Kiss the Ground: Can Healthy Soil Save Our Food and Our Planet?

What if one of the biggest answers to climate change, declining food quality and environmental damage was something we walk on every day?

That's the question behind Kiss the Ground, a 2020 documentary narrated by Woody Harrelson.

It was directed by Josh Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell and runs about 85 minutes.

It brings together farmers, scientists and campaigners to look at how farm soils have been degraded, why that matters, and what can be done to restore them.

Its central message is simple. Healthy soil is alive.

The film makes some ambitious climate claims. It also shows farmers rebuilding soil fertility, cutting back on bought-in inputs and running more resilient farms.

Watch the trailer

The official trailer sets out the film's argument: that restoring farm soils could be one of the biggest environmental opportunities we have.

Where to watch Kiss the Ground in New Zealand

The film premiered on Netflix on 22 September 2020.

As of October 2026, it streams in New Zealand on Prime Video.

There is also a free 45-minute version for schools and educators, ordered through the filmmakers' education programme.

If you don't have time for the full film, here's what it covers and why it matters.

What Kiss the Ground covers

1. The world under our feet is alive

The film opens on a mostly invisible world.

Healthy soil holds a crowded community of bacteria, fungi, insects and other organisms.

They break down organic matter, cycle nutrients, support plant roots and hold the soil together.

Plants feed them back.

Through photosynthesis, plants take carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into sugars. Some of that carbon travels down through the roots and into the soil, where it feeds microorganisms.

The film argues that modern farming has often ignored this partnership, treating soil as something to hold plants upright while fertiliser does the feeding.

Without a working soil ecosystem, farmers can end up more and more reliant on bought-in inputs to keep yields up.

2. How farming turned soil into dust

The film goes back to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Across the American Great Plains, heavy cultivation, drought and the loss of grassland cover combined into huge dust storms.

Topsoil blew away, farms failed and families left their land.

The film argues that plenty of farming systems still leave soil exposed in the same way.

Frequent tillage, monocropping and bare fields can damage soil structure, reduce organic matter and leave land open to wind and rain.

Losing topsoil means losing part of the foundation food production stands on.

3. The rise of chemical-intensive farming

The film looks at how synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and machinery changed farming through the twentieth century.

Synthetic nitrogen pushed crop yields up dramatically.

Herbicides and pesticides made weeds, insects and disease easier to control over large areas.

The film's question is what happens when these tools replace healthy biology rather than support it.

It argues that heavy reliance on chemical inputs can become a cycle, where declining soil health is made up for with more fertiliser and more sprays.

The film also takes aim at pesticides, glyphosate in particular, and their possible effects on human health.

Some of this is presented more definitively than the evidence allows. Pesticide risk depends on the chemical, the exposure and the circumstances, and several of the health effects the film raises are still debated by scientists and regulators.

The bigger question still stands: should farming depend on ever more chemical inputs, or should soil biology be the starting point?

4. Soil, carbon and climate

One of the film's central arguments is that soil deserves a much bigger place in climate discussions.

Plants pull carbon dioxide from the air. Some of that carbon ends up in the soil through roots, microbes and decaying plant material.

Under the right conditions, part of it can stay there for years or longer.

When soils are disturbed or degraded, that stored carbon can be lost again.

The film features the 4 per 1000 initiative, introduced by former French agriculture minister Stéphane Le Foll.

The initiative was launched in France on 1 December 2015, at the COP21 climate conference in Paris, with the aim of building healthy, carbon-rich soils worldwide.

The film goes further than that, suggesting regenerating soils could rapidly stabilise the climate. Soil scientists have pushed back. Soil scientist Ronald Amundson called the film's narrative a kind of magical thinking, and the California Climate & Agriculture Network criticised it for oversimplifying soil as a climate fix.

How much carbon a soil can hold depends on climate, soil type, how much carbon is already there and how the land is farmed. Soil carbon also has limits, and it can be lost again.

How big a part soil can play is still being argued over. The benefits on the farm don't depend on settling that argument.

5. Regenerative farming: working with nature

The film then moves from problems to farmers doing things differently.

One of the central figures is North Dakota rancher Gabe Brown.

In the film, Brown is losing money and watching his soil erode before he changes course, going back as far as Thomas Jefferson's journals to learn how crops were grown before chemical fertilisers.

His book tells the harder version. Hail wiped out his cash crops in 1995 and again in 1996, a blizzard and a dry summer meant no harvest at all in 1997, and hail took 80% of the crop in 1998. He later wrote that the bank knew when they bought toilet paper.

What Brown and the film's other main guide, conservation agronomist Ray Archuleta, show on screen comes down to a handful of principles:

• Disturb the soil less. Less ploughing protects soil structure and the life in it.
• Keep the soil covered. Plants, crop residue or mulch protect against erosion and drying out.
• Keep living roots in the ground. Crops and cover crops feed soil microbes for more of the year.
• Grow more variety. Mixes of species rather than single crops.
• Bring animals back, carefully. Well-managed grazing recycles nutrients and supports plant growth.

Brown's ranch has since diversified into chickens, sheep, pigs and bees alongside cattle and crops, selling meat, eggs and honey direct.

The film presents his operation as farming that pays its way and looks after the land at the same time.

6. Can grazing animals help restore land?

This is one of the film's more provocative arguments.

Cattle usually turn up in climate stories as a problem, because of methane and because livestock farming can drive land clearing.

Kiss the Ground asks whether grazing animals can also help repair damaged grassland.

Actor Ian Somerhalder visits Zimbabwean ecologist Allan Savory, the founder of Holistic Management, and the film includes footage from the Africa Centre for Holistic Management.

Closer to the film's home, it follows California ranchers Doniga and Erik Markegard.

The idea is to move animals between paddocks and give pasture long rest periods, so plants recover, grow deeper roots and keep the ground covered.

Manure returns nutrients to the soil as well.

This is one of the film's most contested arguments. Managed grazing can improve vegetation and soil in some places, but results vary a lot. Carbon stored in soil doesn't automatically cancel out the methane cattle produce.

Better land management is one claim. Climate-neutral beef is a much bigger one.

7. Composting: turning food waste into fertility

The film also looks at something consumers can directly change: food waste.

It visits San Francisco's curbside composting programme, where, as Robert Reed explains in the film, the city collects hundreds of tonnes of food scraps and garden waste every day and turns them into compost for local farms.

Compost improves soil structure, returns nutrients and organic matter, and helps soil hold water.

It also keeps food scraps out of landfill, where they rot without oxygen and give off methane.

Food scraps don't have to be the end of the food chain. They can grow the next crop.

8. Restoring land that looked beyond repair

Near the end, the film shows its most dramatic example of recovery: China's Loess Plateau, with ecologist and filmmaker John D. Liu.

Centuries of pressure had left large parts of the plateau badly eroded, with rural communities struggling to make a living.

A major watershed rehabilitation project began in 1994, building terraces, planting trees, shrubs and grasses on degraded slopes, and building sediment dams.

The film shows bare hillsides growing green again.

Degraded land doesn't always stay degraded. With enough investment, planning and patience, damaged ecosystems can recover, and the people living on them can do better too.

9. The money side of rebuilding soil

A recurring theme is that looking after soil isn't only an environmental cost.

Healthy soil can mean less irrigation, less erosion and fewer bought-in inputs.

Diversified farms can be less exposed when one crop fails or one commodity price drops.

The film argues farmers shouldn't have to choose between looking after the land and making a living.

Changing systems still costs money. It can mean new equipment, new management and uncertain results for a few years.

Individual success stories are encouraging. They don't guarantee the same result everywhere.

10. What consumers can do

The film ends by asking viewers to see their food as a direct line to the health of the land.

It argues for supporting farmers who improve their soil, composting, planting variety, and asking more questions about how food is grown.

Nobody has to become a farmer.

The film's argument is that shifts in what consumers expect, how farmers farm and what governments back could together push farming towards regenerating land rather than wearing it out.

What Kiss the Ground means for organic food

For organic buyers, much of the film will sound familiar.

Healthy soil, biodiversity, composting, recycling nutrients and less reliance on synthetic inputs have long been at the heart of organic farming.

Certified organic farming runs to set standards, including restrictions on synthetic pesticides and fertilisers.

Regenerative farming overlaps with a lot of this. The two aren't the same thing.

A farm can call itself regenerative without being certified organic, and some regenerative systems still use synthetic herbicides and fertilisers.

Certification alone doesn't guarantee every soil-health measure is improving either.

That's where independent certification earns its keep. It gives a defined set of production rules and someone checking them, rather than relying on the word on the label.

The film adds another layer to choosing organic. It asks you to think beyond what might or might not be in your food, and to ask what happened to the soil while it was being grown.

Why this matters in New Zealand

New Zealand farming looks very different from the big American cropping operations in much of the film.

Pasture-based livestock, horticulture, cropping and orchards each bring their own soil challenges.

The questions are the same, though.

How do we keep soils fertile for the next generation? How do farmers protect soil life, cut erosion, hold more water and stay profitable?

And how can shoppers back farming that delivers more than the cheapest possible food?

New Zealand's organic growers and farmers already practise many of the principles in the film.

Looking after soil shouldn't be left to certified organic farms alone. Protecting the land that grows our food is a job for the whole sector.

Is Kiss the Ground worth watching?

Yes, especially if you care about food, farming or the future of agriculture.

It's at its best showing real farmers rebuilding soil, bringing back biodiversity and finding ways to buy in less.

The climate claims are the part to read carefully. Some of the film's figures are big ones, and worth checking before you repeat them.

The central message holds up, though. Soil isn't unlimited, and how we treat it matters well beyond the farm gate.

Kiss the Ground asks you to look at your dinner differently. Past the price, to the land, water and living systems it took to grow it.

The future of our food depends on what happens under our feet.

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