Star role for a ‘robust’ carbon scheme as dirt gets the Amazon treatment

Two filmmakers are making dirt ‘fascinating’ as Australia’s carbon credit scheme gets top billing in a new Amazon show.

Filmmakers Josh & Rebecca Tickell. Picture : Amazon Prime

Australia’s sometimes controversial soil carbon credit scheme under which farmers can sell credits to big corporate emitters is about to go global, thanks to American filmmakers making their third documentary for streaming service Amazon Prime Video.

Joshua and Rebecca Tickell say Australian Carbon Credit Units and the Safeguards Mechanism that encourages companies to buy credits as offsets is a model for the world.

Their Big Picture Ranch team is in Australia to film regenerative farming, including at the Wilmot Cattle Co in northern NSW, for a new doco, Groundswell.

Speaking to The Australian from the paddocks during Wilmot field days run by ImpactAg Australia and Macdoch Ag Group, Joshua Tickell said ACCUs was “essentially the first step toward a regulated market (with carbon credits) that could be traded around the world”.

The Tickells have been making films together since 2007 – writing, directing and producing documentaries that for years relied on philanthropic funding but have hit the mainstream thanks to the growth of streaming TV services.

Their breakthrough was their 2020 Netflix original, Kiss the Ground, focused on regenerative farming, and narrated by actor Woody Harrelson. They followed up with Common Ground in 2023 which featured actors Laura Dern among others and was a Tribeca Film Festival winner. In January this year, Amazon bought rights to all three films: Kiss the Ground and Common Ground will stream from April 22, with Groundswell, still in production, airing next year.

“Documentary filmmaking hasn’t really been Hollywood’s priority,” Rebecca Tickell said. “So we’ve kind of had to bust in through the back door and find our own method of being able to take these really important messages and bring them out to the mainstream.

“The storytelling has been challenging; we’ve had to find a way to make dirt fascinating – on a par with The Avengers – something that people are going to actually want to watch. When we started, we couldn’t even say climate change. It was considered a dirty word. So we’ve had to find really creative ways to not polarise people around these issues that seem to be very politicised.”

Navigating a middle path has been personal: “I live in California, but my father’s a conventional legacy farmer from Ohio in the midwest of the US. It’s really easy to write off an environmental message if you’re a farmer, and you don’t necessarily believe in climate change. But we found that maybe people don’t believe in climate change, but they certainly believe in the weather. So like my dad, I can’t really talk to him about climate change, but I can talk to him about the weather, how that will affect his ability to grow crops.

“It really is about finding common ground. My dad doesn’t want to be blamed for using pesticides or chemicals … Where you really can reach a farmer is not in putting that blame on them for the mess that we find ourselves in, but rather showing a pathway for how they can make a profit … and also creating resiliency to climate disasters.”

Rebecca Tickell argues food is an important pathway to convincing people about climate change.

“Some people are not interested in talking about climate change, they’re not interested in talking about agriculture, but they are interested in their own health, and this is an incredible intersection,” she said.

And while Trump’s “drill baby, drill” approach to climate change might be a worry, Tickell said there were many people in the administration pushing for regenerative agriculture. .

‘Politics aside, RFK (health secretary Robert F. Kennedy) has (leadership of) the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ campaign,” she said. “A lot of people who were around our Kiss the Ground campaign and our Common Ground campaign are now actually in the Trump administration, working to put regenerative agriculture in place.”