On Tuesday, a pair of documentaries landed on Amazon Prime that put forth a rather bold claim: By simply making a few tweaks to how we farm, humanity can reverse climate change and all but eliminate a host of other problems stemming from our modern food system.

The two films — Kiss the Ground, which first came out on Netflix in 2020, and its follow-up, Common Ground, which premiered on streaming this week — are the most high-profile documentaries advocating for a widespread shift to “regenerative agriculture.”

This organic-adjacent approach to agriculture focuses on using a few farming methods to improve soil health, which has been degraded over the last century in large part due to the industrialization of agriculture, with its bevy of synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Deployed at scale, the films argue, regenerative agriculture would improve soil health so greatly that farmers around the globe could draw down massive amounts of climate-warming greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and store them in soil, largely solving the climate crisis.

“By converting our farmland to regenerative agriculture, the soil could sequester all of the carbon dioxide that humanity emits each year,” actor Jason Momoa claims in Common Ground. “That would bring our carbon emissions to net zero. In other words, our planet’s soil could help stabilize our climate.”

Regenerative agriculture, according to the films, could also boost biodiversity, enrich struggling farmers, clean up polluted waterways, and end the “human health crisis.” (It’s unclear which human health crisis they mean.)

Gregg DeGuire/Variety via Getty Images

This straightforward, all-encompassing plan to fix some of the world’s most wicked problems has been embraced by an eclectic set of US policymakers, A-list actors, celebrity doctors, and leading environmental organizations. (The films collectively also feature Rosario Dawson, Tom Brady, Laura Dern, and Donald Glover, among others.)

When Kiss the Ground was released, its sweeping claims drew criticism as overly simplistic and scientifically dubious — a kind of “magical thinking,” as one environmental scientist put it in a review of Kiss the Ground in the journal Biogeochemistry. The films feature no critics or skeptics, only fervent supporters.

Regenerative agriculture practices certainly have some environmental........

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