Education
The line between information and knowledge is drawn with integrity.
Farming science is saturated with noise, its difficult at times to figure out fact from fiction. So we figured it out for you.
Here are some documentaries and books NFA suggests
Farmers Footprint: Regeneration
This film features the trials, learnings and victories of the four generation Breitkreutz family from Stoney Creek Farm transitioning from conventional farming to regenerative agriculture in Redwood Falls, Minnesota. Using conventional methods they saw their soils degrade and their input costs rise every year. Transitioning to regenerative practices has helped their row cropping operation and significantly reduced their input cost for their cattle. This film tells the story of how they did it.
Just Eat It - A Food Waste Story
In The Clean Bin Project, Jen Rustemeyer and Grant Baldwin attempted to produce zero waste in an examination of our throw-away society. As a followup, they turn their eye to food waste from farm to fridge. They vow to stop buying groceries and for six months to survive exclusively on discarded food. The myths behind corporate food production and marketing make for easy pickings as the directors dismantle best-before dates and show how our idea of "perfect produce" encourages us to discard perfectly edible and nutritious food—collateral damage in an age of food security headlines. Living off rescued goods their stockpile of found food demonstrates how the supply and demand chain is out of sync. It becomes immediately apparent this is a widespread problem with simple solutions. Unlike many environmental films that portray apocalyptic outcomes or make viewers feel helpless, Rustemeyer's and Baldwin's personal investment makes major sustainability issues comprehensible, solvable and delicious.
Living Soil: A Documentary
Our soils support 95 percent of all food production, and by 2060, our soils 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.
Kiss The Ground: A Documentary
Kiss the Ground reveals that, by regenerating the world’s soils, we can completely and rapidly stabilize Earth’s climate, restore lost ecosystems and create abundant food supplies. Using compelling graphics and visuals, along with striking NASA and NOAA footage, the film artfully illustrates how, by drawing down atmospheric carbon, soil is the missing piece of the climate puzzle.
This movie is positioned to catalyze a movement to accomplish the impossible – to solve humanity’s greatest challenge, to balance the climate and secure our species future.
You can watch this film on Netflix!
In Search Of Balance: The Documentary
In Search of Balance takes the viewer into the lives and life settings of individuals who have succeeded in the quest for balance, yielding health where Big Pharma has failed; celebrating healthy and productive soil where Big Ag has despoiled it; and offering eco-empathy and life balance where “business as usual” apart from the solace and real health benefits of contact with nature leaves communities disconnected and depressed.
The reach of the movie is wide and its resources current and science-based, without being academic. The interested viewer will be eager at its conclusion to explore the role of the human microbiome to our health and behavior; to dig deeper into the richness of the term agroecology as perhaps the central unifying overlap between those three circles we spoke of; and to explore and seek remedies for the broken relationship that Richard Louv refers to as “nature deficit disorder.”
Food Independence & Planetary Evolution: Zach Bush, MD
A triple board certified physician, master healer & consciousness, Zach Bush, MD is the founder and director of M Clinic, an integrative medicine center in Charlottesville, Virginia and simply put, one of the most compelling medical minds currently working to improve our understanding of human and environmental health.
Food Shock by Dianne Loughnan
‘Food Shock’ investigates these issues and encourages us to ask some important questions: what are the alternatives to our current system? How do we get there? And what can we, the consumer, do to change things? The answers may surprise…
Dianne Loughnan is a former Queensland and NSW provincial newspaper journalist and now commercial beef producer. She has also worked for the Queensland Landcare movement and has consulted to rural industries as a public relations practitioner.
Living Energies By Callum Coats
Why are so many species of plant and animal disappearing? How is it that Earth is losing more fresh water than it is producing? What are the effects of chlorination and fluoridation of water? The answers to these and many more pressing environmental questions are to be found in this remarkable book - the first in-depth examination of the life and work of the brilliant forester, scientist and pioneering inventor, Viktor Schauberger. Schauberger's insights into Nature pivoted on the essential characteristics of water as a living and pulsating substance that energizes all of life, both organic and inorganic.
Farmacology by Dr Daphne Miller
In Farmacology, Daphne Miller brings us beyond the simple concept of “food as medicine” and introduces us to the critical idea that it’s the farm where that food is grown that offers us the real medicine. Venturing out of her clinic and spending time on seven family farms, Miller uncovers all the aspects of farming—from seed choice to soil management—that have a direct and powerful impact on our health. Bridging the traditional divide between agriculture and medicine, Miller shares lessons learned from inspiring farmers and biomedical researchers and artfully weaves their insights and discoveries, along with stories from her patients, into the narrative. The result is a compelling new vision for sustainable healing and a treasure trove of farm-to-body lessons that have immense value in our daily lives.
Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture System For Human Settlements By Bill Mollison & David Holmgren
In 1974 David Holmgre met Bill Mollison at the College of Advanced Education in Hobart. The two found they shared a strong interest in the relationship between human and natural systems. Their wide-ranging conversations and gardening experiences encouraged Holmgren to write the manuscript that was to be published in 1978 as Permaculture One.
"I wrote the manuscript, which was based partly on our constant discussions and on our practical working together in the garden and on our visits to other sites in Tasmania... I used this manuscript as my primary reference for my thesis, which I submitted and was passed in 1976." - David Holmgren.
Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe
Dark Emu argues for a reconsideration of the 'hunter-gatherer' tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession. Accomplished author Bruce Pascoe provides compelling evidence from the diaries of early explorers that suggests that systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia's past is required.
Biggest Estate On Earth by Bill Gammage
Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gammage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised.
For over a decade, Gammage has examined written and visual records of the Australian landscape. He has uncovered an extraordinarily complex system of land management using fire and the life cycles of native plants to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year. We know Aboriginal people spent far less time and effort than Europeans in securing food and shelter, and now we know how they did it.
With details of land-management strategies from around Australia, The Biggest Estate on Earth rewrites the history of this continent, with huge implications for us today. Once Aboriginal people were no longer able to tend their country, it became overgrown and vulnerable to the hugely damaging bushfires we now experience. And what we think of as virgin bush in a national park is nothing of the kind.
Cancer: Cause & Cure By Percy Weston
The story of Percy’s unique journey as he recounts his experiences and observations over a lifetime of struggle on the land and the years of transition from traditional methods of farming to modern practices. Percy believes there is a causative factor for cancer via the food chain which has been overlooked by science. With his knowledge in chemistry, Percy in the 1940s first demonstrated a relationship between food and cancer in animals. Percy extended his research further and confirmed his findings by curing medically diagnosed cases of arthritis and cancer in humans. This book is an enthralling story of Percy’s life and his journey in discovering his unique cancer curing mineral formula.
Anything We Missed?
Book, podcast or documentary suggestions? Please let us know!