Hey, everybody. I'm very, very excited about our cast, a Rob Herring, the rector and producer of the big hit new film The Need to Grow Rob Herring is an award-winning filmmaker, The Need to Grow has been seen in over 175 countries.

He is also a certified holistic health coach and the co-founder of the Integrative Pediatrics.

Congratulations for this incredible achievement, and thank you for joining me.

Thank you so much, sir. Happy to be here. Happy to talk about some important issues today.

The fulcrum of your movie is the challenges and also the opportunities of trying to convert to a form of agriculture that's more sustainable.

And one of the things that you point out, I think most of us are very well aware of, is that we are quickly running out of tops of the conventional till out agriculture.

The UN estimates that we will completely deplete all tops of all the Arab, all the tops of all in the world within 60 years.

So what is the solution?

Yeah, I think that statistic can be a little bit overwhelming. And at the base of it, we have to understand that there's a difference between farmable top soil and what can be called dirt.

And so dirt is really void of life.

And dirt is sort of the medium or the platform for which this microbial life can actually happen.

But this soil is really complex. There's almost a cosmic galactic level of microbial activity happening right under our noses.

And so for a long time, this was invisible. And I think it was very easy for agriculture to kind of ignore or just be unaware of this importance of this biology, this microbiology.

We now know that in as much as a tablespoon of soil, we can have up to six or 10 billion microorganisms. So that's 10,000 different species, lots of biodiversity.

But why is that important to agriculture is because when that soil life has been depleted, when that soil life has been ignored and been mistreated by the use of chemicals, by the use of overtilling, then we are really disabling the ability for soil to grow plants.

What works is that these microbes are working in exchange with soil roots with plant roots.

And so right now we've reached this point in human history where we can pump artificial fertilizer after artificial fertilizer.

And we grow almost what I like to look at as like a silhouette of what a plant once was.

And so we know that the nutritional concentration, the nutrient density has been depleted so dramatically over just the last few decades.

We're growing something that looks like a broccoli, but it doesn't have the minerals and the nutrient density that, you know, even just a few generations ago, the broccoli would have.

So we now know that, you know, some plants have lost as much as 60 times their nutrient density.

So over time, what happens there is that the soil becomes less and less resilient, meaning it now needs more pesticides, because it's more susceptible to weeds and bugs, and it needs more fertilizers year after year.

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