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.
