The Need To GROW
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The Need To GROW—a film by Rob Herring and Ryan Wirick—follows innovators of low and high tech solutions to help localize food and regenerate our planet's dying soils.
The Need To Make The Need To GROW
The U.N. report "Wake Up Before It's Too Late" recently stated that localizing and diversifying the food supply and increasing small organic farms was the key to fixing our food system; rather than relying on chemical-dependent, soil eroding, nutrient-lacking, GMO monocultures. It seemed so obvious. Meanwhile, TIME magazine estimated that at our current rate of soil degradation, we only have roughly 60 years of farmable topsoil left on the planet...
Yet Soil Is Our MOST Powerful Tool Against Climate Change!
Reducing emissions (half of the answer), does nothing to remove the excess carbon from our atmosphere that we've already polluted! HEALTHY SOIL & REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE CAN DO THIS.
The Need To GROW is a personal look into diverse, yet serendipitously interconnected stories from across the country, as they fight to bring awareness to game-changing methods of localizing urban food production and restoring the soil of our planet.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality...To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~Buckminster Fuller
What Makes This Film Different
Many documentaries before us have done an amazing job highlighting the problems we currently face on this planet. But focusing only on overwhelming environmental issues can feel paralyzing.
TNTG acknowledges that there is no one magic solution, but we must look at the food industry as a holistic system!
We interviewed a lot of experts, but this is ultimately a story driven film. Following characters from several areas of our food ecosystem - inventors, CEOs, teachers, activists and urban farmers - we can observe the importance of interconnectedness amongst a myriad of solutions.
This isn't your traditional documentary about urban agriculture or farming. As we searched the country for interesting solutions, our journeys took us to some pretty unexpected places! What we found exceeded our wildest expectations.
Why This Film Matters To You
The demand for healthy, fresh, nutritious food has been skyrocketing as more and more people are made aware of the health and environmental risks associated with conventionally grown produce. In the last 20 years, Farmers Markets have grown by over 500%. In the last 10 years, Organic Food Sales has increase by over $20 BILLION annually!
But with 25% of the country's food coming from less than 1% of our farmland, we need to diversify to ensure true food security. The opportunities in this film represent ways we can bring even more fresh, local, nutritious food even closer to where people actually live. And we can do it while saving resources, so we can all feel better about the ecological footprint of our dollars.
With over 40 million US households already gardening, The Need To GROW showcases simpler, more regenerative methods which provide better nutrition and keep our families safer and healthier.
We Need You!!
We've put a lot of money into this project so far over the last 3 years of production. We've risked everything, including our personal savings to work on this film because we know that the message has great potential. What we need now are the ‘finishing funds’. The film has already been shot, so it’s just the post-production that remains. On a documentary with a lot of footage, this can be quite a bit of work.
The stories and topic deserve so much more than what we can accomplish alone. We so badly want to do it justice. This is the kind of platform that can absolutely give us the means to create a final product which sits in the league of celebrity backed, studio documentaries with MUCH bigger budgets.
Your Impact
The entire journey of making this film has been about interconnectivity and coexistence. So much of our experience reminded us that even though there is greed in this world, it is human nature in fact, to want to care for the Earth.
When nature works well, it's because of support systems. Our success at creating a beautiful message which makes a real difference is similarly all about our support system. If you’re reading this it’s because you’re someone who understands there must be a better way for humans to coexist with nature on this planet. The good news is, you’re right! There are alternatives to the models that we may or may not even realize we’re relying on.
How Else You Can Help
Like Our Facebook Page!
If you can't contribute to claim a reward right now, that doesn’t mean you can’t help spread the word about this important information and our project! SHARE SHARE SHARE on Social Media platforms to help improve our visibility and the awareness of these important ideas!
Regardless of this film, you can start making real change right now. Start small. Grow something. Anything! Compost. Reduce food waste. Buy more of your weekly supply at a farmer’s market. Ask if they’re using regenerative farming practices. Read labels and buy foods that support ecosystem restoration. Start contributing to the new food ecosystem!
Sign up for our newsletter at www.TheNeedToGROW.com to get tips on growing your own food, reducing waste, and supporting solutions.
Bigger Vision
The new food ecosystem explored in this film requires not only a technological revolution, but a cultural one. We need a renaissance around the art of healing the planet and thriving in harmony with nature. In short, we need to grow local community and support local economy through the localization of the food system. Through this new (and ancient) relationship, food becomes more than a commodity, but rather a guiding principle for society as a whole, symbolic of the planet's health, and a reminder of our place in the biosphere.
In this sense, feeding the world in a regenerative way starts with understanding food production as an ecological system that includes all of humankind, all of the animals, the rivers, the oceans, all the way down to the microbes and mycelium. And it requires a critical mass of people actively participating in making food production an intimate part of their own communities.
We need to grow food in places and ways we currently don’t; especially throughout our cities, on empty lots and rooftops, year round and in every climate. We need to grow with high performance microfarms, traditional organic farms, front/back yard gardens, shared community gardens, food forests, and school gardens. We need to grow using hydroponics and aquaponics, especially in areas of drought. We need to grow food using practices that restore local soil systems, mycelial networks, biodiversity, and by extension, create true food security and reverse climate change. There is not one answer, but many.
If we fail to switch to a regenerative, decentralized network of local food ecosystems, if we don’t proactively restore our greatest carbon sink (soil), if we don’t empower people with the tools needed to participate in this cultural and technological transformation...quite simply, the world cannot sustain very much human life.
Luckily, positive change is already happening. This is a story of the pioneers of those solutions.
The Need To GROW—a film by Rob Herring and Ryan Wirick—follows innovators of low and high tech solutions to help localize food and regenerate our planet's dying soils.
The Need To Make The Need To GROW
The U.N. report "Wake Up Before It's Too Late" recently stated that localizing and diversifying the food supply and increasing small organic farms was the key to fixing our food system; rather than relying on chemical-dependent, soil eroding, nutrient-lacking, GMO monocultures. It seemed so obvious. Meanwhile, TIME magazine estimated that at our current rate of soil degradation, we only have roughly 60 years of farmable topsoil left on the planet...
Yet Soil Is Our MOST Powerful Tool Against Climate Change!
Reducing emissions (half of the answer), does nothing to remove the excess carbon from our atmosphere that we've already polluted! HEALTHY SOIL & REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE CAN DO THIS.
The Need To GROW is a personal look into diverse, yet serendipitously interconnected stories from across the country, as they fight to bring awareness to game-changing methods of localizing urban food production and restoring the soil of our planet.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality...To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~Buckminster Fuller
What Makes This Film Different
Many documentaries before us have done an amazing job highlighting the problems we currently face on this planet. But focusing only on overwhelming environmental issues can feel paralyzing.
TNTG acknowledges that there is no one magic solution, but we must look at the food industry as a holistic system!
We interviewed a lot of experts, but this is ultimately a story driven film. Following characters from several areas of our food ecosystem - inventors, CEOs, teachers, activists and urban farmers - we can observe the importance of interconnectedness amongst a myriad of solutions.
This isn't your traditional documentary about urban agriculture or farming. As we searched the country for interesting solutions, our journeys took us to some pretty unexpected places! What we found exceeded our wildest expectations.
Why This Film Matters To You
The demand for healthy, fresh, nutritious food has been skyrocketing as more and more people are made aware of the health and environmental risks associated with conventionally grown produce. In the last 20 years, Farmers Markets have grown by over 500%. In the last 10 years, Organic Food Sales has increase by over $20 BILLION annually!
But with 25% of the country's food coming from less than 1% of our farmland, we need to diversify to ensure true food security. The opportunities in this film represent ways we can bring even more fresh, local, nutritious food even closer to where people actually live. And we can do it while saving resources, so we can all feel better about the ecological footprint of our dollars.
With over 40 million US households already gardening, The Need To GROW showcases simpler, more regenerative methods which provide better nutrition and keep our families safer and healthier.
We Need You!!
We've put a lot of money into this project so far over the last 3 years of production. We've risked everything, including our personal savings to work on this film because we know that the message has great potential. What we need now are the ‘finishing funds’. The film has already been shot, so it’s just the post-production that remains. On a documentary with a lot of footage, this can be quite a bit of work.
The stories and topic deserve so much more than what we can accomplish alone. We so badly want to do it justice. This is the kind of platform that can absolutely give us the means to create a final product which sits in the league of celebrity backed, studio documentaries with MUCH bigger budgets.
Your Impact
The entire journey of making this film has been about interconnectivity and coexistence. So much of our experience reminded us that even though there is greed in this world, it is human nature in fact, to want to care for the Earth.
When nature works well, it's because of support systems. Our success at creating a beautiful message which makes a real difference is similarly all about our support system. If you’re reading this it’s because you’re someone who understands there must be a better way for humans to coexist with nature on this planet. The good news is, you’re right! There are alternatives to the models that we may or may not even realize we’re relying on.
How Else You Can Help
Like Our Facebook Page!
If you can't contribute to claim a reward right now, that doesn’t mean you can’t help spread the word about this important information and our project! SHARE SHARE SHARE on Social Media platforms to help improve our visibility and the awareness of these important ideas!
Regardless of this film, you can start making real change right now. Start small. Grow something. Anything! Compost. Reduce food waste. Buy more of your weekly supply at a farmer’s market. Ask if they’re using regenerative farming practices. Read labels and buy foods that support ecosystem restoration. Start contributing to the new food ecosystem!
Sign up for our newsletter at www.TheNeedToGROW.com to get tips on growing your own food, reducing waste, and supporting solutions.
Bigger Vision
The new food ecosystem explored in this film requires not only a technological revolution, but a cultural one. We need a renaissance around the art of healing the planet and thriving in harmony with nature. In short, we need to grow local community and support local economy through the localization of the food system. Through this new (and ancient) relationship, food becomes more than a commodity, but rather a guiding principle for society as a whole, symbolic of the planet's health, and a reminder of our place in the biosphere.
In this sense, feeding the world in a regenerative way starts with understanding food production as an ecological system that includes all of humankind, all of the animals, the rivers, the oceans, all the way down to the microbes and mycelium. And it requires a critical mass of people actively participating in making food production an intimate part of their own communities.
We need to grow food in places and ways we currently don’t; especially throughout our cities, on empty lots and rooftops, year round and in every climate. We need to grow with high performance microfarms, traditional organic farms, front/back yard gardens, shared community gardens, food forests, and school gardens. We need to grow using hydroponics and aquaponics, especially in areas of drought. We need to grow food using practices that restore local soil systems, mycelial networks, biodiversity, and by extension, create true food security and reverse climate change. There is not one answer, but many.
If we fail to switch to a regenerative, decentralized network of local food ecosystems, if we don’t proactively restore our greatest carbon sink (soil), if we don’t empower people with the tools needed to participate in this cultural and technological transformation...quite simply, the world cannot sustain very much human life.
Luckily, positive change is already happening. This is a story of the pioneers of those solutions.
Organizer
Ryan Wirick
Organizer
Mission Viejo, CA
