Holistic Methods Can Help Save World’s Deteriorating Land, Ex-Farmer Believes

Allan Savory believes that modern range management concepts are not saving the land, but destroying it.

Savory says conventional agricultural and management ideas ignore the way the soil--and plants and animals on it--work together. And he says that, because modern range management fails to understand that relationship, it is helping wash away valuable topsoil, choke rivers and dams with silt and turn agricultural land into desert.

Savory, a former rancher and wildlife manager in his native Zimbabwe, says resources can’t be managed without considering people, animals and dollars and how they work on the land--a technique he calls holistic resource management.

He contends that such practices as resting the land, reducing the number of grazing animals and using lots of pesticides and fertilizers speed up soil depletion.

Massive Starvation

Land is deteriorating worldwide, a phenomenon brought to public attention by massive starvation in Africa, he says.

Seventy-five percent of the world’s land is brittle, and conventional modern farming and ranching methods misunderstand that environment, Savory says.

For example, conventional wisdom holds that damaged land will come back if it is left unused for a time. But Savory says resting brittle land only makes it worse.

In brittle environments, plants decay from the top down through oxidation. But the decay blocks the sun from the bottom of the plant, preventing new growth. Animal action is needed to tromp dead grasses and other plants out of the way.

Brittle land needs large numbers of animals breaking up crust that forms on soil after a rain; it needs plants to prevent runoff, Savory says.

Even predators have their uses.

“Cattle won’t step on a decaying plant; deer won’t either,” Savory says. “But you bring in wolves, you get the animals excited, milling around, and this happens.”

Cause of Overgrazing

He also says conventional thought misunderstands overgrazing. He says overgrazing is not caused by the number of animals on a piece of land, but by how long animals are allowed to graze an area.

Savory’s holistic concept, taught by his Center for Holistic Resource Management in Albuquerque, calls for rotating animals from tract to tract and grazing more animals, not fewer.

Bert Madera, a third-generation rancher on the 47,000-acre Pitchfork Cattle Co. ranch west of Jal, N.M., has been using the range management technique for five years.

“We’re running 20 cows per section on country that generally runs five cows,” Madera says.

He grazes cattle for about two days on a piece of land before moving them to another tract.

The entire ranch has been switched to holistic management.

“None of it is under continuous grazing, like traditional ranching, anymore,” Madera says. “After you’ve studied under Allan, you just can’t do it that way anymore.

‘Start Changing Things’

“You realize the things that were happening, the degeneration of the land and the desertification of the land. You see that happening and you just start changing things.”

Holistic resource management also has been used since 1983 on the Sonnleiten Ranch near Windhoek, Namibia, and on the Barlite Ranch near Marfa, Tex.

Both ranches made the change in years of below-normal rainfall or drought, yet both increased the numbers of livestock and the amount of available forage, Savory says.

The center also has joined the state of Montana on a project to eradicate knapweed, which is poisonous to cattle. Working with one ranch family, the center is trying to bring back the land so other plants will thrive and compete with knapweed, Savory says.

He says the same concept could be used for infestations of pests, such as grasshoppers, that now are fought by spraying.

Ideas Behind Approach

Holistic management was developed from centuries of agricultural practice and discoveries. Savory’s concept rests on the ideas that different types of environments have different decay processes that respond differently to rest and disturbance, that some environments respond adversely to rest and that overgrazing is related to the amount of time animals spend on the land, not to the number of animals. It also rests on holism, relating the parts to the whole.

Savory describes his technique as a “thought model,” a way of looking at a problem and setting goals that consider what is to be produced and how it will affect the quality of life for the people involved.

Once a goal is set, the ecosystem is studied to determine how it must operate to achieve the goal.

Savory began working on the problem of severe land deterioration in 1956 in Zimbabwe.

“Many conventional bits of wisdom were not making sense,” he says. “We had obliterated these large herds (of native wildlife) in South Africa and replaced them with a few domesticated animals.”

‘Not Making Sense’

Conventional thinking held that less intense grazing should have helped the land, but instead, “the land dried up, the springs dried up, and the weather had not changed,” Savory says. “It was not making sense.”

Savory says land depletion harms not only farms, but also industries and cities, because the health of a nation’s land affects the health of its water.

Poor land leads to high runoff, loss of topsoil, silting of dams and rivers and depletion of aquifers.

“Poor land means poor people, social upheaval and political unrest,” he says. “We’ve all seen where that leads.”

Savory, who moved to the United States in 1978, says he chose to work on resource management in this country because the rest of the world uses U.S. ideas and technology.

The United States attracts thousands of foreign students every year because it is considered the technological leader of the world. But Savory contends that the United States is teaching and exporting agricultural myths.