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The documentary starts with explaining a very real problem, our soil being wiped out on a large scale. It does not show any large scale solutions to this problem, and the small scale solutions it shows are questionable at best. One slide in the film quickly disregards the value of animals, claiming falsely that cows are the biggest polluter and eat 80% of the grain we grow. It then focuses on the stories of a farmer growing plants on a parking lot, a man who burns waste wood to fuel a poorly-explained algae machine, and a girl scout who doesn't want GMO cookies.
The farmer growing plants on a parking lot requires trucking in fertilizer.
The algae man requires input of waste wood.
Neither of these "systems" address the problem stated at the beginning of the documentary, our worn out, arid soils. Truly regenerative agriculture requires the use of grazing animals, period. Any other system requires trucking in imported fertilizer and many energy inputs to make that fertilizer.
The parking lot farmer speaks about self sufficiency. It is nice to be able to grow your own vegetables in his pods, but if our food systems collapsed, you cannot survive on kale nutritionally, and nothing on his farm is providing fat or protein, the 2 macronutrients that we cannot survive without. His system would quickly fall apart if he was unable to get his trucked-in inputs. You need animals to truly feed yourself, and to feed your soils in a truly closed loop.
The algae guy honestly seems like a quack. The documentary did a horrible job explaining how his magical machine works. He put a few dozen house plants in pots in his algae pool to create the illusion that his magic soup is growing them. Nowhere in his pod did it appear that he was growing food at any kind of usable scale. The arson conspiracy angle was silly and was obvious that the filmmakers were asking leading questions to try to point to a nefarious act in order to up the drama of this otherwise boring and confusing segment.
The girl scout GMO story also doesn't focus on our soil issues. They do a poor job explaining why we should avoid GMO foods. Most people think that we should avoid them because they are "man made" or "not natural" but all of our produce is selectively bred and man made. Have you ever seen what a wild banana or watermelon looked like before people started breeding them? The true problem of GMO is that it allow the plants to be drenched in glyphosate, which the documentary does not explain.
Our dwindling soil is a huge issue and I was excited to see a documentary that focused on this issue. This documentary did not deliver on that promise, instead focusing on 3 very small "solutions" that are nowhere near scalable. It is concerning that they ignored many of the real leading voices in regenerative agriculture to speak to these random people who really aren't making even a tiny dent in the problem. There are countless voices out there who are well known and are doing real work to rebuild the soil, and can show real evidence. They do this by integrating animals which this documentary avoids completely.
After all 3 stories show the failure of their efforts, we are shown the creation of vegetable gardens at schools to try to lift our mood. It's nice to see these young people experience growing food, but it has absolutely no effect on the glaring, potentially catastrophic, problem of the lack of soil on our farmland. For a film who's tagline is "Save the Soil, Save the World." it does nothing to show how to save the soil.
score 1/10
andyscott-55077 4 November 2020
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw6235652/ |
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24-2-2021 18:05:04