#171 Nicol Ragland, Founder of Regenerate Oklahoma
Influenced and informed by time spent with the Indigenous in multiple countries, Ragland continues to engage in a long term photographic and film exploration into humanity’s relationship to culture and the wild. Recognizing culture to be an accumulation of ideas where we explore ways of exploring, this infinite play is where she’s found the best terrain to collaborate, listen carefully and recognize expansion due to authoring and co-authoring.
Photographs and films have become her best challenge to create imagery that does not cause dispute but rather reconfigure who we are. She intends an aesthetic meant to push boundaries and bridge difference.
In addition, Nicol has founded REGENERATE OKLAHOMA — A state-wide soil health initiative that seeks to advance the practices of regenerative agriculture.
More of her work can be seen on her website.
Bigger Than Us #171
This transcript has been lightly edited.
Nicol Ragland 00:46
Nicol, how are you doing today?
Nicol Ragland 01:30
I’m well, Raj, thank you. Good to be with you.
Nicol Ragland 01:33
Nicol. Thank you for joining. Nicol, before I get into the topic of regenerative farming, I’d like to explore your background in photography. Can you share with us some of your experiences in photography and the travels you’ve taken?
Nicol Ragland 01:45
Sure, yeah. I grew up really loving photography, collecting books. I think I’m an inherent observer. I was really quiet as a kid and just was always looking. It was really part of my nature to watch and collect photography books as a kid growing up. And then I took some classes in grade school and high school. I actually ended up studying Environmental Science at the University of Denver and got my last few credits actually, in Nepal.
I was working for the World Wildlife Fund, doing environmental survey work. And all the while really being 22, 23 at the time, and that was my first really third world adventure. And as you and I’m sure many folks listening in, if they’ve had the opportunity to do so, it’s an experience that really takes you out of your comfort zone and your own habitual perception. And instead of doing all the environmental work that I was supposed to be doing, which was tree diversity, seed dispersal, and tourist impact, I was taking pictures. All I wanted to do was take pictures.
And so it was really my wake-up call to incorporating story, imagery, and focus on storytelling in relationship to environmental work and environmental stories. And so, consequently, I came back to Colorado at the time, and I went to the Art Institute of Colorado for photography, and that was mid-90s. And really focused on — obviously, coming from doing environmental work — I wanted to do more national and international study, so I ended up working for different nonprofits, from here in Oklahoma to Colorado, California, and then all over the world, and doing a lot of work with indigenous communities from East Timor to Indonesia, to East Africa, India, Southeast Asia.
I’m really focused on telling stories in relation to the art of us and humanity’s relationship to the wild and culture, and, really, our deep connection to place. So it’s been quite a journey, about 20 years now, of telling stories in the environment; specifically, human beings in relation to our connection to culture and place has really been my love and quite an adventure for quite some time.
Nicol Ragland 04:34
Can you share a perhaps a story or two, regarding human beings’ connection to place?
Nicol Ragland 04:40
Yeah. I was really blessed to spend time with a tribe in East Africa called the Hadzabe. And they’re one of the last remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers, certainly in Africa, but definitely in the world and have a direct link to original human beings 50,000 years ago, particularly in this area.
I was lucky enough to get there at a time when there wasn’t so much encroachment on this particular tribe of a lot of tourism, as you can imagine, with the Maasai and different pastoralists in the region. And I have spent several weeks — we were camping with them, playing charades, sitting around a fire, singing, sharing granola bars, hunting and gathering, and a lot of walking and listening and really learning that particular culture. And consequently, I was working with a friend on the ground there who’s from there, and he’s fluent in Swahili — they speak Hadzane, their native language, but several speak Swahili, and my friend Ethan was translating for me. And we were sitting once with an elder, and believe it or not, someone from the Tanzanian government thought it would be a good idea to take one of these elders or suggest to an elder, to be part of an archery tournament in South Korea. And this gentleman said, “Sure, yeah, I’ll go to South Korea.”
And I just want to remind you that these are people that — they own nothing, they share everything, and they move camps based on kills. There’s no please and thank you in their language because everything is around sharing and collective living. And they’re hunters. And so when I would see four-year-olds that could shoot birds, 200 feet, out of trees, it was just exquisite. Completely in touch with nature, and just a really extraordinary group of people. And so this gentleman said, “Yeah, I’ll go to South Korea and participate in this archery contest.”
And so I’m thinking to myself, “My God, like I mean, South Korea, first-world, of trains and neon signs and cell phones and cars.” And I mean, you can’t imagine the culture shock. And so I said to him through my friend, Ethan, “What did you see?” And he just gave this long, beautiful, elder pause, and he said, “I didn’t understand why everyone had their own plate of food.” It completely stripped me of my own first world conditioning of consumption in the first world. And I said, “Is that it?” Like, “Yeah, that’s it, I just didn’t understand.” And it was so telling, and just a realization that that’s where we once were, having a direct line of total sharing, knowing exactly where your food came from, and living off the land. So yeah, that was a huge moment.
Nicol Ragland 08:13
That really is amazing. I took the note down here, own nothing and share everything.
Nicol Ragland 08:18
Yeah, yeah. No concept of ownership.
Nicol Ragland 08:22
Right, that really is fascinating. Now, on your travels, did you ever feel unwelcome?
Nicol Ragland 08:30
Oh, sure, absolutely. I mean, different parts of the world, different cultures. Not everyone comes in understanding their impact. And that’s something that I, after many travels, really thought about in myself: how am I making a difference, or influencing an area or region? How am I being sensitive and really considering it in relation to this particular place? I ate baboon with the Hadzabe, that’s something I have, yeah. Which I mean, it’s just shocking to this day, but in consideration of their particular culture, that was a huge feast. It’s a massive kill for them to actually kill a baboon. And so to participate in that feast is in consideration of their culture and celebration of their culture. So you know, there’s always a question. How do you enter? Knowing and doing enough research and listening. Really listening, learning, and building relationships. Singing songs and figuring out, really, our commonalities that can transcend differences in language and culture. Ultimately, that’s the beautiful part is if you can get to that place, that really is shared understanding between us.
Nicol Ragland 09:54
It really is. They say when you free yourself from knowing — your history, your past — you’re open to all different kinds of new ideas. And I feel like that’s kind of what you did when you entered these different indigenous peoples’ tribes and areas.
Nicol Ragland 10:07
Yeah, absolutely. That’s always the challenge. They say, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” And that’s what I love so much about being a documentarian, whether I’m documenting a farm in Minnesota or going into East Africa to learn about a tribe. I could certainly have an idea about a particular story based on my own conditioning, based on my reading, based on teachers, it goes on and on. Or I can go in completely open-hearted and open-minded in order to really, really listen.
I did have another interesting story: I worked with a group…there was a gentleman called…Peterson who was actually asked by the tribe, many members of the tribe of the Hadzabe in Tanzania, to help them create an allotment of land from the Tanzanian government in order for them to maintain their practice of hunting and gathering. And I’d asked my partner if I could connect with him because I had a handful of images, and I wanted to try and make a difference. I had a very naive and romantic idea about this particular tribe. I was enamored by their way of life of owning nothing and sharing everything. And I sat down with him, a native to Tanzania and just a really phenomenal human being. And I heard him say, in Swahili, to my partner — and I was picking up just a little bit of Swahili, I don’t know, at all, difficult language, but I could pick up his intonation and what he was saying — and he turned to my partner on the ground, and he said, “I don’t have a whole lot of time for another muzungu that wants to change the world.” And muzungu is, “white person.”
And I felt it, and I knew it. And my partner told me what he had said afterwards. And I’ve always really thought about that because, again, we can come in as a very privileged, white member of the United States and have an idea of changing the world of East Africa through a tribe. Or, we can listen and learn and recognize the fact that there’s a lot of the Western world that is helping, you know, bicycles, getting them to hospitals, and medical care. There are so many things that are indicative of the truth on the ground. And so that was a really confronting and a really important experience that I hold true to my heart to this day.
Nicol Ragland 12:54
Well, I appreciate you sharing that. And you mentioned changing the world and farms in Minnesota. I’d like to switch gears here. How did you get involved in regenerative farming?
Nicol Ragland 13:05
I was connected, actually, through my godfather, who’s a functional medicine doctor to another functional medicine doctor called Dr. Zack Bush. He’s triple board certified in endocrinology, metabolism, hospice and palliative care, really brilliant man. He had been doing a lot of cancer research and was doing some work out of rural Virginia, and he had a control group that he was focused on in studying cancer, and he put them all on a high alkaline diet, many of which actually got even worse.
And so he and his team went into our food system and said, “What is what’s going on in our food system?” And he came to the conclusion of a lot of detriment of these chemicals, primarily glyphosate. Glyphosate is the culprit, the main toxin that’s in Roundup, very commonly used. It really has been the major player involved in the rise in all these epidemics from the mid-90s of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, ADHD, it goes on and on; autism. And much of which — within functional medicine as well — a lot of our medical practitioners are speaking to these days is the importance of the microbiome, that these diseases essentially are high inflammation. Zach had an idea of doing a film, so he, I, his wife, Jenn, and our team basically did a drive down the Mississippi River. He initially wanted to do water testing down the Mississippi River.
But like every documentary — and what I was mentioning, in terms of going in and having an idea of a story — that story really shifted once we started learning the farmers. Specifically in the Midwest, so much of what we’re dealing with, in terms of the dead zones off the coast of Louisiana, has to do with agricultural runoff. And so we just started learning the truth of what’s happening within our food system, the pressure of the use of chemicals for our farmers, really what was happening to them, and consequently, to our land and our watersheds.
And so we put together a film called Farmer’s Footprint that was released a few years ago — it’s a 20-minute short film, folks can watch it online at farmersfootprint.us. And since then, it’s been turned into a nonprofit, and having so many people around me dealing with chronic diseases and not having grown up with hearing about cancer hardly at all. And now, every time I turn around, it’s just a common disease, as well as, like I said, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, it’s just skyrocketing.
And I think it really is instigating a lot of people to ask questions: What is happening? What is the direct correlation? What are we eating and drinking and breathing? How can we, individually and collectively, make a difference within our food system. That was really the beginning. And then, ever since, I’ve been shooting stories from black farming here in Oklahoma to folks in Kansas, Texas, I spent a month in Australia shooting for a group called RCS, a really extraordinary group that have been working for 30 years. I think between 7000 and 8000 farmers are really transitioning their land from conventional farming to regen.
It’s a really extraordinary model of bringing farmers together to create collective groups to help in that process of transitioning, and so I learned a lot in Australia. And then, consequently, I have moved back to my family’s ranch here in Oklahoma about three years ago and have found the soil health ambassadors here in Oklahoma. And I’ve recently started a soil health initiative called Regenerate Oklahoma. So that’s been the process really in the last three years.
Nicol Ragland 17:26
And what are your hopes for the initiative, Regenerate Oklahoma?
Nicol Ragland 17:30
The hope, the mission, and real intention is to bridge consumers to farmers. To create really unprecedented statewide media and education to consumers to understand why soil health matters, what the direct line is from soil health to human health, to hyperlocalize our food systems so that people have a direct link to knowing who their regenerative producers are, as well as building out really strong regenerative agribusiness in the state and direct markets.
We’ve got several organizations in the state: Noble Research Institute is doing phenomenal work on education for grazing lands. The Conservation Commission, the Conservation District, and the Grazing Land Coalition are really the bigger statewide organizations, but we’re really focused on reaching consumers and getting stories out there, really detailed, intimate stories of the truth of what farmers are shouldering through and the pressures they feel from the government, from the chemical industry, and really supporting them by creating local markets so that people have a direct reach to chemical-free, regenerative food.
Nicol Ragland 18:55
And how are you getting the message out to the ears and eyes of consumers?
Nicol Ragland 19:01
Being a photographer and filmmaker, image and intimate, honest, vulnerable stories of these farmers to consumers is really potent. And so through creating short films, photo essays, short stories, through social media newsletters. One of my goals is just hero billboards across the state so that people know names and faces of who producers are, where they’re located, their specific story. So consumers really feel a direct line in knowing their farmer. That’s part of our goal.
Nicol Ragland 19:38
And have you seen any inbound interest since you started the initiative?
Nicol Ragland 19:41
Yeah, absolutely. I think by virtue of the fact that all of us are are shouldering through this pandemic, one of the gifts of COVID — many of the farmers that had a direct market in place, their market went up 500% in 2020. And so I think, because in dealing with sickness anyway, coupled with a pandemic, people are really asking questions of, “Where does my food come from?” And really, too, because of the bottlenecks of the food system that really revealed themselves, in cold storage and distribution, and getting food to consumers has obviously been challenging. And so we’re gonna have to really hyperlocalize anyway, we might as well be creating clean, chemical-free, hyperlocal markets. There definitely is interest, and farmers markets are on the rise, which is really exciting. There’s definitely a real, very strong interest for sure.
Nicol Ragland 20:49
Now, the crux of our conversation is the why behind what you do. You mentioned your conversation with Dr. Zach Bush. What about that conversation drew your interest where you decided to devote so much energy into Regenerate Oklahoma and sharing these stories?
Nicol Ragland 21:08
There’s so many people in this space with different skill sets — there are geomorphologists and soil scientists and farmers and ranchers — and so many folks that I’ve connected to, across the country and internationally, are saying, “What’s really missing is truly changing the narrative.” I believe in film, I believe in the power of film. It’s the most powerful way of getting a message out there.
We’ve got to get this out to the masses, and making the direct connectivity to the microbiome within our soil directly to the microbiome within our own human system is really kind of the “aha” moment, and connecting the dots within rural communities and in cities as well.
But I think so much of my work is creating a connectivity between rural and urban communities. In addition to — the United States spends more on health care than any other developed country in the world. We’re leading in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disease, and cancer, and recognizing that the solution to that is regenerating our soil and creating that connectivity from soil health in relation to human health. We know what to do, the solution is there. We’re dealing with so many draconian powers, all of which can feel very abstract and disconnected.
And so coming back to Oklahoma, and finding a place that is more land-heavy and very community-driven, and handshake-driven, and trust-driven. And it’s a place where people make deals based on handshakes and trust. Coming back here and recognizing such a massive issue collectively, and recognizing that that is our common ground, and then finding the major soil health ambassadors across the state, and saying, “Okay, we could actually make a difference in one particular state by virtue of the fact that it is community-driven, that we are land-heavy, and people are really waking up to our food system.”
Nicol Ragland 23:28
You mentioned sharing the story, sharing the narrative. And you and I both know that there are billions of dollars invested in maintaining the narrative. What are some of the challenges you’ve come across or seen in changing the narrative?
Nicol Ragland 23:44
That we are feeding the world. This all really happened at the beginning of the Green Revolution, and this idea that if we were to use these chemicals, our yields would rise, we would make money significantly faster, and all of this would be feeding the world. And that is completely false. There’s a famine in Sub-Saharan Africa as we speak, millions of people are starving, and we’re not feeding them. And we’re not feeding them because we don’t have the political infrastructure to do so.
Clean food, whether it’s organic or, in best case scenario, regenerative, is all grown on five acres or less. We’re trapped in a system that, for people that really understand, 40% of our food is wasted, and less than 1% of our farmers are eating their own food. I mean, say that twice. Just that alone just really reveals the insanity of our food system. And states like Kansas, which is 90% farmland, is importing 90% of their food. Monsanto recently sold to Bayer. Monsanto owned 80% of our global food chain. They sold to Bayer for something around $68 billion, which is, if you really think about it, not a lot of money in comparison to that level of power. And a really important point is why would a company like Monsanto, which essentially has taken out all of the nutrients of our plants, sell to a company, a German company called Bayer that sells medicine? That, to me, is really an issue of Homeland Security. So again, there are billions of dollars in this space. And the issue is bringing it back home from state to state for each of us, individually, to be part of changing the narrative of creating hyperlocal healthy food systems.
So we’re certainly up against a lot. But what I do see is, like I said before, that the question and the issue of dealing with so many of these diseases, and now a pandemic, we’re wanting to reconnect to our own relationship to what we put in our bodies. Absolutely.
Nicol Ragland 26:13
Can you expand on that statistic? Less than 1% of farmers are eating their own food?
Nicol Ragland 26:19
Yeah, I mean, we’re not growing food. We’re growing plastic. And corn that’s not edible and soybeans, and sometimes meat that’s sold overseas, that we then buy back. It’s crazy. The problem is really this culture of convenience, as well as cheap food, and really understanding the cascading effects of what cheap food means. That’s part of the problem as well in terms of the narrative. If we had stronger markets, and more farmers were actually producing this clean food, those prices would then go down. And so again, that is going to take all of us for consumers to build more demand and to get creative, and building out stronger markets in order for this food to be less expensive. It’s an industrial complex, right? We’re not in a place of growing food. And that’s part of the problem. But like I said, true clean food is grown on five acres or less. So there’s no there’s no shortage of land, there’s shortage of demand as well as labor. Labor is definitely a part of our challenge we’re working on as well.
Nicol Ragland 27:38
So speaking of true clean food and demand, if you had a magic wand, let’s fast forward to 2030. What would you like to see regenerative farming look like?
Nicol Ragland 27:48
Mainstream. A common term. People would understand it. They would see brands that would have a regenerative label on it, we would see scanners on our phone that would show nutrient density specific to each carrot, that if we walk through a grocery store, we would know exactly what’s in that carrot and where it came from, we would see a drop in these diseases, we would recognize that schools and shifts in these mental issues that we’re dealing with, and behavior issues with kids would be changing. We’d recognize the direct correlation between our health, our farms, and our food. But really having it be mainstream, and really beyond organic. Absolutely.
Nicol Ragland 28:35
And when you’re speaking to farmers to enroll them into thinking regeneratively, what do those conversations look like?
Nicol Ragland 28:42
It really varies. I think the important thing is to meet farmers where they are. No one wants to be told what to do; I certainly don’t want to be told what to do or shamed in any way. And it’s really important to all of us that there’s a deep respect and reverence to farmers. I certainly have it, everyone on my team has it. We’re working directly with farmers themselves, gently and and sensitively. Farmers have done the best that they could have done thus far. And much of this is based on succession and doing what their fathers did, and what their grandfathers did, and grandmothers, and it’s been passed down and it’s very deep-seated. It’s as deep as religion, these beliefs, in relation to how they work their land. And again, it can be an invasive thing to say, “We’re bringing a new idea to you, and we’d like you to change your operation.” And so part of the challenge is creating economic incentives. Growing food, growing crops that can really change their numbers is really important. And again, that’s going to take shareholders and CEOs of different companies, people getting creative, to be part of the farming community, investing in farms, investing in land. We in Oklahoma, we’ve got a rise — I think it’s like 1200% — in foreign land ownership. So we need companies really caring about local land and empowering local farmers. And economically, understandably, Oklahoma is one of the top states that’s dealing with major bankruptcies. So what does it look like within a state for people to say, “I want to care about our farmers and our land?” You keep things local and build out markets locally.
Nicol Ragland 30:36
I appreciate that. And I know you said nobody likes to be told what to do. But my last question is this: if you could share some advice, words of wisdom, recommendations with the audience — and it doesn’t have to be specifically regenerative farming, it could be more broadly speaking — what would it be?
Nicol Ragland 30:53
I think that the most powerful way to change is to listen and not to know. Like I said, that’s our approach when we connect with farmers. And I think it’s a rule of thumb anyway, just as a human being. In this case, in relationship to regenerative agriculture and farming, it’s to know your farmer. There’s a direct link within each of us individually, and our well-being, simply by knowing where your food comes from, and supporting those that are creating chemical-free, nutrient-dense regenerative food, as well as stewarding the land. And I myself have just become so respectful of farmers and their effort, their tenacity, and shouldering through the change in climate, and being just so incredibly resilient through what they’ve had to work through within our food system and industrial complex, as well as, now, a new completely different invitation to creating regenerative agriculture and what that looks like.
Nicol Ragland 32:00
I appreciate that, and before we go, I like to leave the audience with this. When I was researching for the show, I came across this quote by Wendell Berry: “People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food,” which I think is very, very illustrative of our conversation today.
Nicol Ragland 32:19
Yeah, absolutely. Wendell is incredible. He also has another short and sweet one, which is like, “If you eat, you’re into agriculture.”
Nicol Ragland 32:30
I like that. I appreciate that. And I look forward to catching up with you again soon.
Nicol Ragland 32:34
Thank you so much. Glad to be with you.
Bigger Than Us #171
This transcript has been lightly edited.
Nicol Ragland 00:46
Nicol, how are you doing today?
Nicol Ragland 01:30
I’m well, Raj, thank you. Good to be with you.
Nicol Ragland 01:33
Nicol. Thank you for joining. Nicol, before I get into the topic of regenerative farming, I’d like to explore your background in photography. Can you share with us some of your experiences in photography and the travels you’ve taken?
Nicol Ragland 01:45
Sure, yeah. I grew up really loving photography, collecting books. I think I’m an inherent observer. I was really quiet as a kid and just was always looking. It was really part of my nature to watch and collect photography books as a kid growing up. And then I took some classes in grade school and high school. I actually ended up studying Environmental Science at the University of Denver and got my last few credits actually, in Nepal.
I was working for the World Wildlife Fund, doing environmental survey work. And all the while really being 22, 23 at the time, and that was my first really third world adventure. And as you and I’m sure many folks listening in, if they’ve had the opportunity to do so, it’s an experience that really takes you out of your comfort zone and your own habitual perception. And instead of doing all the environmental work that I was supposed to be doing, which was tree diversity, seed dispersal, and tourist impact, I was taking pictures. All I wanted to do was take pictures.
And so it was really my wake-up call to incorporating story, imagery, and focus on storytelling in relationship to environmental work and environmental stories. And so, consequently, I came back to Colorado at the time, and I went to the Art Institute of Colorado for photography, and that was mid-90s. And really focused on — obviously, coming from doing environmental work — I wanted to do more national and international study, so I ended up working for different nonprofits, from here in Oklahoma to Colorado, California, and then all over the world, and doing a lot of work with indigenous communities from East Timor to Indonesia, to East Africa, India, Southeast Asia.
I’m really focused on telling stories in relation to the art of us and humanity’s relationship to the wild and culture, and, really, our deep connection to place. So it’s been quite a journey, about 20 years now, of telling stories in the environment; specifically, human beings in relation to our connection to culture and place has really been my love and quite an adventure for quite some time.
Nicol Ragland 04:34
Can you share a perhaps a story or two, regarding human beings’ connection to place?
Nicol Ragland 04:40
Yeah. I was really blessed to spend time with a tribe in East Africa called the Hadzabe. And they’re one of the last remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers, certainly in Africa, but definitely in the world and have a direct link to original human beings 50,000 years ago, particularly in this area.
I was lucky enough to get there at a time when there wasn’t so much encroachment on this particular tribe of a lot of tourism, as you can imagine, with the Maasai and different pastoralists in the region. And I have spent several weeks — we were camping with them, playing charades, sitting around a fire, singing, sharing granola bars, hunting and gathering, and a lot of walking and listening and really learning that particular culture. And consequently, I was working with a friend on the ground there who’s from there, and he’s fluent in Swahili — they speak Hadzane, their native language, but several speak Swahili, and my friend Ethan was translating for me. And we were sitting once with an elder, and believe it or not, someone from the Tanzanian government thought it would be a good idea to take one of these elders or suggest to an elder, to be part of an archery tournament in South Korea. And this gentleman said, “Sure, yeah, I’ll go to South Korea.”
And I just want to remind you that these are people that — they own nothing, they share everything, and they move camps based on kills. There’s no please and thank you in their language because everything is around sharing and collective living. And they’re hunters. And so when I would see four-year-olds that could shoot birds, 200 feet, out of trees, it was just exquisite. Completely in touch with nature, and just a really extraordinary group of people. And so this gentleman said, “Yeah, I’ll go to South Korea and participate in this archery contest.”
And so I’m thinking to myself, “My God, like I mean, South Korea, first-world, of trains and neon signs and cell phones and cars.” And I mean, you can’t imagine the culture shock. And so I said to him through my friend, Ethan, “What did you see?” And he just gave this long, beautiful, elder pause, and he said, “I didn’t understand why everyone had their own plate of food.” It completely stripped me of my own first world conditioning of consumption in the first world. And I said, “Is that it?” Like, “Yeah, that’s it, I just didn’t understand.” And it was so telling, and just a realization that that’s where we once were, having a direct line of total sharing, knowing exactly where your food came from, and living off the land. So yeah, that was a huge moment.
Nicol Ragland 08:13
That really is amazing. I took the note down here, own nothing and share everything.
Nicol Ragland 08:18
Yeah, yeah. No concept of ownership.
Nicol Ragland 08:22
Right, that really is fascinating. Now, on your travels, did you ever feel unwelcome?
Nicol Ragland 08:30
Oh, sure, absolutely. I mean, different parts of the world, different cultures. Not everyone comes in understanding their impact. And that’s something that I, after many travels, really thought about in myself: how am I making a difference, or influencing an area or region? How am I being sensitive and really considering it in relation to this particular place? I ate baboon with the Hadzabe, that’s something I have, yeah. Which I mean, it’s just shocking to this day, but in consideration of their particular culture, that was a huge feast. It’s a massive kill for them to actually kill a baboon. And so to participate in that feast is in consideration of their culture and celebration of their culture. So you know, there’s always a question. How do you enter? Knowing and doing enough research and listening. Really listening, learning, and building relationships. Singing songs and figuring out, really, our commonalities that can transcend differences in language and culture. Ultimately, that’s the beautiful part is if you can get to that place, that really is shared understanding between us.
Nicol Ragland 09:54
It really is. They say when you free yourself from knowing — your history, your past — you’re open to all different kinds of new ideas. And I feel like that’s kind of what you did when you entered these different indigenous peoples’ tribes and areas.
Nicol Ragland 10:07
Yeah, absolutely. That’s always the challenge. They say, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” And that’s what I love so much about being a documentarian, whether I’m documenting a farm in Minnesota or going into East Africa to learn about a tribe. I could certainly have an idea about a particular story based on my own conditioning, based on my reading, based on teachers, it goes on and on. Or I can go in completely open-hearted and open-minded in order to really, really listen.
I did have another interesting story: I worked with a group…there was a gentleman called…Peterson who was actually asked by the tribe, many members of the tribe of the Hadzabe in Tanzania, to help them create an allotment of land from the Tanzanian government in order for them to maintain their practice of hunting and gathering. And I’d asked my partner if I could connect with him because I had a handful of images, and I wanted to try and make a difference. I had a very naive and romantic idea about this particular tribe. I was enamored by their way of life of owning nothing and sharing everything. And I sat down with him, a native to Tanzania and just a really phenomenal human being. And I heard him say, in Swahili, to my partner — and I was picking up just a little bit of Swahili, I don’t know, at all, difficult language, but I could pick up his intonation and what he was saying — and he turned to my partner on the ground, and he said, “I don’t have a whole lot of time for another muzungu that wants to change the world.” And muzungu is, “white person.”
And I felt it, and I knew it. And my partner told me what he had said afterwards. And I’ve always really thought about that because, again, we can come in as a very privileged, white member of the United States and have an idea of changing the world of East Africa through a tribe. Or, we can listen and learn and recognize the fact that there’s a lot of the Western world that is helping, you know, bicycles, getting them to hospitals, and medical care. There are so many things that are indicative of the truth on the ground. And so that was a really confronting and a really important experience that I hold true to my heart to this day.
Nicol Ragland 12:54
Well, I appreciate you sharing that. And you mentioned changing the world and farms in Minnesota. I’d like to switch gears here. How did you get involved in regenerative farming?
Nicol Ragland 13:05
I was connected, actually, through my godfather, who’s a functional medicine doctor to another functional medicine doctor called Dr. Zack Bush. He’s triple board certified in endocrinology, metabolism, hospice and palliative care, really brilliant man. He had been doing a lot of cancer research and was doing some work out of rural Virginia, and he had a control group that he was focused on in studying cancer, and he put them all on a high alkaline diet, many of which actually got even worse.
And so he and his team went into our food system and said, “What is what’s going on in our food system?” And he came to the conclusion of a lot of detriment of these chemicals, primarily glyphosate. Glyphosate is the culprit, the main toxin that’s in Roundup, very commonly used. It really has been the major player involved in the rise in all these epidemics from the mid-90s of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, ADHD, it goes on and on; autism. And much of which — within functional medicine as well — a lot of our medical practitioners are speaking to these days is the importance of the microbiome, that these diseases essentially are high inflammation. Zach had an idea of doing a film, so he, I, his wife, Jenn, and our team basically did a drive down the Mississippi River. He initially wanted to do water testing down the Mississippi River.
But like every documentary — and what I was mentioning, in terms of going in and having an idea of a story — that story really shifted once we started learning the farmers. Specifically in the Midwest, so much of what we’re dealing with, in terms of the dead zones off the coast of Louisiana, has to do with agricultural runoff. And so we just started learning the truth of what’s happening within our food system, the pressure of the use of chemicals for our farmers, really what was happening to them, and consequently, to our land and our watersheds.
And so we put together a film called Farmer’s Footprint that was released a few years ago — it’s a 20-minute short film, folks can watch it online at farmersfootprint.us. And since then, it’s been turned into a nonprofit, and having so many people around me dealing with chronic diseases and not having grown up with hearing about cancer hardly at all. And now, every time I turn around, it’s just a common disease, as well as, like I said, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, it’s just skyrocketing.
And I think it really is instigating a lot of people to ask questions: What is happening? What is the direct correlation? What are we eating and drinking and breathing? How can we, individually and collectively, make a difference within our food system. That was really the beginning. And then, ever since, I’ve been shooting stories from black farming here in Oklahoma to folks in Kansas, Texas, I spent a month in Australia shooting for a group called RCS, a really extraordinary group that have been working for 30 years. I think between 7000 and 8000 farmers are really transitioning their land from conventional farming to regen.
It’s a really extraordinary model of bringing farmers together to create collective groups to help in that process of transitioning, and so I learned a lot in Australia. And then, consequently, I have moved back to my family’s ranch here in Oklahoma about three years ago and have found the soil health ambassadors here in Oklahoma. And I’ve recently started a soil health initiative called Regenerate Oklahoma. So that’s been the process really in the last three years.
Nicol Ragland 17:26
And what are your hopes for the initiative, Regenerate Oklahoma?
Nicol Ragland 17:30
The hope, the mission, and real intention is to bridge consumers to farmers. To create really unprecedented statewide media and education to consumers to understand why soil health matters, what the direct line is from soil health to human health, to hyperlocalize our food systems so that people have a direct link to knowing who their regenerative producers are, as well as building out really strong regenerative agribusiness in the state and direct markets.
We’ve got several organizations in the state: Noble Research Institute is doing phenomenal work on education for grazing lands. The Conservation Commission, the Conservation District, and the Grazing Land Coalition are really the bigger statewide organizations, but we’re really focused on reaching consumers and getting stories out there, really detailed, intimate stories of the truth of what farmers are shouldering through and the pressures they feel from the government, from the chemical industry, and really supporting them by creating local markets so that people have a direct reach to chemical-free, regenerative food.
Nicol Ragland 18:55
And how are you getting the message out to the ears and eyes of consumers?
Nicol Ragland 19:01
Being a photographer and filmmaker, image and intimate, honest, vulnerable stories of these farmers to consumers is really potent. And so through creating short films, photo essays, short stories, through social media newsletters. One of my goals is just hero billboards across the state so that people know names and faces of who producers are, where they’re located, their specific story. So consumers really feel a direct line in knowing their farmer. That’s part of our goal.
Nicol Ragland 19:38
And have you seen any inbound interest since you started the initiative?
Nicol Ragland 19:41
Yeah, absolutely. I think by virtue of the fact that all of us are are shouldering through this pandemic, one of the gifts of COVID — many of the farmers that had a direct market in place, their market went up 500% in 2020. And so I think, because in dealing with sickness anyway, coupled with a pandemic, people are really asking questions of, “Where does my food come from?” And really, too, because of the bottlenecks of the food system that really revealed themselves, in cold storage and distribution, and getting food to consumers has obviously been challenging. And so we’re gonna have to really hyperlocalize anyway, we might as well be creating clean, chemical-free, hyperlocal markets. There definitely is interest, and farmers markets are on the rise, which is really exciting. There’s definitely a real, very strong interest for sure.
Nicol Ragland 20:49
Now, the crux of our conversation is the why behind what you do. You mentioned your conversation with Dr. Zach Bush. What about that conversation drew your interest where you decided to devote so much energy into Regenerate Oklahoma and sharing these stories?
Nicol Ragland 21:08
There’s so many people in this space with different skill sets — there are geomorphologists and soil scientists and farmers and ranchers — and so many folks that I’ve connected to, across the country and internationally, are saying, “What’s really missing is truly changing the narrative.” I believe in film, I believe in the power of film. It’s the most powerful way of getting a message out there.
We’ve got to get this out to the masses, and making the direct connectivity to the microbiome within our soil directly to the microbiome within our own human system is really kind of the “aha” moment, and connecting the dots within rural communities and in cities as well.
But I think so much of my work is creating a connectivity between rural and urban communities. In addition to — the United States spends more on health care than any other developed country in the world. We’re leading in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disease, and cancer, and recognizing that the solution to that is regenerating our soil and creating that connectivity from soil health in relation to human health. We know what to do, the solution is there. We’re dealing with so many draconian powers, all of which can feel very abstract and disconnected.
And so coming back to Oklahoma, and finding a place that is more land-heavy and very community-driven, and handshake-driven, and trust-driven. And it’s a place where people make deals based on handshakes and trust. Coming back here and recognizing such a massive issue collectively, and recognizing that that is our common ground, and then finding the major soil health ambassadors across the state, and saying, “Okay, we could actually make a difference in one particular state by virtue of the fact that it is community-driven, that we are land-heavy, and people are really waking up to our food system.”
Nicol Ragland 23:28
You mentioned sharing the story, sharing the narrative. And you and I both know that there are billions of dollars invested in maintaining the narrative. What are some of the challenges you’ve come across or seen in changing the narrative?
Nicol Ragland 23:44
That we are feeding the world. This all really happened at the beginning of the Green Revolution, and this idea that if we were to use these chemicals, our yields would rise, we would make money significantly faster, and all of this would be feeding the world. And that is completely false. There’s a famine in Sub-Saharan Africa as we speak, millions of people are starving, and we’re not feeding them. And we’re not feeding them because we don’t have the political infrastructure to do so.
Clean food, whether it’s organic or, in best case scenario, regenerative, is all grown on five acres or less. We’re trapped in a system that, for people that really understand, 40% of our food is wasted, and less than 1% of our farmers are eating their own food. I mean, say that twice. Just that alone just really reveals the insanity of our food system. And states like Kansas, which is 90% farmland, is importing 90% of their food. Monsanto recently sold to Bayer. Monsanto owned 80% of our global food chain. They sold to Bayer for something around $68 billion, which is, if you really think about it, not a lot of money in comparison to that level of power. And a really important point is why would a company like Monsanto, which essentially has taken out all of the nutrients of our plants, sell to a company, a German company called Bayer that sells medicine? That, to me, is really an issue of Homeland Security. So again, there are billions of dollars in this space. And the issue is bringing it back home from state to state for each of us, individually, to be part of changing the narrative of creating hyperlocal healthy food systems.
So we’re certainly up against a lot. But what I do see is, like I said before, that the question and the issue of dealing with so many of these diseases, and now a pandemic, we’re wanting to reconnect to our own relationship to what we put in our bodies. Absolutely.
Nicol Ragland 26:13
Can you expand on that statistic? Less than 1% of farmers are eating their own food?
Nicol Ragland 26:19
Yeah, I mean, we’re not growing food. We’re growing plastic. And corn that’s not edible and soybeans, and sometimes meat that’s sold overseas, that we then buy back. It’s crazy. The problem is really this culture of convenience, as well as cheap food, and really understanding the cascading effects of what cheap food means. That’s part of the problem as well in terms of the narrative. If we had stronger markets, and more farmers were actually producing this clean food, those prices would then go down. And so again, that is going to take all of us for consumers to build more demand and to get creative, and building out stronger markets in order for this food to be less expensive. It’s an industrial complex, right? We’re not in a place of growing food. And that’s part of the problem. But like I said, true clean food is grown on five acres or less. So there’s no there’s no shortage of land, there’s shortage of demand as well as labor. Labor is definitely a part of our challenge we’re working on as well.
Nicol Ragland 27:38
So speaking of true clean food and demand, if you had a magic wand, let’s fast forward to 2030. What would you like to see regenerative farming look like?
Nicol Ragland 27:48
Mainstream. A common term. People would understand it. They would see brands that would have a regenerative label on it, we would see scanners on our phone that would show nutrient density specific to each carrot, that if we walk through a grocery store, we would know exactly what’s in that carrot and where it came from, we would see a drop in these diseases, we would recognize that schools and shifts in these mental issues that we’re dealing with, and behavior issues with kids would be changing. We’d recognize the direct correlation between our health, our farms, and our food. But really having it be mainstream, and really beyond organic. Absolutely.
Nicol Ragland 28:35
And when you’re speaking to farmers to enroll them into thinking regeneratively, what do those conversations look like?
Nicol Ragland 28:42
It really varies. I think the important thing is to meet farmers where they are. No one wants to be told what to do; I certainly don’t want to be told what to do or shamed in any way. And it’s really important to all of us that there’s a deep respect and reverence to farmers. I certainly have it, everyone on my team has it. We’re working directly with farmers themselves, gently and and sensitively. Farmers have done the best that they could have done thus far. And much of this is based on succession and doing what their fathers did, and what their grandfathers did, and grandmothers, and it’s been passed down and it’s very deep-seated. It’s as deep as religion, these beliefs, in relation to how they work their land. And again, it can be an invasive thing to say, “We’re bringing a new idea to you, and we’d like you to change your operation.” And so part of the challenge is creating economic incentives. Growing food, growing crops that can really change their numbers is really important. And again, that’s going to take shareholders and CEOs of different companies, people getting creative, to be part of the farming community, investing in farms, investing in land. We in Oklahoma, we’ve got a rise — I think it’s like 1200% — in foreign land ownership. So we need companies really caring about local land and empowering local farmers. And economically, understandably, Oklahoma is one of the top states that’s dealing with major bankruptcies. So what does it look like within a state for people to say, “I want to care about our farmers and our land?” You keep things local and build out markets locally.
Nicol Ragland 30:36
I appreciate that. And I know you said nobody likes to be told what to do. But my last question is this: if you could share some advice, words of wisdom, recommendations with the audience — and it doesn’t have to be specifically regenerative farming, it could be more broadly speaking — what would it be?
Nicol Ragland 30:53
I think that the most powerful way to change is to listen and not to know. Like I said, that’s our approach when we connect with farmers. And I think it’s a rule of thumb anyway, just as a human being. In this case, in relationship to regenerative agriculture and farming, it’s to know your farmer. There’s a direct link within each of us individually, and our well-being, simply by knowing where your food comes from, and supporting those that are creating chemical-free, nutrient-dense regenerative food, as well as stewarding the land. And I myself have just become so respectful of farmers and their effort, their tenacity, and shouldering through the change in climate, and being just so incredibly resilient through what they’ve had to work through within our food system and industrial complex, as well as, now, a new completely different invitation to creating regenerative agriculture and what that looks like.
Nicol Ragland 32:00
I appreciate that, and before we go, I like to leave the audience with this. When I was researching for the show, I came across this quote by Wendell Berry: “People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food,” which I think is very, very illustrative of our conversation today.
Nicol Ragland 32:19
Yeah, absolutely. Wendell is incredible. He also has another short and sweet one, which is like, “If you eat, you’re into agriculture.”
Nicol Ragland 32:30
I like that. I appreciate that. And I look forward to catching up with you again soon.
Nicol Ragland 32:34
Thank you so much. Glad to be with you.
Before we go, I’m excited to share that we’ve launched the Bigger Than Us comic strip, The Adventures of Mira and Nex
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