Literally Saving the Earth by Regenerating Grassland

Grassland is the largest ecosystem on land, so what happens to grassland is important. And today, 70% of grasslands on earth have either turned into deserts or are in the process of turning into deserts. Why? What is happening?

Some areas of the earth don't get enough rainfall to grow trees but get enough to grow grass, like the Great Plains of North America, the Serengeti in Africa, or the vast Mongolian Steppe. Before the domestication of grazing animals, these grasslands were swarming with enormous herds of wild grazing animals. The grass plants and the grazing animals evolved together over millions of years. Believe it or not, they need each other like bees and flowers.

When the wild grazing herds were replaced with domesticated grazing animals, some big areas began turning into deserts. So people made the logical conclusion that domesticated animals make grasslands turn into deserts. Environmentalists decided the obvious solution is to stop domesticated animals from grazing some of these regions of land so the land could recover, but when they do it, the land doesn't recover. It continues to turn into desert.

It turns out, a desertified grassland actually needs grazing animals to thrive again.

The problem isn't the kind of animals grazing on the grass, it's the way the animals are grazing. Wild herds and domesticated herds behave differently. Do you know why?

You can answer the question yourself. What do wild grazing animals always have nearby? Predators! And the predators scare the grazers and make them crowd together in a bunch. So a herd intensively grazes one concentrated area. But of course it starts filling up with poop and piss, so the bunch moves on, and doesn't come back until the stink is gone and the grass has recovered. When a patch of land goes through this repeatedly, the grass grows in abundance. It is getting regularly fertilized and mowed. You know what the fertilizer does, but the mowing is important too.

Without mowing, grass grows tall, goes to seed, and then dies out. That is a grass plant's life cycle. And in the spring, new grass has to grow in the shade of all the dead grass from last season. The old dead grass smothers the new grass, blocking out its sunlight, so not as much grass grows the next year. The bare patches of land harden into a crust, and when rain falls on it, the water doesn't soak in as well. It runs off, taking topsoil with it, and evaporates quickly. So there's less water and nutrients in the soil, causing even less grass to grow the next season. The grassland has begun to turn to desert.

The biologist, Allan Savory, and other pioneers have found a way to mimic the effect of natural grazing animals (with their predators) – but without the predators, using domesticated animals. All a rancher has to do is bunch the animals together, either by herding them carefully or by dividing a larger field into smaller sections with fencing, and then move them frequently, and make sure they don't come back to the same plot of ground until the grass has recovered.

You can see some good before and after pictures in Allan Savory's TED talk called How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change. His talk is about how to manage grazing animals effectively. His method is called Holistic Planned Grazing.

When ranchers begin to use Holistic Planned Grazing, they have to increase the number of animals every year for a while to keep up with the increase in the amount of grass that grows. It makes the land so much more productive that it produces more food for humans, but it produces more food for the wild animals too. It turns more of the falling sunlight into grass.

In other words, Holistic Planned Grazing means more of the sunlight is converted into plant material, more of the rain goes into the soil, into the plants, and into the aquifers. Less runs off and evaporates. Floods become less of a problem when they happen, and they happen less often. And the land suffers less from drought, because the more soil life, the more water it can hold. And because more of the water gets absorbed into the ground, the plants are more resilient and more able to survive drought conditions for longer. Thriving grass also cools the atmosphere and prevents soil erosion.

One of the more interesting and important effects of desertification of the largest ecosystem on earth is that when land turns to desert, it releases an enormous amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. And when this process reverses, it pulls that CO2 out of the atmosphere and puts it into the ground. That's because the life in the soil is made of carbon.

Soil life is made up of organisms ranging in size from one-celled bacteria, fungi, algae, and protozoa, to more complex arthropods and nematodes, to earthworms, insects, small vertebrates, and of course, plants. One teaspoon of healthy soil contains millions of beneficial soil microorganisms that include thousands of species of bacteria and fungi. All of this is made of carbon. The carbon comes from the CO2 in the air, brought into the soil by plants.

Experts have estimated that using Holistic Planned Grazing on only half of our barren or semi-barren grasslands would remove so much carbon from the air that our atmosphere would be like it was before the industrial age began.

Not only does Holistic Planned Grazing reverse desertification, it produces food without the need for chemical fertilizers or pesticides or fungicides, so it prevents the contamination of groundwater and surface-water.

Over 40 million acres of land are now being managed using Holistic Planned Grazing, and the results are really quite impressive. Look at the before and after pictures in the links at the end of this article. I think you will be surprised at the results. This method is ending poverty for people who rely on these desertifying lands for their sustenance because it makes the land so much more productive.

This can help solve other problems too. There is no reason to burn the Amazon rain forest to create grasslands for cattle. There are already-existing grasslands all over the world in desperate need of grazing animals right now.

By now it should be clear that the title of this article is not an exaggeration. Holistic Planned Grazing could literally save the earth in more ways than one. But what can you do about it? You can help get it adopted on a larger scale. The more ranchers who use it, the better. Here's where to start: Sign up for updates at the Savory Institute and Holistic Management International. Like them on Facebook (Savory Institute here, HMI here) and share their posts. You'll find plenty of opportunities to get involved. At the very least you can help make this information more widely known, and that will make a difference. You can do the same for our web site updates (near the top of the sidebar) and our Regenerating Grassland Facebook page (here).

And of course one simple and physical thing you can begin immediately is to buy beef and lamb that has been managed using Holistic Planned Grazing. Support that industry. There are a few ways to find out if your meat has been grazed regeneratively: A New Choice For Consumers: Regenerative Organic. Also check out Applegate Farms. They sell sausages made from meat raised regeneratively. You can also ask your butcher. Sometimes they know. My local butcher, for example, sells a whole line of meat from a ranch in Montana that employs Holistic Planned Grazing.

The Savory Institute also has a certification program (certifying that the land that produced the meat was managed Holistically), and more and more companies are getting certified all the time. You can track it here: Land to Market.

Simply buying the food and convincing others to buy it will make a difference. The same has already been done with organically grown grains, fruits and vegetables. There are a lot more farmers growing organic food because people voluntarily choose to buy it, even though it's often more expensive. This greater market creates more incentive for farmers to grow organically. The market for organically grown foods has been steadily growing for decades. And the greater the supply, the lower the cost, generally speaking, and as the cost to the consumer drops, more people will be willing to buy it. We can do the same thing with Holistically produced meat.

The bottom line is: The desertification of grasslands can be reversed and you can help get it done. It can happen fairly quickly. Land starts to noticeably recover within two years.

Listen to a podcast about this: Literally Saving the Earth by Regenerating Grassland. 

Now look at some good before and after images of what Holistic Planned Grazing can do:

Getting Results on the Land with Holistic Management

Comparison Photos of Holistically Managed Land Versus Conventionally Managed Land

The Power Of Holistic Management, In Pictures

The International Battle For Cattle

In the minds of many, cattle are a problem. They generate methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. People are chopping down Amazon rainforest to make pasture for cattle. Feedlots are cruel, polluting, ugly and stinky. Vast areas have turned to desert because of overgrazing by cattle. As the human population grows, and as people around the world rise out of poverty in ever greater numbers, the demand for meat has increased dramatically, making the problem even worse.

If this is all you knew about cattle, it would be enough to want to end the practice of raising cattle for meat. But, as is often the case, there's another side to this story. 

Have you heard Allan Savory's TED talk entitled, How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change? It gives you an entirely different way to think about cattle. The main idea is that you can raise cattle on a piece of land in such a way that the ecosystem is restored, there is more food for wildlife, the aquifers get filled with water, running water on the land comes back, and carbon is removed from the atmosphere and sequestered underground. The desert becomes a lush grassland, full of life. And, oh yeah, whoever does this makes money, so it doesn't need any government spending.

And Savory is not talking theory here. He has trained people to do this and they have gone out and done it to their land (on 40 million acres so far), and it works. In his TED talk, he shows some before and after pictures — what the land looked like before they started using Savory's method, and what it looks like now — and it's really amazing. You can see more before and after pictures here and here.

I've written a full explanation of how it works here, but I can give you the basic idea in a paragraph. There are some places where there isn't enough rainfall for forests to grow, but there's enough for grasses. These places exist all over the world, and they are huge areas. Most of them have been turning to desert, largely because of the absence of grazing animals. What do you always have on a thriving grassland? Large herds of grazing animals. Take them away, and the grassland turns to desert. Graze them the wrong way, and the grassland turns to desert. Graze them the right way, however, and that desert can turn back into a rich grassland.

So instead of growing corn and soy to feed to cattle in feedlots, instead of burning down Amazon rainforest to create pasture, we can utilize the millions of acres turning to desert that are, right now, in desperate need of grazing animals. Rather than being a problem, cows could be an ally in saving the planet.

Adam Khan is the author of Self-Reliance, Translated, and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb. You can email him here.

More Water in the Aquifers (Without More Rain)

What happens to the water when it rains? If the land doesn't have a lot of plants growing on it, the water either runs off or evaporates. Not much soaks in, so not much makes it to the underground aquifers.

But if there is rich vegetation, that rain will soak in. The life in the soil will hold a lot of the water near the surface where the plant life can utilize it. And a lot of it will soak down and refill the aquifers.

Allan Savory has developed a way for vast stretches of land to be converted from barren desert to lush grasslands, creating an enormous increase in water going into aquifers, and it doesn't require government spending. In fact, the ranchers who do it will profit. And it will produce food.

It's called Holistic Planned Grazing. Here's how it works: Holistic Planned Grazing Has a Huge Impact on Water.

Grazing Animals Can End The Drought

Whether the drought in the Southwestern United States is caused by climate change or desertification (or both), grazing animals can end the drought, if those animals are managed the way Allan Savory suggests in his famous TED talk.

The Southwestern United States is almost entirely grassland, and it is turning into desert. Even when it rains, the land no longer holds the water and little of that water is making its way to the aquifers. Its desertification could be reversed with Holistic Planned Grazing. If you would like to see what can be done with such dry land, check out the before and after photos at Planet Tech and prepare to be amazed.

But, you might reasonably ask, how is this possible? Here is a clear explanation of how Holistic Planned Grazing can restore lush grassland and water to dry and barren land: Literally Saving the Earth by Regenerating Grassland.

Read more about how this works and what you can do to help: How to Stop Grasslands From Turning Into Deserts.

Listen to a podcast about this: Literally Saving the Earth by Regenerating Grassland.

Adam Khan is the co-author with Klassy Evans of Fill Your Tank With Freedom and the author of Slotralogy and Self-Reliance, Translated. Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb. You can email him here.

Want More Rain and Cooler Temperatures?

Most grasslands on earth are turning into desert because the rainfall runs off or evaporates before it can nurture any plants. What could we do that would help the rainwater soak in and stick around long enough to do some good? 

Think about it for a second and you can answer that yourself. What do all thriving grasslands have in common? Large herds of grazing animals. The grass plant and the grazing animals have evolved together. Their needs intertwine so tightly that the absence of one causes the absence of the other.

So grazing animals, if they are grazed the right way, can restore bare land to thriving grassland, which prevents the rain from running off or evaporating, allowing it to soak in and refill the aquifers and rehydrate the plants.

Also, plants release water when they get hot, similar to sweating, which lowers the area's temperature. In the long run also, more plants equals more sequestered carbon dioxide, which lowers the earth's overall temperature.

Read more about how this works and what you can do to help: How to Stop Grasslands From Turning Into Deserts.

Listen to a podcast about this: Literally Saving the Earth by Regenerating Grassland.

Adam Khan is the co-author with Klassy Evans of Fill Your Tank With Freedom and the author of Slotralogy and Self-Reliance, Translated. Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb. You can email him here.

How to Stop Grasslands From Turning Into Deserts

Some of the land on earth is humid and moist year round. On this kind of land, you could burn ten thousand acres to the ground, wait until grass grows on it and then overgraze it until the land is spent and dead, and if you then simply left it alone, the jungle would grow right back. On this kind of land, you can't create bare ground for any length of time without constant weeding. Whole cities in the jungles of Mexico, complete with giant stone pyramid structures, have been swallowed up so completely by the jungle that new cities are still being discovered.

Another significant portion of the land on earth is dry for part of the year. Much of that is grassland, which is the largest ecosystem on land. On grassland, if you burn it and/or overgraze it, many environmentalists and ecologists once believed (and many still do) that you could also just leave it alone and it would grow back. But for more than 60 years, that method has been tried in many places all over the world, and what happens? The land slowly turns into desert. It does not recover. The question is why?

This is a very important question. About 70 percent of grasslands have either turned into deserts or are in the process of turning into deserts. In satellite photos of the earth, the green areas are moist year round. The tan areas are turning to desert, and this process has been a large source of climate change itself because all that life that died sent its CO2 into the atmosphere. So this is a problem that must be solved, and soon.

A basic evolutionary fact has been staring scientists in the face all along. These tan-colored places are (or were) mostly grasslands. And what do you always find on thriving grasslands? Large, hoofed animals grazing on the grass — buffalo, zebra, gazelles, wildebeest, etc. The grass and the animals evolved together, much like bees and flowering plants. They evolved to rely on each other. They developed characteristics that are adapted to each other.

So if you take away the grass, the hoofed animals die off. And if you take away the hoofed animals, the grassland turns into a desert.

The reason this was not apparent is that once the naturally-occurring hoofed animals were gone from a particular area, they were immediately replaced by domesticated hoofed animals, and these were clearly overgrazing and killing the land. So the obvious solution was to ban domesticated animals from damaged or endangered land areas so the land could recover. So huge plots of land have been made off limits to grazing animals for long stretches of time. But as I said, the land does not recover. It begins to die. And the bare ground spreads until it looks like the barren plains of Iraq.

Domesticated animals made the land turn into desert. But leaving the land alone also made it turn into desert. The biologist Allan Savory has found an answer to this puzzle. The answer is counter-intuitive. It didn't really matter which animals were grazing. The key was HOW the animals were grazing. If the hoofed animals graze in a particular way, the grass grows and the deserts turn back into rich grassland. If they graze in any other way, or don't graze at all, the land turns into a desert.

Savory's answer is this: For a grassland to be healthy it requires herds of hoofed animals to graze on it. But they must graze in a natural way, which means: 1) all bunched up as grazing animals do (for safety in numbers — safety from predators), 2) never staying in the same spot for very long, and 3) not coming back to that spot for a while (which allows the grass to grow back). If you graze the animals that way, it doesn't matter which hoofed animals are doing the grazing — wild or domestic, or both — the grass begins to thrive.

Thriving grass has many impressive and meaningful consequences. First of all, grass captures moisture. On bare earth, rain runs off (washing away topsoil) and evaporates. When the ground is covered with grass, the plant roots and other living organisms in the soil soak up the water and hold it. The grass does the same with CO2, removing it from the air and sequestering it in the earth. Grass also cools the atmosphere and prevents soil erosion. It prevents contamination of groundwater and surface water (because it needs no artificial fertilizer or pesticides). It turns the falling sunlight into abundant food. And grasses are the foundation of entire ecosystems, so diverse plants and wild animals also get what they need to thrive. Thriving grassland increases biodiversity.

Experts have estimated that using grazing animals in this way on only half of our barren or semi-barren grasslands would remove so much carbon from the air that our atmosphere would be like it was before the industrial age began.

In a natural setting, two forces working together cause hoofed animals to graze the right way: predators and disgust. The presence of predators causes scattered grazing animals to bunch together in a big herd. They eat the grass and, of course, urinate and defecate. After a couple of days of this, they are compelled by their noses to move to greener pastures. So the ground gets thoroughly and regularly "tilled" and "fertilized" and then left alone for a while. And grasses flourish. When the grass has grown tall, it lures the animals back into the area to do it all again. If the animals don't come back, the tall grass rots and smothers any new grass trying to sprout. That's when bare ground begins to form.

Huge parcels of the earth have been turning to desert because we haven't understood how this works. All over the world — from Australia's outback to the Northern Rockies to Zimbabwe — Allan Savory and his teams have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that when these principles are applied, the deserts disappear. The land turns green. Wildlife returns. Plant diversity proliferates. Birds start singing. It's a beautiful thing. Watch this TED talk to see some photographs of the kind of transformation these principles bring into being. Well over forty million acres of land are now being grazed this way (called Holistic Planned Grazing).

Think about the consequences. More food can be generated with less water. Instead of draining the Colorado river to grow lettuce in the Arizona desert, for example, livestock could be raised instead. The grass would capture the little bit of rain that falls, and hold it and grow into food for livestock.

Using grazing animals correctly, the grasses grow deeper roots over time, sequestering more carbon and holding more water, preventing runoff, preventing the loss of topsoil from wind and rain, and protecting the plants and animals from dying off during droughts.

But, you might be thinking, don't all those hoofed animals create methane? And isn't methane a powerful greenhouse gas? Yes to both. However, the alternatives are either bare ground that produces no oxygen or food but produces excess heat...or the grass goes uneaten, so it rots, producing methane. The bacteria can either break down the grass inside a grazing animal or outside it. Either way, you get methane.

But for the reduction of greenhouse gasses, shouldn't we focus on getting alternatives to petroleum fuels? Yes, but not exclusively. The desertification of the land also produces copious amounts of atmospheric CO2. So even if we got rid of all fossil fuels, these lands would continue to turn into deserts until grazing herds return. We should, however, also find alternatives to petroleum. Click here for one possible way to accomplish it quickly.

In some places, people working with Allan Savory are using domesticated animals mixed in with the wild animals to make the herds bigger (bigger herds work better for grass than smaller herds), and both the domestic and the wild animal herds grow healthy and multiply because the process makes each acre produce more grass. Considerably more. Another good reason to manage the wild animals along with the domesticated ones is because in many places humans have wiped out the predators, and without the predators, grazers stop bunching together and the grass starts dying.

So there it is. Would you like to prevent a big portion of the world from turning into deserts? Would you like to end poverty for millions of people (who are currently relying on this desertifying land for their sustenance)? Would you like to help feed a hungry world? Would you like a cooler, more hospitable world? Would you like to solve our growing water shortage problem? Would you like to stop the burning of tropical rainforests to create grasslands for cattle? Would you like to stop the erosion of topsoil? Would you like to reverse the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? There is something you can do to help.

Here's where to start: Sign up for updates at the Savory Institute and Holistic Management International. Like them on Facebook (Savory Institute here, HMI here) and share their posts. You'll find plenty of opportunities to get involved. At the very least you can help make this information more widely known, and that will make a difference. You can do the same for our Facebook page (here).

One simple and practical thing you can begin immediately is to buy only beef and lamb that has been grazed using Holistic Management. Support that industry. Put your money where your mouth is. Find out how to know if your meat has been grazed regeneratively: A New Choice For Consumers: Regenerative Organic. Also: Applegate Farms Announces It's Joining The Regenerative Agriculture Movement.

The Savory Institute has a certification program now (certifying that the meat was grazed Holistically), and more and more companies are getting certified all the time. You can track that here: Land to Market.

This is all extraordinarily good news. Desertification of the earth can be reversed, and it can happen very quickly. The land starts to noticeably recover in the first year. To achieve it, we need more animals, not less. Sometimes for the process to work, Savory has discovered he needs to increase the herd size by 400% or more. Grasslands need herds. Humans can make it happen. People are already doing it. The end result is a healthier planet, healthier animals, more food, and healthier humans.

Listen to a podcast about this: Literally Saving the Earth by Regenerating Grassland.

Adam Khan is the co-author with Klassy Evans of Fill Your Tank With Freedom and the author of Slotralogy and Self-Reliance, Translated. Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb. You can email him here.

Earthworms Are Made of Carbon

Healthy soil is rich with living organisms — bacteria, fungus, insects, plants and worms. Each of these organisms are full of carbon. Where did they get their carbon? It was taken out of the air by plants and is now on or below the surface of the earth.

If you are concerned about carbon dioxide levels rising in the atmosphere, you should be determined to get more of that carbon dioxide out of the air and into the ground. The amount of carbon dioxide that can be sequestered per acre is considerable.

The healthier the soil, the more living organisms live in it.

And one of the best indicators of healthy, living soil is the presence of earthworms. So we can focus on this simple goal — more earthworms — and we will be moving in the direction of reversing climate change.

Regenerating Grasslands Can Save the Rainforests

Rainforests in the Amazon are being cleared to create pasture for cattle. In the meantime, vast areas of already-existing grasslands are turning to desert because of the lack of grazing animals.

For grassland to thrive, it requires lots of grazing animals. The grass plants and the grazing animals evolved together and need each other like bees and flowers.

If we need more cattle, the first place we should raise them is in these desertifying grasslands.

Learn more about how this works:

How to Stop Grasslands From Turning Into Deserts

Literally Saving the Earth by Regenerating Grassland

How Forests Make Seafood

PHYTOPLANKTON ARE TOO small to be seen with the naked eye, yet they are vital to all life on the planet. They are abundant in the world’s oceans and, through their process of photosynthesis, they are tasked with the job of turning sunlight into food for other sea-dwelling creatures. Experiments have proven that their numbers are greatly enhanced when iron is added to the ocean. The importance of iron led one path-breaking scientist to make a unique connection. The Erimo Peninsula on the north coast of Japan saw its forests clear-cut and its hills turned into pasture long ago. The change drove off the schools of fish that once teemed there, and caused a decline in oyster populations. Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a Japanese marine chemist, spent years studying the relationship between forests and oceans.

His key finding is that even where iron is abundant in parts of the ocean, it is oxygenated, which means it is not readily available for the tiny creatures. What can make iron available to phytoplankton to perform photosynthesis, however, is fulvic acid, one of several humic acids that comes from the decay of leaves and other organic matter. The ongoing, natural decomposition of centuries of tree leaves and other material on the forest floor, and the leaking, leaching, and washing of this chemical stew into the ocean, is vital to increasing coastal phytoplankton, and thus the things that eat them, and those that eat them, from oysters all the way to whales. The award-winning chemist spent much of his life working with fishermen in coastal communities to reforest the coast and the banks of rivers and streams to increase fish stocks, and he wrote about it, in Japanese, in one of his papers, “When Forests Disappear the Sea Dies.”

- Excerpted from the book, The Man Who Planted Trees: A Story of Lost Groves, the Science of Trees, and a Plan to Save the Planet by Jim Robbins.

What a Grassland Can Do

"As an illustration of the interdependence that characterizes any natural community, consider what is necessary to support certain levels of animal life on one single acre of grassland. One study indicated that such a community had nearly 6 million grass plants, the primary food producers. These plants supported 700,000 herbivores — most of them insects — which fed off the grass and absorbed its energy. At the next higher level of this food chain were more than 350,000 carnivores — spiders, ants, beetles, and other small creatures — feeding on the herbivores. And at the very top level were three larger carnivores — two moles and one bird — that fed on the lower forms of life and owed their existence to the 6 million grass plants at the base of the pyramid."

- Excerpted from the book, The Secret Life of the Forest by Richard M. Ketchum.

Grasslands cover 45 percent of land worldwide

Grasslands cover 45 percent of land worldwide, says Gretel Ehrlich in her Forward in the book, Cows Save the Planet.

Depleted Soil Means Food Isn't As Nutritious

Our food may look the same as it used to. It may even look better. But it doesn't have as many minerals in it as it used to. Why? Soil depletion. This is causing nutritional deficiencies. For example, the amount of calcium in a typical modern apple is only half of what it was eighty years ago. It also has less iron and phosphorus, and only about 20 percent of the magnesium.

What's the problem? The living things in soil — the worms, insects, bacteria and fungi — help make minerals accessible to the plants growing in that soil. If the soil isn't healthy because of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, etc., then the plants can't absorb as many minerals, so you don't get them in your diet.

Soil health is important for many reasons. When you buy organically grown food and holistically grazed grassfed meat, you are directly financially supporting the growth of healthy soil, and you will benefit personally because your food will be more nutritious.

Holistic Solutions Fight Desertification

Allan Savory used decades of research to create a holistic method to manage land to fight desertification — something which has been proven to work on every continent except the Arctic and Antarctic. In this very personal interview Savory explains the results and the way to manage in a holistic way, which he says is a crucial understanding to battle effects from a climate change.

This interview below was recorded during the Tipping Points seminar in Stockholm on November 13, 2013.



This is the presentation Allan Savory gave at the event:

How Bare Soil Causes Erosion

Plowing a field exposes the soil to erosion. Bare earth is rare in nature at elevations below timberline. Think about the grasslands and forests you may have walked in your life. How much bare soil do you see? Not much, if any. Outside of arid environments, plants typically blanket the ground surface, their leaves intercepting rainfall and their roots binding the soil. Now think about the brown color of the water running off a freshly plowed field or the exposed soil of a construction site during a sudden downpour. Leaving the soil bare for some part of the year makes it vulnerable to erosion, whether by wind or rain, resulting in a rate of soil loss tens to hundreds of times faster than nature makes it.

The above is quoted from the book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, a book that traces the fall of almost every civilization to its root cause: Soil erosion.

Soil Restoration Can Begin Anywhere

Soil has been depleted, exhausted and eroded throughout history, and has been the ultimate cause of the collapse of almost every civilization that has come before us, as documented in David Montgomery's fascinating book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. But one of the beautiful and hopeful things about this depressing history is that soil restoration can take place anywhere. It can be done one abandoned field at a time.

An example comes from Judith Schwartz's book, Cows Save the Planet And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth. The Loess Plateau in China, an area the size of Belgium on the Yellow River, was restored in only ten years. It was an almost barren desert swept frequently with dust storms, and considered by many to be the "most eroded place on earth."

Now the place is a "thriving agricultural region with the poverty rate lowered by half," writes Schwartz. The local farmers "built terraces, reforested sloping land (where a good deal of erosion tends to happen) and shifted to perennial crops that have deeper roots."

Somewhere along the way, the Chinese government figured out that it would cost them less money in the long run to restore the soil than it was already costing them to deal with the constant problems from all the area's topsoil eroding into the river. But of course, when they restored the soil, other problems were naturally solved too, like the poverty level of the inhabitants.

As Montgomery points out, the most fundamental resource of all terrestrial life is soil. Ignore it and we suffer. Take care of it and we all benefit.

Would you like to see large areas of the earth's soil restored? There is something you can do to help make it happen. Read more about it here: How to Stop Grasslands From Turning Into Deserts.

Brush is Good Forage Too

Most of the cows I’ve trained to eat weeds have become pretty open-minded about trying a little bit of everything in pasture. These particular cows were trained to eat distaff and Italian thistle, and they decided on their own to eat coyote bush, a species known to invade grasslands in the area. I videoed the cows grazing the bushes off at head-level, breaking large branches off with their heavy bodies in an effort to get at the best parts. It looked just like it would have had my herd of goats visited for the day. As my rancher, Peggy Rathmann said,“This is forage!”

Read the rest: Overcoming Our Brush Prejudice.

Use the Cattle to Build the Soil, Not the Other Way Around

Gary Zimmer, author of The Biological Farmer, says biological farming puts the fun back in farming and at Wilton Park in Australia that statement has been validated. One look at the smile on Henry Sheehan's face would convince anyone that he was having way too much fun. Henry is manager of Wilton Park, where FigTrees Organic Farms produces and markets award winning organic beef. Henry's enthusiasm for the eco-system he nurtures is a pleasure to witness. And be warned, it is contagious. The beauty of this shift in focus is that it increases biodiversity, increases the yield per acre, and increases profit, all while sequestering an ever-growing amount of carbon in the soil and making the land more resilient to drought.

Advantages of Grass-Fed Beef

One of the most direct things you can do to reverse desertification is to buy grass-fed beef. Luckily, this is also good for your health:

What is Our Least Valued But Most Essential Natural Resource?

"In some regions farming without regard to soil conservation rapidly leads to soil loss," writes David Montgomery in his book, Dirt. "Other regions have quite a supply of fresh dirt to plow through. Few places produce soil fast enough to sustain industrial agriculture over human time scales, let alone over geologic time. Considered globally, we are slowly running out of dirt.

"Should we be shocked that we are skinning our planet? Perhaps, but the evidence is everywhere. We see it in brown streams bleeding off construction sites and in sediment-choked rivers downstream from clear-cut forests. We see it where farmers' tractors detour around gullies, where mountain bikes jump deep ruts carved into dirt roads, and where new suburbs and strip malls pave fertile valleys. The problem is no secret. Soil is our most underappreciated, least valued, and yet essential natural resource."

Read more: Does Dirt Need Saving?

Is Grass Fed Beef Production Sustainable?

I read in an article on NPR that grass fed beef is not sustainable. I signed up so I could make a comment. Here's what I wrote:

To say that grass fed beef is not sustainable is an incomplete statement. Grazing cattle in the conventional way is not sustainable on most lands. But grazing cattle using Holistic Grazing Management is not only sustainable, it dramatically regenerates grassland, making the land so productive that wildlife has far more to eat as well.

Watch Allan Savory's TED talk, "How to Green the World's Deserts and Reverse Climate Change" to learn more about this. The bottom line is that grasslands have evolved with large herds of grazing animals. For the grasses to thrive, they require large herbivores, but those herbivores need to be grazed in a particular way.

Holistic Grazing Management is being used on every continent, and it is amazingly successful. You can see before and after pictures in Allan Savory's talk that will blow your mind. They've taken barren land and turned it into rich grasslands teeming with life. Forty million acres around the world are now using this method. It is not only sustainable, it makes the land more productive (more beef produced per acre) without any artificial inputs like fertilizers or pesticides, so it is profitable and organic too.

Because it restores soil, plants grow deeper roots, the soil absorbs more water, erosion stops, and the soil becomes filled with life — more grass, more animals eating the grass, more animals eating the animals that eat the grass, and more earthworms and fungi and bacteria and protozoa and nematodes and arthropods and insects down in the soil. All of that life is made of carbon. Where does the carbon come from? From the air.

Regenerating grasslands can sequester an immense amount of carbon. It can do more to reverse climate change than any other thing on earth. It can remove more carbon from the air than even the complete elimination of all fossil fuels. Holistic Management can literally save the planet.

Here's the NPR article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/03/21/291495523/how-your-love-of-burgers-may-be-helping-to-drive-wildlife-extinct