- [Narrator] Diya Payal is a 14 year old from India who loves science, nature, and spending time with her family.

She's recently come to appreciate the importance of sustainable farming to counter the effects that climate change and industrial agriculture have on plants.

- We are losing many, many species, and the benefits that come from it.

- [Narrator] With guidance from filmmaker Camilla Becket, she chronicles her findings, and examines the ways in which food, family, and farming are all connected to the natural world.

- [Diya] Everything is connected through seeds of life.

[pleasant music] [pleasant music continues] - [Narrator] Major funding for this program is provided by.

Additional funding by.

[birds chirping] [bee buzzing] [gentle music] [gentle music continues] [burner clicks] [family chattering in Hindi] [family continues chattering in Hindi] - My name is Diya Payal.

I am 14 years old, and I live in Dehradun in the state of Uttarakhand, India.

[pleasant music] I live with my mother, my father, and my little brother, Shivam.

[Diya speaks Hindi] Do you know about the [Diya giggles].

My father is an accountant.

He works at Navdanya Biodiversity Farm.

[pleasant music] [insects chirping] At the organic farm, they grow and conserve indigenous Indian varieties of seed that are in danger of becoming extinct.

When I discovered that we could lose our heritage seeds, I became very concerned.

I decided I wanted to find out more.

This film is about what I learned.

[pleasant music] [pleasant music continues] [students chattering] [pleasant music] My favorite teacher at school gave me a book about biodiversity, and I did some research.

Biodiversity of seed and plant varieties is necessary for increasing soil health.

Increased soil health leads to the cultivation of flourishing crops, which means better human health.

Seed biodiversity is declining day by day, as now the diet of people rely in only one or two crops like rice and wheat, due to which certain seeds and crops are close to being extinct.

[somber music] My parents told me that industrial farming uses seeds and farming methods that need pesticides and chemicals to produce the food that we eat.

[insects chirping] These industrial methods are killing biodiversity.

[Vandana speaks Hindi] - What is the reason for loss of biodiversity?

- So industrial agriculture is an agriculture based on inputs that are toxic chemicals, and these inputs then require uniformity.

Therefore, biodiversity must disappear.

85,000 species is what human beings ate.

Now we grow and trade in about four to 12.

- We are losing many, many species, and mostly species, you know, we don't even really understand what they do for our ecosystems, but as we lose them, we lose the benefits that come from it.

[somber music] [insects chirping] - [Diya] So, how are they addressing this problem at the organic farm?

I spoke to Sheela Godiyal, the head seed keeper at Navdanya.

[Sheela speaks Hindi] [Sheela continues speaking Hindi] [Diya speaks Hindi] Is the number of seeds and their varieties increasing or decreasing?

[Sheela speaks Hindi] [Sheela continues speaking Hindi] - Seed is life.

Every life form has its original seed.

It could be seeds of plants that are seeds.

You were a little seed, an embryo in your mother's womb.

So all life begins with the seed.

Foods we eat are grown from seed, and when you have more diversity of indigenous seeds, you have much more nutrition.

If seeds are bred for nourishment, they will give us nourishment.

If seeds are bred only for quantity, they will degrade in quality, and when the monocultures are there, they will be devastated if there's an excess rain, if there's excess heat, if there's a drought.

So, seeds of nourishments, seeds of life are seeds that farmers have used over hundreds of thousands of years.

[gentle music] - [Diya] I love nature.

I appreciate the beautiful forest, and rivers, and hills around Dehradun where I live, and where my family comes from.

I love to walk in nature, and to visit the farm, their plants, and insects, and birds, and animals, and people live in a harmonious relationship with one another.

[insects chirping] There's a balance in nature.

I began to understand that the way we grow fruit should be in accordance with nature's processes too.

We should avoid chemicals, pesticides that will kill pests, weeds, because they can kill insects, and plants, and animals that we depend upon too.

[cow moos] Organic farming builds healthy soil, and healthy soil produces healthy food.

Healthy soil is very rich in biodiversity.

I decided to talk to the soil scientists to find out more.

- My name is Bhavna Simar.

I have done my MSC in in environmental science.

I'm working in Navdanya last five year.

I'm a research coordinator, and mostly I work in soil lab.

Soil is a very necessary part of our earth, and it's very necessary for farmers because farmers grow different type of crops for all of us.

If your soil is healthy, the crop is healthy, you can eat healthy, and you feel healthy.

If you throw any harmful chemical in your soil, it's kill your soil nutrients and soil microbes.

But, if you do organic farming, you can use organic compost.

[Diya speaks Hindi] [M.P.

speaks Hindi] [M.P.

continues speaking Hindi] - Now, if we start working with nature, we start rethinking it, and we bring in other plants that give us ecosystem services.

So, for instance, we can bring in plants to actually help our crop by giving it nitrogen for free, so you don't pollute the world with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.

We can bring in plants that are host plants that have little flowers that attract the beneficial insects that will give us our pest control for free.

- You do mix cropping, maybe you grow a different type of crop in your field.

That means different type crops gives different type nutrients of our soil.

If you do biodiversity based organic farming, you no need any other chemical compost, and it's very useful for your soil.

[Thakur speaks Hindi] [Diya speaks Hindi] I spoke to some local area farmers about their farming methods.

[Thakur speaks Hindi] [Thakur continues speaking Hindi] [Diya speaks Hindi] [Thakur speaks Hindi] [Thakur continues speaking Hindi] [Thakur continues speaking Hindi] [pleasant music] [farmer speaks Hindi] [cow moos] [Diya speaks Hindi] [Prakasha speaks Hindi] [Diya speaks Hindi] [Prakasha and Anjali speaking Hindi] [Anjali speaks Hindi] - Chemicals are very intolerant of diversity.

When you measure the true biological productivity, the more biology you have, the more productivity you have.

And more when you take biodiversity, and measure the nutrition in it, the food that we eat, it produces far more nutrition per acre.

The new varieties might look like they yielded more, but yielded more of weight, not more of nourishment.

So industrial agriculture's monocultures, chemical inputs, it produces commodities.

And agriculture that is ecological, biodiverse, is working with the laws of nature, it works on recycling, it works on diversity, and most importantly, it nourishes the soil, which nourishes us.

[gentle music] [cow moos] - [Diya] Our grandparents and ancestors worked with nature, and not against it as modern industrial methods do.

I decided to visit the village where my grandparents, and other relatives live.

They live in villages close to each other in the foothills of the Himalayas.

My family on both my mother's and father's side have been practicing organic farming for generations.

[family speaks Hindi] - [Diya] We arrived in our village of Faldakot.

I spoke to my grandmother.

[pleasant music] [family speaks Hindi] [Sohan speaks Hindi] [Saraswati speaks Hindi] [Sohan speaks Hindi] [Saraswati speaks Hindi] [gentle music] [family speaks Hindi] [Saraswati speaks Hindi] [family laughing] - Then I interviewed my mother, and her two sisters.

What is your name, and what do you grow, and how long have you been farming?

[Kanta speaks Hindi] [Diya speaks Hindi] [Prabha speaks Hindi] [Diya speaks Hindi] [Prabha speaks Hindi] [Meenakshi speaks Hindi] [pleasant music] [family speaks Hindi] - [Diya] Next, we walked to my mother's family village of Nali Badoli to talk to my grandparents there.

[lively music] [lively music continues] [lively music continues] [Diya speaks Hindi] [Jagdish speaks foreign Hindi] [Jagdish continues speaking Hindi] [Maya speaks Hindi] [Diya speaks Hindi] [Maya speaks Hindi] [Diya speaks Hindi] [Maya speaks Hindi] [somber music] - [Diya] Climate change is a long term shift in Earth's average weather patterns, which is mostly caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and ecologically damaging land use practices.

[water rushing] Healthy biodiversity is not only related to a healthy environment, but it's also related to weather patterns and climate change.

[Diya speaks Hindi] [Thakur speaks Hindi] [Thakur continues speaking foreign language] [Prabha speaks Hindi] [Anjali speaks Hindi] - What we call industrial agriculture, it's bare ground with with a monoculture.

That is what we call an ecological desert.

When we clear these ecosystems, all the carbon in those trees get burnt.

The carbon in the soils get released, and the fertilizers they use create greenhouse gases.

And this is changing our climate, and causing all the other problems that we see with droughts, forest fires.

The more biodiversity we have, the more plants and animals we can put back in the system, the more greenhouse gases we can take out of the atmosphere to make sure that we have a livable planet.

[lively music] [people chattering] [horn honks] [lively music continues] [horn honks] - [Diya] It is all connected.

We are a part of nature.

If we take care of nature, nature will take care of us.

It's the cycle of life.

This way of thinking includes our spiritual traditions too.

[Diya speaks Hindi] [Prabha speaks Hindi] [Prabha continues speaking Hindi] [Sohan speaks Hindi] [Sohan continues speaking Hindi] [Sohan continues speaking Hindi] [Prabha speaks Hindi] [Sohan speaks Hindi] [chanting in Hindi] [bell jingling] [all singing in Hindi] [all continue singing in Hindi] - [Diya] It starts with seeds, it extends to the earth, to the elements, the air, the animals, the families, the elders, the ancestors, the communities and our culture.

[people singing in Hindi] Everything is connected through seeds of life.

I began to think about what young people could do to help.

We could learn how to grow food, and save seeds.

Speak up against industrial seeds, and junk foods.

We could compost our food waste.

We can avoid plastic and other pollution that puts toxins into the environment.

[soothing music] - The easiest way to regenerate our planet, stop the degeneration, is by the choices you make.

And I'd say the first one is, I call it voting with your wallet.

If you buy highly processed toxic foods from industrials systems, you give them money, those systems survive.

On the other hand, if you buy certified organic, you build that.

You change farming at its source.

[Sheela speaks Hindi] [Sheela continues speaking Hindi] - We are part of nature.

We are not separate from nature.

We wouldn't be alive if we didn't have trees that gave us oxygen to breathe.

We wouldn't be alive if we didn't have streams, and groundwater wells that gave us water to drink.

We wouldn't be alive if the soil and the seed didn't give us food.

So, nature supports us.

My message to everyone is now you have to become mothers of Mother Earth.

[birds chirping] - [Diya] Together, we can regenerate the Earth with our mind, heart, and hands.

[upbeat music] We can all do our part to live in peaceful relationship with nature.

To protect and preserve biodiversity on which we all depend.

[upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [pleasant music] [pleasant music continues] [pleasant music continues] - [Narrator] Major funding for this program is provided by.

Additional funding by.

For more information on "Films BYkids," visit thirteen.org/filmsbykids.

[gentle music] [upbeat music]