- Average temperatures of the globe is continuing to go up—
which, by the way, is a consensus. It's 99.9%
scientists are on the same page about this now.
- 20 years ago, I was preaching that it was a hoax.
When you get out of your own backyard, and you talk
to people, and you get to see things around the world,
it changes your whole perspective.
- The fact of the matter is that 90% of
the climate scientists in the world agree that
climate change is caused by carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere.
I think this is a crisis.
[solemn music]
These bins are all destroyed.
They aren't recoverable at all.
The grain is all ruined.
- [Narrator] Richard Oswald grows corn and soybeans
in Rock Port, Missouri.
His house was destroyed by the worst flooding the Midwest
had seen in generations.
- [Reporter] From Nebraska to Wisconsin,
historic river flooding.
- [Man] It's the kind of floodwater that's taking away roads, bridges,
buildings, anything in its path.
- What the farm would normally look like.
[suspenseful music]
I had convinced myself that the water levels here
would be the same throughout any normal flood,
but the sad fact of the matter is that
there's not a normal flood anymore.
Weather fluctuations in general have changed a lot,
and they're getting worse and worse.
I think this is a crisis.
- [Narrator] And he's not the only one who feels that way.
- After the flood, more people are certainly open
to climate change as something that's real now.
- [Narrator] Graham Christensen works
on his family's farm in Nebraska.
For years, he's tried to convince other farmers
to start paying attention to the climate crisis
and that big agriculture is partially to blame.
- 2005 and '06 was when I started getting woke
to the climate change issue.
As I learned more and got more data,
I felt stronger and stronger about we need to do something
and that the farmers held a lot of the tools
that needed to be a critical part of reduction of emissions.
- [Narrator] This fall, Graham
and hundreds of other farmers across the country
signed a joint letter to Congress,
urging them to consider the Green New Deal.
- We, as farmers, can help define how that actually looks
in federal policy, Green New Deal or whatever, you know, that may take.
- [Narrator] Today, Graham is driving to see his friend,
Scott Olson, who farms nearby.
- The Olsons are about the epitome of what real Nebraska,
real America's all about—
longstanding, generational family.
I appreciate them because they're open-minded.
They catch on to things.
- [Narrator] The Olsons agree to sit down with Graham
over lunch to discuss climate change and the Green New Deal.
- I look at the Olsons as people
that other people look up to in the area,
and when people like that
start, you know, entertaining those discussions,
things are gonna happen quicker.
- We have talked very little about this Green New Deal.
I guess it's on the internet.
I've never taken the time— or had the time lately,
I guess—to look it up and go through it.
Mostly what I hear is on radio, see on TV,
sounded like a crazy deal.
I don't know if the Green New Deal's gonna be
our savior or our route out here for, for this stuff,
but looking for a federal policy platform to amplify
the importance of creating an incentive-based
and a market-based program to help farmers
take the risk off of transitioning
into some of these practices that are scientifically
proven to reduce greenhouse gases.
- [Narrator] The practice Graham is referring to
is regenerative farming.
The basic idea is that a variety of seasonal crops
grown without chemical fertilizer
are better able to pull carbon from the atmosphere
and store it in the soil.
This is one of the goals of the Green New Deal
when it comes to farming.
Here you can see the difference.
On the left is a regenerative field
that has a variety of lush crops with nutrient-rich soil,
while the field on the right is conventional
with bare soil, which doesn't store as much carbon or water.
- So starting to embrace the ecosystem
and work with nature, instead of always trying to work against nature.
- [Narrator] This is a big deal
because about 1/4 of the world's greenhouse gas emissions
come from agriculture.
- Agriculture is now neck and neck with fossil fuels
as the largest discharger.
- I believe more in the climate cycles, I guess,
than I do in climate change.
What Mother Nature did to us this March was
once in a, I shouldn't say—hell,
probably once in a lifetime.
- 99.9% scientists are on the same page about this now.
So if that 99% of scientists are right,
one of the more cautious, conservative things
for us to do is be able to embrace this,
get out in front of the situation,
and become a part of the solution.
- How are you gonna convince communist nations in India,
all these other countries who are the worst polluters
and will never cooperate,
and what we do would make a very little change
in the whole scheme of the entire Earth?
- I always think they, like, look at us as, like, leaders, you know?
At some point, like, someone's just gotta say,
'Let's put a value on this, let's create this commodity,
and let's shift,
because it's the right thing to do,
and we know it, and we know the science is there.'
And if our country were to take the lead
and actually start creating opportunity out of this,
then they're gonna look at it and be like,
'Oh, we're missing out on this whole explosive industry.'
- I see where you're going with this
and what you're wanting to do.
One of the things you're gonna have to do is
to create a market for that.
In the meantime, we gotta survive with what we have.
- [Narrator] While change is hard,
farmers like Del Ficke, outside Lincoln, Nebraska,
say that making the shift to regenerative agriculture
was not only possible, but profitable.
He downsized his farm, added new crops,
and brought in cattle to graze and fertilize the land.
- And we have so many acres of pasture rangeland
in the United States.
All we need to do is improve those acres.
- [Interviewer] Why did you see a need
to change the way you were doing things?
- Well, we were destroying everything.
The soil was on life support.
Everyone was making money but us.
We knew nothing about the soil from a natural standpoint.
It was a total unlearning process,
and we continue to do that every day.
- [Narrator] Del showed us the soil
on his new regenerative farm.
- This is the difference between healthy soil.
The blackness of the soil is the carbon.
So in a depleted field,
there's a certain amount of life left,
but you will not find, you will not find earthworms.
The floods, these earthworms, you know,
those spots where they crawl through,
the water infiltrates down all those holes, goes deep.
It grabs the water; it doesn't run off.
It is a drug. I'm a soil junkie.
- [Narrator] Del has seen so much success,
he started spreading the word,
and now his phone rings off the hook.
- The biggest question I get is someone—
they might be 40 years old,
they might be farming with their dad that's 65
and their grandpa that's 85, or whatever—
and they'll say,
'Can you talk to my dad because I want to be doing this,
but my dad said we're gonna do it this way.'
- A lot of times, farmers are slow to jump on the boat
for something new.
They think that they need to follow in the paths
of their fathers and their mothers,
and be conservative.
And so that's one of the problems that we have
in agriculture today, is because
most farmers are not early adopters.
Most farmers are wait-and-see-ers.
- [Narrator] Many farmers in this area
grow only one crop at a time,
like corn or soybeans,
which are often fertilized with chemicals.
- That came out pretty good.
- They did, didn't they?
- [Narrator] Del says it can be hard to break away
from the status quo,
as government subsidies and crop insurance
give farmers a much-needed financial safety net.
- Why would you change if you've got an insurance policy?
Why would you change if you know if you just keep doing it,
you're at least gonna stay in business?
It's crazy the ignorance that's out there,
but it's because they're scared.
- We don't get support from the politicians.
We thought we had an in with President Obama.
- [Obama] It's getting, oftentimes, harder
for the family farmer to turn a profit.
It's getting easier for large agribusiness concerns
to buy out family farms.
- We thought that he was gonna end
some of the concentrated animal agriculture
controlled by the big corporations, and that fell apart.
People thought that President Trump would do that, as well.
- [Trump] The farmers are being left out in the cold.
We're gonna protect the farmer. We have to protect the farmer.
- He said he would, but he hasn't,
and I don't think he will,
and so we've just basically lost any say in
the kind of agriculture we have in this country today.
- [Narrator] That's why thousands of farmers and ranchers
are getting behind the Green New Deal:
to ensure that they have a seat at the table
for any conversation about
what the future of agriculture should look like.
- I'd like to see these kind of conversations
start happening more holistically.
Whether it's the Green New Deal that gives us that
platform or not,
this stuff needs to happen now.
- It's tough to get terribly optimistic about
the Green New Deal when the country's
so divided politically,
and one side wants to demonize the other side
and not really take an action.
Everything that a farmer does
is directly related to science.
You put that seed in the ground, and it's science that,
the understanding of why that seed grows
and what it's supposed to do.
So when is it that farmers started
turning their backs on science?
Should I just go out now and
start planting gravel in the ground,
and call that a seed, and expect it to grow
because I don't believe in science?
Because I don't wanna be,
I don't wanna hear what agronomists tell me,
because, gosh darn it,
I want that gravel to grow into a corn plant,
so I'm just gonna take this rock, and put it in the ground,
and it'll grow?
No, I'm too smart to do that.
I'm smart enough not to question 90% of the climatologists
in this country, too.
[solemn music]