in the same place.

They're migrating.

Sut, sut!

Come on!

Come on, gals.

Sut!

Come on!

The second thing is that they're mobbed up,

because in the bushes, there's a jaguar, a lion, a cheetah,

(hooves thudding)

and so the mobbing creates a predator protection.

Come on, gals!

Sut, sut!

- [Woman] (shouts) Come on!

Come on, babies.

Come on.

- [Joel] And then the third M is that they're mowing

and they're pruning.

So the weeds get pruned, grass gets pruned.

Everything gets pruned evenly.

So the closer we can approximate

this moving-mobbing-mowing template

that we see recorded throughout history,

that's where we start building soil

and seeing all sorts of cool ecological function.

So how do we duplicate this moving-mobbing-mowing

that we see in nature's template?

How do we do it domestically?

Our technology is electric fencing.

Electric fencing allows us to very cheaply steer a herd

of a thousand animals more precisely

than wolves and bison did 500 years ago.

- [Nick] Moving cattle frequently

through small sections of a field,

called managed or mobbed grazing,

mirrors how animals graze in nature,

allowing cows to naturally fertilize the soil,

and giving grass time to recover.

This management style contrasts

with the more common practice of allowing animals access

to an entire pasture for the season,

leading to over or undergrazed sections,

more exposed soil, and less healthy animals.

- Back up a little bit more, Ashley.

The animals here move.

You don't see big stationary buildings.

All of the infrastructure is portable.

Come on, pig!

You're stacking these on the landscape.

We can run the rabbits under the apple trees.

We can run pigs in the woods.

We run egg mobiles behind the cows.

And so rather than an acre being used for one thing,

that acre is used for several animals,

each of which acts synergistically on the other.

I'm raising cows as an ecological management tool.

- Our beautiful landscapes, the grasslands of the world,

the grasslands with really, really rich soils,

were co-created with ruminant animals.

They are helping to build healthy soil.

They're helping to add carbon to the soil in so many ways:

through their waste, the organic matter,

through the fact that they are pressing down plant material

so that it can be acted upon by microorganisms,

and that stimulates the whole process of the plants growing

and the plants sending down carbon into the soil.

If we remove ruminant animals, cattle or reindeer and sheep,

then there's something missing.

- [Nick] Our current agricultural system

ignores these contributions

and relies instead on chemicals to grow fields

with only one crop, creating an environment devoid of birds,

insects, and the ruminant animals needed

to carry out the natural cycles

that have sustained the planet for millions of years.

Regenerative agriculture, a practice that uses a diverse mix

of animals and plants to mimic,

rather than dominate nature,

is repairing the soil and increasing productivity

on farms around the world.

- We're producing five times the county average.

What if the neighbor did?

What if that neighbor did?

What if the other neighbor did?

What if the whole county did?

What if the whole state did?

The truth is, our problem is not resources.

Our problem is management.

(engine rumbling)

- When I sit down in an airplane

or I sit somewhere and people ask me what I do,

I'm like, "I measure methane for a living."

And they're like, "Oh, tell me about cow farts."

This is a very high-tech piece of equipment

that measures enteric methane.

The animal can walk up

and will trigger a alfalfa pellet to drop,

and we can actually get real-time methane readings

from each individual animal that's in this field.

Certain people in Washington thought

that potentially cow farts were a really big problem

in terms of climate change today.

And I laughed, but I thought,

the more I looked at it, I'm like,

"Holy shit, these people are serious."

The notion that a cow fart, for instance, is ruining society

is just such an unfortunate misinterpretation

of the real science, the real beauty

and the real ecology of the system.

Biogenic methane, which is the methane

that these cattle are putting up in the atmosphere,

is part of a natural biological cycle.

The methane goes up.

It has a half life of roughly 10 years.

That methane is broken down into CO2 and water.

Well, that water is a functioning component

of water vapor that is a cycle that creates rain,

and the CO2 is taken up by plants for photosynthesis.

Even though this methane is going up in the air,

we're also building carbon below ground.

It's offsetting the methane that's going up anyway.

It's a natural biogenic cycle.

However, when we talk about fossil fuels,

bringing up deep carbon and methane

from well below the topsoil down into the earth's crust,

that's a completely different entity,

and that is carbon that's ancient that's coming

from deep below ground being put in the atmosphere,

and is an imbalance from a natural biological cycle.

- [Nick] Good grazing also helps soil retain water,

something our industrialized cropping system cannot do.

- So what we have is a rainfall simulator.

(water splashing)

It's raining, okay?

Many in the regenerative ag space have said this before me,

but it's not necessarily the rain you get.

It's the rain you keep.

(water splashing)

So we've actually put on close to two inches of water

in a very short period of time.

How about we shut it off?

We have differences without question.

We can see the sediment.

We can see the runoff,

and then we can likewise see the clear water,

that water that's coming through

and being stored in the root systems,

a big, big difference.

Okay, we just put two inches of rain,

two inches of rain down in just a couple of minutes, okay?

(soil thuds)

It's dry.

You look at that.

There's no water infiltration.

There's absolutely no water infiltration.

If we take this sample, right?

See the wet?

Look at that.

All this moisture, and that's what binds, is this aggregate.

It's that balance of what's bound

to the roots, what's tied to the roots.

- [Man] That's very helpful.

- Yeah, you bet. Thanks for everybody setting it up.

Thank you guys for doing all this.

(group applauds)

(cattle lowing)

- People will often say, "Oh, a huge percentage

"of the earth's agricultural land is for grazing,

"and oh my gosh, isn't this a travesty?"

Actually, the vast majority of the area

where the animals are grazing is area

where you couldn't do crop production,

either because it's too hilly, it's too windy,

too cold, too rocky.

If you took the grazing away,

there would be no food production on those areas.

But in most of those places,

you can do cattle or other grazing animals.

- So imagine this sheet

of paper being the surface of the earth.

I now fold it.

Now I fold it twice,

until it's only one quarter its original size.

What you see now is the total amount

of land available in the world.

The rest is water and ice.

Now, this here is my business card,

and the equivalent amount of land

of my business card is the total amount

of agricultural land in the world.

All land, all agricultural land.

I take my business card

and I fold it into one piece that's 2/3,

and the other piece that's 1/3 its original size.

And then I rip my own business card into pieces.

So this is all agricultural land,

and the larger of the two pieces is

what we call marginal land,

characterizes the amount of land in the world

that is not suitable to grow crops.

You can't because the soil is not good enough

or there's not enough water, marginal land.

So 2/3 of all agricultural land in the world is marginal.

The remaining 1/3 of all agricultural land

is called arable.

This is where we can grow all crops.

Let's go back to the marginal land though.

What do we do currently with 70% of all agricultural land,

this so-called marginal land, globally?

We graze livestock.

To be precise, we graze ruminant livestock there.

In fact, you cannot do anything else there.

You can't use it for pigs or poultry

because they don't have the digestive tract

to eat the grasses and legumes

that can live on that marginal land.

So if it weren't for ruminant livestock,

we would effectively not make use

of the majority of agricultural land in the world.

(cattle lowing)

- If you took the grazing away,

it would create a gaping hole

in the food system of the highest-quality,

most nutrient-dense food available.

There would be no food production on those areas.

But it's also a problem for ecosystem function

because grazing animals have

this tremendously beneficial impact

when they're managed well.

(calm music)

- If you don't know really

that there's an option to regenerate the lands,

you're gonna think, "Well, it's been always this way.

"It's a desert.

"That's why it's called the Chihuahuan Desert."

Yeah, but the Chihuahuan Desert used to be grasslands.

This is included with your visit, no extra charge.

Just be careful.

See the fence?

This is the kind of erosion you end up having

if we keep managing the way we manage.

60 years ago, we had this land,

and they started building fences,

and we can see here, a fence used to run there.

So when we degraded the land,

there was really nothing to control the flow of the water,

and then the water started degrading the land.

What you're seeing here, it didn't exist before.

It's just amazing how much soil we have lost

in just 60 years.

The road that take us to the ranch,

you see a good example of what's going on in this region.

We see all this desertification taking place,

all this degradation.

All these ranches are pretty much with no people at all.

All these springs have dried up.

It's really a very sad view.

- [Nick] Alejandro Carrillo has joined

a collective of ranchers working to restore

more than a million acres here.

- Think about it.

These grasslands, I mean, much taller, buffalo,

thousands of antelope, bighorns in all the sierra.

We're gonna call this the Serengeti.

It is the same stuff.

I think that what we should visualize,

we want the American Serengeti back.

(calm music)

If you take a look at this little arroyo,

there is nothing to protect the soil, just bare soil.

See, we think that there is no seed here anymore,

but there is seed bank waiting

for the right conditions to come.

So the thing here is, and we call this hardpan.

And what the cows do with their hooves is

they break this hardpan, and then they fertilize it,

and then they put all this nutritional back to the soil.

So they start creating the conditions for these,

whatever seeds are left there

under this hardpan to germinate.

(sheep bleating)

Las Damas ranch has been in the family for 40 years.

Our ranch is roughly 30,000 acres.

It has flatland, hills, and mountain range.

Our precipitation is about 10 1/2 inches per year.

Since I was a kid, I experienced this constant drought,

and I always asked myself, "Can we do better than this?"

Regenerative ranching started in Chihuahua 40 years ago

with a few folks that were on very hard times.

They started the ball rolling

and more ranches doing it in different kind of environments.

- [Nick] It's this,

the ability of regenerative agriculture to work

on a large scale that makes it a viable alternative

to the current system.

- We're running 600 mother cows,

plus all the heifers, calves and bulls and all that.

We have to mimic what nature used to do,

but not with wolves anymore,

with domestic cattle, and also with electric fence.

So we're trying to mimic that migratory pattern

of working the soil, and move on.

Let's take a look at this cow pie.

See all these little holes?

Oh, even a mushroom here.

Isn't it cool?

There we go.

Pretty amazing to have the mushrooms here

in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert.

Now you can see these holes, which are indicating

that there was some dung beetle activity here.

Let's see what's underneath.

Oh, see all these holes from dung beetles?

Ah, it has this earthy smell.

You know when you don't have life in the soil,

you have this acid smell or no smell at all.

When you smell it,

it has this beautiful smell.

(tranquil music)

Reality is that it's not actually the cow itself,

it's how we manage the cow.

We manage the cow in a way that it will mimic nature,

it would help us restore these huge tracts of land

that are already degraded.

(bird squawks)

We started seeing multiple species of perennial grasses.

Wildlife just exploded:

these mule deer, golden eagle, these foxes and bobcats,

and all these creatures that were long before us.

We don't have to fight nature,

so we can work with nature to restore the original habitat.

There is hope, and then we can do it.

(tranquil music)

(cattle lowing)

- We're here at a conference about sustainable livestock

to help feed the world.

The reality today is that something

on the order of 800 million human beings

don't receive adequate essential nutrition.

We have no hope of feeding today's world,

let alone the world of 2050,

without ruminant animal agriculture

as being a fundamental part

of whatever agricultural systems are practiced

in whatever part of the world they're being practiced.

- Well, for many people around the world,

livestock are the key asset in their lives.

In many, many cases, a woman can own an animal,

but she can't have title to a land,

so there's a real opportunity there to help women

and the benefits that come to their livelihoods,

but very often when you benefit women,

it benefits the whole household and their nutrition too.

- There have been a number of high-profile reports lately

that have advocated a shift away from animal-source foods,

and that has been done on the grounds

of being more healthy in one sense,

and then secondly for the sake of the environment.

And I think the main point is

that this is a much more complex issue.

It's much more nuanced.

In the countries where we work,

there are very high rates of stunting or malnutrition.

Most of the diets of the poor people are starch-based diets.

So they fill the stomach,

but they don't provide the important nutrients.

It constrains not just physical growth,

it's also mental growth.

So it's a huge, huge problem.

Studies have shown that just adding a little bit of meat

to the diet of children increased their test scores,

their performance in exams in school by 45%.

If you have a report saying

that there should be a global diet

and people should globally stay away

from animal-source foods, it's just so unfair

to people in those situations who need, if anything,

they need to consume more meat, drink more milk.

If you are promoting a plant-based diet

and you live here in the US,

you can go to Walgreens or CVS

and get your nutrient supplements.

But if you have you have countries where there could

be no physicians for hundreds of miles,

nevermind having a pharmacy where you can go

and get your B12 supplement,

so the only source of these missing nutrients

would be animal-source foods.

- Livestock-source foods, let's call them,

milk, meat, and eggs,

have some nutrients that are not available in plant foods.

They're much readily available.

When you eat those foods,

you don't have to eat kilos and kilos,

as you would perhaps of spinach

to get enough iron, for example.

They're also really, really important,

and in fact, the nutritionists are starting to say

that during the first 1,000 days of life,

they're essential, not just important, but essential.

- [Nick] Hunger and malnutrition

are not limited to developing countries.

And in the United States, pressure to restrict

or reduce meat consumption ignores that fact.

- The Meatless Monday program

that started in New York City schools tells kids

that they shouldn't have meat every Monday.

What's the harm in that?

Why not just have vegetables one day a week?

Number one, it sends a message to kids

that they shouldn't be eating meat,

which is absolutely dangerous and wrong.

For low-income and poor children,

they might not get it at home.

They may not be able to afford it.

And for those kids, the nutrients in meat is

what gives them the nutrients they need

to grow and be healthy.

(children conversing)

(tranquil music)

- I think for a lot of vegans,

there's a very clear black-and-white issue

about killing something versus not killing something,

death versus not death,

because I would look at my plate,

and what mattered to me was,

is there something dead on this plate?

So if there was a piece of meat on it,

then that was something I was not gonna eat,

and if there was no meat on it,

then that felt like it was death-free,

and that was what I was willing to consume.

Learning to garden,

and then also actually engaging with information

about the nature of agriculture changed all of that,

because even the foods that were plant foods,

there's no way to produce those

without massive amounts of animal death.

And that's what soil is.

It's dead plants, it's dead animals,

with a whole bunch of little tiny microorganisms

constantly working on it, degrading it.

The detritivores are breaking it down

and making all those nutrients available again

to the cycle of life.

One tablespoon of soil

can have over a million living creatures in it.

Without them, none of us are here.

We can't do that, but they can.

That is just how life is recycled.

The garden gave me great joy,

and it was an amazing thing to be outside every day

and to watch plants come to life.

It was very, very satisfying on a,

sort of on a spiritual level just to be engaged.

It also makes it harder as a vegan

because there's this terrible ethical dilemma

that you come up against.

(water splashing)

I had got all my little plants, my mostly lettuce there,

that's in the first garden bed early in the spring,

and every night the slugs are eating it.

(crickets chirping)

And when I say eat it, I mean they demolish it.

If you've gardened, you know what I'm talking about.

It's just clearcut every night.

So I go back to the store, I buy some more starts.

I plop my little plants back in,

and the next night, same thing,

and the next night, same thing.

I'm like, "Well, I have two choices here.

"I can just accept that I'm not gonna have a garden

"because the slugs are gonna eat at all,

"or I can try to figure out what to do about the poor slugs.

"Is there a way to keep them out?"

So this keeps happening over and over.

They're eating the lettuce, I'm replanting it.

I'm like, "I'm gonna have to give up,

"or I've gotta find a way."

Well, people just kill them.

That's what they do.

That's just what gardeners do.

I'm gonna have to kill something,

and it's gonna be really hard.

So I was like, "Well, people use beer,

"and they're really attracted to beer."

They love the smell of it,

so if you leave it out in little containers,

they'll drink it, and then they get drunk,

and they fall in and they drown.

And I thought, "Well, it's a good way to go."

(gas whooshes)

I went and I bought a bottle of beer

and I put it out in little containers,

and I woke up at three in the morning

and I was just in a cold sweat

because I was gonna be killing the slugs,

and I couldn't do it.

I could not kill the slugs.

So I put on my shoes and I ran outside and I freed them all.

I saved them.

- If we're gonna make really intelligent decisions

about what kind of farming we want,

we need people to be quite intelligent about this stuff,

to have some kind of hands-on experience.

What does it mean to grow lettuce?

Do I have to kill slugs?

Do I have to kill rabbits?

Do I have to kill Bambi to eat lettuce?

I'm telling you, probably yes.

You probably do have to kill Bambi to eat lettuce.

- If the only animal you've ever interacted with

is a pet dog or a pet cat,

it gives you a very jaundiced view of life.

Can you have life without death?

No, you can't.

One of the most profound ecological principles

that exists is the life, death,

decomposition, and then regeneration,

life, death, decomposition, regeneration.

That is the foundational,

that's the cornerstone of the entire ecological process.

(bright music)

- So the next time I'm at the store,

I'm like, "Okay, I'll just buy lettuce.

"It's so easy."

And it was like, "Oh, thank goodness."

And I went over

and literally I'm holding this head of lettuce,

like I've already had the realization.

And so there it is in my brain, like, "Who are you fooling?

"Whoever grew that lettuce for you killed slugs,"

and they killed more than slugs.

They killed rabbits.

They killed a whole bunch of stuff.

And that was that moment for me,

was holding that lettuce was just,

yep, the animals are gonna die,

and your only choice now is to do it well.

That is the only choice left.

Are we gonna be the death that's killing everything,

or are we gonna be the death

that's part of the cycle of life

that actually makes life stronger?

Those are really our only options.

- Today, with all of your support and encouragement,

we have been able to achieve the goal

of building our facility, now called Meatworks,

true to that vision

of the highest animal welfare standards,

the highest food safety standards,

and full traceability of product through the facility.

(audience applauds)

(scissors snip)

- That's it! (crowd cheers)

- We're set up where we're able

to break it to manageable pieces, like I said,

something that works for you and for your customers.

- Thanks, Amado. - Thanks.

- You bet.

- This is everything that I've dreamt about

that I didn't think was possible

unless we built our own slaughterhouse.

Meatworks is coming at it from our perspective,

from the farmer's perspective,

with all of our complaints and with all of our dreams.

That's their goal,

and so maybe that last day is gonna be

just as good as the rest of 'em.

(birds chirping)

When I'm taking animals to the slaughterhouse,

there's certainly an aspect of it that's just a job.

It's one of the tasks on my to-do list

that I've gotta get done.

There's also a part of it,

once I'm actually at the slaughterhouse

and watching the animals go, as much as possible,

I try to take a moment to say my gratefulness

to the animal and gratitude,

and gratefulness to the people at the slaughterhouse

for doing what they do.

(calm music)

Meatworks is so small.

They're only working with farmers,

and they were started by farmers

because of the frustration that farmers have had

with bigger processing plants.

Go on.

And I'm grateful to the people that are doing it,

and especially the ones

that still care animal to animal

about the humaneness of the process.

(gate clattering)

Any time we slaughter animals for our own consumption,

which primarily we do slaughter all of the animals

that we eat in this house,

we take a moment of silence and then a moment of sharing

in the presence of the animal to be present

with what we're doing and to honor that animal's life

and be grateful for the sustenance

that it's gonna provide for us.

- We must return to this notion

that the earth has these systems,

and that we have to understand those systems

and try to mimic and mirror those systems

in our food production and in the way we eat.

And when we do that,

we're gonna have global ecological health,

and we're gonna have personal individual health as well.

- You're gonna be really successful raising livestock.

You're gonna be a grassman before you're a cattleman.

Cattlemen graze grass down.

Grassmen know in order to graze it down,

first you have to graze it up, and overgrazing is a-

- [Nick] As studies continue to prove the benefits

of well-grazed animals to our health and our planet,

many farmers practicing industrial farming methods

are beginning to adopt regenerative methods

to save their farms and the soil for future generations.

- [Instructor] And they're usually much better looking.

- We went ahead and we signed up for a week-long class,

and I have a couple of degrees from Purdue,

but that week-long that we had there was so intensive,

I can't even explain how intense it was,

and it was a game-changer, huge game-changer for our farm.

(bright music)

- In the past, we always just grain fed our beef

and we just put 'em out there,

and we raised corn and we just raised these beef

so we just corn fed everything.

As of this year,

we're doing all grass-fed beef from start to finish.

- We're getting away

from the commercial chemical agriculture.

We're actually just growing it with the land,

just because the point of it is to make life, to make food,

and we want to make good food.

- This here pasture, they've been on this pasture here

about a day and a half,

and we're getting ready to pull 'em off of this paddock

onto our new paddock over here.

It's had about 25 to 30 days' worth of rest,

and as you can see, it's nice, lush and green,

and lots of new regrowth,

and this here has been ate down pretty good.

And this here's gonna get its 30 days' rest.

- One of my favorite and most common questions is,

"Okay, so even if this sounds good and your pigs are happier

"and your chickens are happier,

"can we really feed the world this way?"

And the answer is not only can we,

it's the only way that actually can,

because the other system is so environmentally degrading,

it's degrading faster than we can feed ourselves.

(Paul calling cattle) (cattle lowing)

(lively music)

(hooves clopping)

- [Joanna] Finally our farm is making money

at what we're doing.

It's a win for our family and us.

It's a win for the people who are eating what we produce,

and it's a win for the whole environment around us.

- So you're just stopping on by then?

- Yep, just headed through-

- Our children are interested in the farm as well,

so we want to continue to lean up the business

and make it more enjoyable for them to come into,

'cause now it's starting to pay us.

Now we wanna have more positions available

in each of the areas that they're interested in.

(gentle music)

Levi is interested in his grass-fed lambs,

and so what we're doing is helping him progress with that.

- Hey, Stephanie?

- [Stephanie] Yeah, hi.

- This is Levi.

I'm coming to buy your sheep.

- [Stephanie] Yeah, hi, how are you, Levi?

- I'm doing pretty well.

Called to tell you that we're

about 20 minutes out to your place.

- [Stephanie] Okay, great.

We'll see you guys then.

- Okay.

I just got off the phone with Stephanie.

She has the 19 sheep that I called about.

I had a lot of customers ask about sheep,

and sheep I thought would be a good addition to the farm

since we already do pigs, turkeys, cows.

(dogs barking)

(Stephanie speaking faintly)

Come here, you.

Aw.

- [Stephanie] This is the last one. He's the heaviest.

(Levi grunts)

(lambs bleating)

- 10, 11, 12,

13, 14, 15-

(lambs bleating)

- Thank you very much. - All right, guys,

thank you very much.

- Nice meeting you. - Nice meeting you.

(engine rumbling)

- [Stephanie] Bye.

- I'm $2,800 short and 19 head more than what I had,

so it's the start of a new enterprise,

and we're gonna see how well that works.

- When's the last time all the soccer moms were lined up

and they're talking about their little child prodigies,

and one of 'em dares to step forward and say,

"Well, my little Mary just told me last week,

"she wants to grow up and be a farmer,"

and all the other soccer moms say, "Wow, cool!

"That's great!"

Can you imagine that happening?

(lively music)

That's when our food's gonna change,

our health is gonna change,

and the health of our land and our farms is gonna change.

That's when it's gonna change.

(sheep bleating)

- My name is Kyle, and I'm here on Anslee Farms.

We're located in West Michigan.

- My name is Felipo, and I'm a dairy farmer

from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

- My name is Sarah Gleason,

and I am the owner and operator of Gleason Bison.

We ranch here, 15 miles outside of Durango, Colorado.

- My name is Musak Sell from Kenya.

(cowbells ringing)

(Musak speaking indistinctly)

- And we're Jackson Regenerational Farm

in Atkinson, Maine.

- Hi, I'm Edlund Choy, and this is White Oak Pastures

in Bluffton, Georgia.

- My name is Ashley.

My husband Ross and I own

and operate The Bluffs in central Minnesota.

- My name is from Pablo Echeverri from Argentina.

- My name is Hannes, and I'm part

of a five-man farm team farming 20 acres

(rooster crows) of connected land

just outside the city of Hamburg in Northern Germany.

- What I hope for the future is

to implement holistic management

and regenerative practices through our community.

- There really is a large number of people

who want to know where their food comes from,

that their food, it was raised sustainably.

- All enterprises somehow interconnect.

Cows in the winter stables produce compost

for our market garden.

The chickens provide external fertility input

to our pastures, which has been great

for our cows and sheep.

- There are people out there

who are passionately dedicating their lives

to the betterment of our environment

and the communities that they're in.

- So thank you very much,

and you are highly welcome to (indistinct)

so that we can learn from you and you learn from us.

- I think this generation has understood

that we are just part of a big, complex system,

and how our actions have big consequences,

so we need to change the way we make decisions

so that we can thrive together with nature.

(cattle lowing)

- [Nick] Farmers around the world

are adopting regenerative techniques,

healing the land, and providing vital nutrition for humans.

(tranquil music)

(gentle music)