Living Soil Film

Living Soil: A Documentary. Now available with subtitles in more than 20 languages. Enable closed captions by clicking the 'CC' icon, then click the gear icon to select the subtitle language you want.

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. 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 60-minute documentary features innovative farmers and soil health experts from throughout the U.S. Accompanying lesson plans for college and high school students can also be found on this site. "Living Soil" 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.

The film is freely available to download and stream at www.soilhealthinstitute.org/livingsoil.

A special thanks to Dawn Bradley, 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.