The land feeds us. It clothes us. It makes the rain, holds the water, and keeps the seeds. For most of human history, the relationship between people and earth was one of mutual dependence: slow, legible, local. That relationship is now being renegotiated at a speed and scale that few of us can see clearly, let alone influence.

Agriculture is the most transformative force humans collectively unleash on the planet. It drives climate change, extinction, erosion, and freshwater depletion. Fertilizer runoff from industrial farming poisons the ecosystems of rivers and coastal areas. Deforestation and the conversion of grasslands into farmland accelerate soil erosion and biodiversity loss. Desertification, driven by over-exploitation of the soil and rising temperatures, is one of the greatest threats to life on earth. Nature is declining globally at unprecedented rates. Throughout history, when agricultural systems failed, societies collapsed. People dispersed and built new ones elsewhere. For the first time, we are pushing the limits of the earth’s carrying capacity everywhere, simultaneously, with nowhere to go.

We have spent nearly two decades inside this contradiction to document the social and ecological consequences of global agriculture. Since beginning LandRush in 2007, we have traveled to five continents, living and collaborating with farmers, farmworkers, fishers, herders, scientists, indigenous peoples, and activists for months at a time. We build relationships over years, returning to the same places and the same people as circumstances change. What has emerged is a sustained inquiry that refuses easy conclusions and asks visitors to draw their own.

Dry West (2014–present) takes us to the American Southwest, where water has always been the defining resource, and is now at the center of an intensifying crisis. California Drought finds the rivers of California bent into a vast plumbing system, redirected and controlled to irrigate farmland that, in geological terms, is desert. American Nile follows the Colorado River, the lifeline of millions of people across seven states and northern Mexico. It no longer reaches its own delta. The same water, drawn through the fields of the Imperial Valley, drains as runoff into the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake. Since a 2003 agreement diverted part of that flow to coastal cities, less water reaches the lake. Dustbowl Riviera chronicles the ensuing shrinkage, which turns the exposed lakebed into a toxic dustbowl and unleashes a slow-motion public health crisis on its shores.

White Gold (2007–2020) examines how the global cotton trade has affected the land, the water, and the people caught in it. Killing Seeds investigates India, where cotton farmers have been locked into a vicious debt cycle by the promises of proprietary seed, resulting in the largest sustained wave of farmer suicides ever recorded in human history. Dying Sea documents what the United Nations has called the worst man-made environmental disaster in history. The Aral Sea in Central Asia, once the world’s fourth-largest lake and the lifeblood of fishing communities for centuries, was destroyed when its two supplying rivers were diverted to irrigate cotton in the surrounding steppe. Burkina Dream follows small-scale organic cotton farmers in Burkina Faso, among them women who had built rare financial independence through organic farming, filmed at the very moment the country introduced genetically modified cotton nationwide. The GM variety promised higher yields but damaged the long-staple fiber that had made Burkina’s cotton prized on global markets, and threatened to contaminate organic farmers’ supply beyond recovery. Texas Blues traces cotton farmers in West Texas, where mining water from the Ogallala Aquifer has turned the semiarid landscape around Lubbock into the world’s largest contiguous cotton-producing land. The aquifer is depleting faster than it recharges. Without it, and without billions in government subsidies and the infrastructure of industrial agribusiness, cotton would barely exist here at any significant scale. As the climate grows drier and chemical-resistant superweeds advance, the farmers who built their lives around this water are running out of time.

LandRush (2011–present) follows the forces reshaping agricultural land, rural communities, and food systems across three very different landscapes. The Farm documents the transformation of Gambella, a remote lowland region wedged between the Ethiopian highlands and South Sudan, home to the Anuak, Nuer, and Murle peoples and to the largest land mammal migration on Earth. Since 2008, when global food prices spiked, foreign investors have been converting its extraordinarily fertile ecosystem into industrial farms, displacing small farmers and pastoralists and relocating parts of the national park. The land rush inflamed long-running conflicts over territory and resources that continue to this day. The Road traces the BR-163, the Soy Highway, which runs north through the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Pará from Cuiabá to the Amazon port of Santarém. The road opens the land. Farms follow. Soy, corn, cotton. A corridor of enormous productivity and enormous loss advances through the same territory, where monoculture and pesticides displace a previously thriving ecosystem. Family Affairs documents two farming families in Iowa who, after decades of decline, are finding new hope in the ethanol boom, which opens a lucrative market for their corn. But the global rise in biofuel production drives up food prices worldwide, and the tension between a family’s survival and the wider costs of industrial agriculture does not resolve cleanly. Full Circle follows an organic farming family in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in eastern Germany who graze their dairy cows and grow their own feed. Climate change has brought sustained drought to the region, and the land can no longer reliably produce what the animals need. Rather than abandon their approach, the family is shifting from dairy to a cow-calf operation, adjusting to what the land can still offer.