The filmmakers who brought you the environmental documentary films, “Kiss the Ground” (2020) and “Common Ground” (2023), which tout the legitimate benefits of chemicals-free “farming,” are at it again with their 3rd film, “Groundswell” (June 5, 2026 release date).
They do offer some valuable ecological guidance, rightly disparaging our corporate-backed chemical/poisons dependency to grow food our grandparents wouldn’t recognize (or enjoy the bland, nutritionally deficient flavor of).
But the Big Trouble is, they’re apparently trebling down on repeating their Big Lie-by-omission: the millions of cows who are a primary driver of the climate crisis, and global pollution, wildlife extinctions, ocean dead zones and wait there’s more!
In fact, the “regenerative ranching” these films tout, include claims that cows are not disastrous ecologically, but can actually help “restore” or “heal” or “regenerate” soil and the environment. This is almost entirely — though not entirely — false. Judging only by the new film’s trailer (below) their messaging today is more insidious than in the two previous films.
Watch the Groundswell trailer, below, to see how they deceptively, cleverly cross-cut between indigenous people of color working in small gardens and obese American cattle ranchers touting their “rotational” and “holistic” cow grazing — which has the opposite impact on the other side of the same planet. But the implication is they are the same, when in reality the have opposite impacts on soil health, waterways, atmosphere and thus global heating.
Regenerative (chemical-free) plant crops are the solution; raising cows for human consumption is a (even, the) major problem.
Meaning, getting artificial pesticides and herbicide and other chemicals out of our plant foods production is indeed important, healthy and essential. But — and here’s the sobering reality these films assiduously avoid — there is no ecologically sustainable way to raise millions of cows for human consumption without having a disastrous impact on the planet’s soil, waterways, oceans, atmosphere and thus the climate we humans are heating. The key word in this sentence is millions.
The pretty pictures the producers repeatedly show in their film trilogy (based only on the 3rd film’s trailer) is of small herds of cows on green grass, which is just not scaleable to fatten millions of cows to feed the 340,000,000 Americans addicted to beef and dairy (aka, cow) products. This would require far more land and water than we can access. Raising cows for human consumption is one of the most, if not the most, inefficient way to feed humans.
READ MORE: https://www.TreeSpiritProject.com/eatinganimals
If the above trailer is any indication, the filmmakers are trebling down on the Big Lie of the Big Beef (cow) and Big Dairy (cow) Lie of “regenerative ranching” — which is not much more than the “clean coal” of the entire cattle industry. This Big Lie is being pushed, bigly, by all cow product makers and it is Trumpian in its scale, scope and calamitous effect. Trumpian in the sense that it deploys the propaganda technique of telling a bald-faced lie and doubling down on it, and then repeating it endlessly.
The result, which is the calamity, is that the average citizen buys and eats the lie hook, line, and sinker. Consumers don’t know about the massive methane emissions from cows, don’t know about the beef and dairy producers desiccation and compaction of soil, nor about the manure and urine pollution of waterways and oceans. And of course doesn’t want to know about this cause — because they want to keep eating the tasty lie, in the form of burgers, hot dogs, cheese blocks and ice cream which we were all raised on and became addicted to.
Instead, these documentaries cleverly focus on the distinction between “organic” and chemicals-laden industrial “agriculture,” a distinction which has merit. But this framework simply ignores the cow in the room which can’t be ignored if you want the planet to stop heating up, and get cleaned up. Talking all about “soil health” while not explaining why cows by the millions are net greenhouse gas emitters is like reupholstering the deck chairs on the Titanic while not steering it clear of the icebergs. We’re still gonna kill ourselves. But hey, we can keep eating cows and making human food from bovine mother’s milk. (And this is, as always, ignoring our slaughtering millions of them each year while they are either infants or young adults at less than 1/3rd their 20+ year lifespan. And treating them as objects-for-profiteering.
• READ MORE about how we treat the animals we eat & drink from: https://treespiritproject.com/cattle-ranching/holocaust-comparison/
• READ MORE about SO-CALLED “regenerative ranching” : https://www.TreeSpiritProject.com/regenerativebs