Recently, the Soil Health Institute released Living Soil, a 60-minute documentary about soil health featuring innovative farmers and soil health experts from throughout the U.S. The film is freely available to download and stream at www.livingsoilfilm.com. Accompanying lesson plans for college and high school students will be available on World Soil Day on December 5th.
Living Soil: A Documentary for All of Us
Our soils support 95 percent of all food production, and by 2060, they will be asked to give us as much food as we have consumed in the last 500 years. They filter our water. They are one of our most cost-effective reservoirs for sequestering carbon. They are our foundation for biodiversity. And they are vibrantly alive, teeming with 10,000 pounds of biological life in every acre. Yet in the last 150 years, we’ve lost half of the basic building block that makes soil productive. The societal and environmental costs of soil loss and degradation in the United States alone are now estimated to be as high as $85 billion every single year. Like any relationship, our living soil needs our tenderness. It’s time we changed everything we thought we knew about soil. Let’s make this the century of living soil.
This documentary was directed by Chelsea Myers and Tiny Attic Productions based in Columbia, Missouri, and produced by the Soil Health Institute through the generous support of The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation.
A special thanks to Dawn Bentley, Brian Berns, Keith Berns, Bill Buckner, Mimo Davis, Dan DeSutter, Miranda Duschak, James “Ooker” Eskridge, Barry Fisher, Liz Graznak, Steve Groff, Jerry Hatfield, Trey Hill, Larkin Martin, Bianca Moebius-Clune, Jesse Sanchez, Larry Thompson, John Wiebold, Kristen Veum, Kevin Mathein, Ben Harris, Tim Pilcher, Josh Wright, Haley Myers, Rob Myers and Josh Oxenhandler.