The 13th century Persian poet Rumi famously wrote: “Let the beauty you love be what you do, there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

Ryland Engelhart and Finian Makepeace took these words to heart and in 2013 founded Kiss the Ground. Named in honor of the famed poem, Kiss the Ground works to restore soils worldwide by promoting and developing models that accelerate the adoption of regenerative agriculture — large scale and home scale. Healthy soil has the miraculous ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and it’s not just carbon storage; the ways that soil stands to positively impact lives of billions worldwide are tangible and immediate: Clean water. Healthy food. Drought resistance. Restored habitats.

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