Allan Savory - The Importance of Managing Holistically - Live at Groundswell 2019 (v2)

yesterday I spoke about how essential it is to address the cause of global desertification and climate change to offer any hope for future generations and in that I mentioned how the cause is the way we are all making decisions today you know agriculture and businesses mainly agriculture and how it does not pay us to keep arguing different practices while under the same management bearing in mind that everything we're calling regenerative today was practiced by civilizations centuries ago and they failed of all regions of the world so that's not what we want right so I did mention that we would have no option but to include livestock as a tool not livestock run to produce milk or hide or meat or whatever as we've done for thousands of years but primarily as a tool to address climate change which will also produce meat milk ID etcetera and I said that today I would cover why that is so essential that we do use livestock and run them properly whatever properly means so when we look at the global situation can you all see that well when we look at the global situation we can see how vast the problem is in the brown areas which are the areas of the world that do turn to desert now where you are right now in the UK is of course out of that brown area you're in what we call a non brittle environment the rainfall of London and the rainfall of Johannesburg are about the same but that totally different climates and today at breakfast talking to John I see your rainfall here is about the same as we have in Zimbabwe but ours comes in four months and then we have eight months of dry so you're in one of these humid environments and no matter how badly you manage it does not turn to desert because you cannot create bare ground and maintain it with chemicals fire bad grazing anything you do nature keeps covering it that's not like that over most of the world right so you here will not suffer the consequences that we do in most of the world from the same practices so listen to what I am saying and what we've learnt in the harder parts of the world to manage because that will also be useful to you here to get higher productivity better results all right but it also will help you to change the policies of other countries because if you preach something here as the answer to desertification and that practice your preaching would cause desertification you're not doing yourself a favor so I will talk about other parts of the world but they every word I say is applicable to you in one way or another so when we look at the parts of the world where desertification is occurring we don't find our abandoned cities like this under jungle we find them under deserts as so that's telling you right away that if you rest land here it will restore itself it will restore biodiversity if you rest land in most of the world it will turn to desert the biggest single cause of desertification is over resting land the exact opposite of what almost every human believes now it begins with the effectiveness of rainfall this is a term I had to come up with in 1960 when we had an extremely bad drought in Botswana South Africa and Rhodesia and at the same time we were collecting money for the flood victims in Mozambique same damn River same rains it didn't make sense what I'd been taught at university made no sense so we started to study that and we found non effective rainfall which is what we have over most of the world today is rain that flows when it falls flows across the soil or to evaporates from bare soil so it's non effective it gives us floods and droughts we're effective rainfall penetrates the soil and then it only leaves the soil one of two ways it leaves through green plants or it leaves flowing through the soil to rivers that's effective rainfall that we used to have now when the rainfall is non effective we get desertification and now most of your foreign aid diffa date everything is dealing with symptoms of this increasing droughts and floods poverty social breakdown violence destruction of cultures languages immigration to Europe and you it's changing the political face of Europe now the immigrants you're getting recruitment to dissident organization terrorist organizations etc one of the fundamentals of guerilla warfare is cut the source of recruitment you are causing the recruitment from the education and the policies flowing out from the UK Australia America etc climate change is a symptom and so we go on alright so when we look at that why does it occur and it occurs really because of one word oxidation in the this part of the world when grass trees anything die we called it naan brittle because you can take the dead vegetation dead grass end of the urn you can just crumple it up in your hand it's soft like tissue paper come to part of the world where I live take any dead twig dead grass the end of the earth crumpled up in your hand and it crackles and it is brittle it snaps and crackles so that's why we call in brutal environments now over most of the world when the grass which provides the bulk of the ground cover to keep the soil covered to keep the rainfall effective when that grass dies it cannot remove its own leaf like trees do trees cut off their own leaves whoops grass cannot do that so when it is standing in the bulk of the world in sunlight it now turns to chemical breakdown gradual slow chemical breakdown that can take 50 years to finish off one grass plant the grasslands can't stand that it kills grasslands and they turn to bare ground desert scrubs it etc all right so if we're going to deal with that globally happening over billions of hectares of land every single year over vast regions of the world we can only do so by using a tool as I mentioned yesterday you cannot even drink water unless you go to the nearest river and use your hands you cannot drink water without a mug a cup some too so we can have all the creativity money and labor in the world to deal with climate change and we cannot even drink water without a tool we have we are a tool using animals so we have to use some tool now what tools do we have I got criticized by some academics because in a TED talk in 2013 I said we have no option the only thing now that can save civilization globally as we know it is livestock properly managed and I was criticized because what sort of scientist is stupid enough to say we only have one option we always have hundreds of options doing has anybody ever thought about that so what options do we have as tool users we can use the tool of technology we have that for nearly two million years like other tool using animals we had sticks and stones as our first technology we could chip the stones we could sharpen the sticks we could not change our environment any more than an otter or a crow or a vulture or a baboon any other tool using animal then unlike other tool using animals we got a second tool we got the two love fire somewhere about a million million or half years ago now we could melt the stones and going to the copper the bronze the Iron Age and our technology could develop till I could use this computer we can put a man on the moon every single thing in this room was made possible by fire without fire none of the clothing you have or anything could have been produced so for 99.9% of human existence we've had two tools that's all that's in our toolbox technology or fire about 10,000 years ago farmers we suspect developed the idea the idea of resting the environment as a positive action conservation probably developed with pastoralists moving their livestock to let grass grow or with arable crop farmers rotating their crops to let soil recover the idea so now we have three tools trained and any university in every profession in the world and you will only be trained to use technology far or conservation resting the land there is no other two the only other thing we do is we use technology like we do to drink water we use technology to plant trees believing that that can solve the problem or shrubs or gross but that's another use of technology all right so go through these tools and what hope has any technology of dealing with oxidation of grass plots over two-thirds of the world even in science fiction we can forget that one no technology can solve the problem I think I can say that with complete confidence what about fire we burn and burn and burn it's supported by environmental organizations and everybody I've been criticized for my ignorance and not knowing that you have to burn grasslands to keep them alive we burn over 42 times the size of the UK if grasslands every year in Africa to try to keep them alive with enormous effects on the climate so we can forget fire it is just rapid oxidation and it exposes soil and makes the rainfall less effective now what about resting the land that our last tool what about that the whole world believes in it well yeah is totally rested land in the National Park in the United States turning to desert as badly or worse than anything I've dealt with in Africa in that they have signs appealing to the public not to even step off the path because of the damage you will do if you trample on that soil the Aldo Leopold forests wonderful man wonderful work he did here as a forest in New Mexico to celebrate him supported by wonderful organizations and what do we find if we look at the Aldo Leopold forest that's what we find bare ground oxidizing grass turning to desert right along the side Rio Grande River thousands of people visit it and say it's wonderful it's elderly a pearl tourist is not wonderful what about planting trees the Israelis are doing it at over 10,000 euros per hectare it was done by the Nabataeans thousands of years ago the whole civilization was based on harvesting water swales planting trees with harvested water they failed what about the United Arab Emirates they're trying very hard they've spent over thirty billion dollars on one percent of the land desalinating water planting trees the desert is just marching through none of these deal with the cause none of these deal with oxidation what about the Chinese they're spending millions and millions of dollars planting goodness knows how many trees and now up to a quarter of a million tons of sand or dumped on Beijing in some days the desert will win not the city so we've not come to the end of our tool bag we look at these and we find we've got to get rid of that grass by the end of the earth that's on our land in Africa it's had four months of rain we've got to get rid of it it'll oxidize if we don't we've got to get rid of it somehow biologically so it can keep growing the next season technology can't do it fire can't do it resting land can't doing planting trees can't do it are we doomed are you just gonna get more and more people from us in Africa swamp 'you this is serious stuff let's get constructive on why we have to use animals these environments that we're looking at here these seasonal environments are the environments in the world where the soil the plants the trees the grasses all develop together over vast periods of time they developed together not before the other and there were millions and millions and millions of animals and in that dry time of the year when oxidation takes over from biological decay the moisture was in the gut of the animal that's where the moisture was when the land the soil and everything dried out and these millions and millions of animals were accompanied and co-evolved with pack-hunting predators big packs they're gone today I was fortunate enough to be able to see up to 40 lands in a day just walking as a young man in Africa but those are gone today these big packs they were ferocious how did these animals protect themselves the females don't have horns they've got babies to protect how do they protect themselves from lions wolves trainers etc they did it by getting into a bunch just as you are today the pack hunter is afraid of the bunch that was the protection if you were animals and you were bunched just as you are now you would be dunking and urinating all over your own food no species including us likes to feed on their own feces it was the dung and the urine that made them keep moving not the predators predators made the bunch the dung in the urn made the move now if that situation was like that you've got to ask yourself now if there were so many millions of animals with these ferocious back hunting predators those millions of animals must have over grazed the world terribly it must have all been one desert because don't you universities your environmental organizations doesn't everybody teach you that over grazing is too many animals you know it thousands of peer-reviewed papers state that over grazing is too many animals so why wasn't the world over grazed what is society's belief we fed it to many animals that's all that over grazing is what is the science we're going to have to return to science not beliefs that have assumed scientific validity or proof by Authority thankfully Andre Vaz an a Frenchman discovered about seventy years ago that over grazing has got nothing to do with animal numbers it's got everything to do with how long the plants are exposed and when are they react sposed whether there's a million cows or one cow it doesn't change the fact the only changes the number of plants over grazed all right so the science is clear but the myth prevails UK farmers your policies differed UK aid the United Nations sustainable development goals they're all causing desertification and climate change because they're influencing the world and believing that you have too many animals all right so when we realize this the 1960s and I came to this realization in Africa at oh my god I've been so wrong because I had condemned livestock I had developed and coined the words game ranching to the full belief with British and American ecologists that if we could just get rid of your damn livestock we could heal the whole world with wildlife and that was one of my big mistakes it's a multi-billion dollar industry today and I was wrong all that land is deteriorating still and I realized we need livestock now how will we to do it how would you graze livestock we'd had over 10,000 years pastoralists bunching and herding and moving their animals extremely knowledgeable people more knowledgeable than any of us in this room their whole culture was livestock so they had been mob grazing bunching moving rotating whatever you like they're animals for ten thousand years and it led to the great man-made deserts of antiquity biblical times so we knew we couldn't do that however most of the world remember you can do almost anything in Britain you 1-cos desert but your policies will alright so that wouldn't work then we'd had about a hundred years of modern range science largely developed in America and South Africa Rhodesia and that as we first discovered in Africa accelerated desertification when we got fencing and grazing systems that accelerated the desert vacation it didn't solve it right so we're back then with how do you do it we knew that when we had this massive grass after the rain it had to be biologically cycled and livestock had to do it that's when putting all the clues together I realized we've got to do it with bunched animals in some way and just to show what it does when we Bunch cattle to mimic the nature of old we can get all that down as dung urine no rainfall gonna flow off that it's all gonna go in none is gonna evaporate out of the soil we're now reversing desertification and when you look at that exact same piece of ground when the rains came the following season you can see it beginning to grow and then there it is so we knew we had to do that but how now was then had given us a clue he had shown us why rotational grazing wasn't working even in Europe he had studied it in Britain Germany France and he'd seen that we lose by diversity so problems are developing with it he understood why he understood that no grazing system would ever work and no grazing system does they all cause desertification and so he had replaced rotational grazing with a very simple planning process where you planned from recovery periods back to grazing periods and on that basis using a map and so on simple planning you could resolve the problem in Europe so we took his work immediately and tried it in Africa and came unstuck we fell on our faces we were in a different environment at that point I realized Rosanna is right is not wrong we have to replace management systems with some form of planning process now how do we do it he's right but we've got to go to a more sophisticated process at that point rather than reinvent the wheel I looked at every profession that I could who had ever dealt with very complicated situations that could change rapidly as grazing can in seasonal rainfall environments and logically I looked at the military we were part of the British Army Rhodesian army was and literally all of us as army officers were trained how to do planning in immediate battlefield conditions I just took 300 400 whatever it was years of European experience expressed in all the military academies of Europe and I simply took our planning procedures and how had the military learnt over centuries to train men rapidly in times of war to train men how to come up with the most likely plan at any moment in time about a house stressed wounded hungry didn't demo matter come up with a plan quickly how had they learned to do that they had learned to do it by breaking it up into little components and dealing with one little component at a time building on one another coming up with the best possible plan easy don't reinvent the wheel so I said let's do that for farmers so that we can integrate livestock wildlife everything seasons droughts we can integrate it all like this problem was we fight battles for short periods farmers have to plan for months and in very dry areas for two years sometimes and battles weren't fought that way so how did we do that easy put it on a piece of paper on one piece of paper you can express four dimensions and a child can understand it and that worked immediately we did that on the first branches in Rhodesia and immediately began to reverse desertification and we have never ever had it fail yet over 50 years later we have had thousands of farmers failed to do it and say it doesn't work we have never had anybody do it and failed it has so many years of work behind it that simple process now before we went public with this a big london-based company turned to me for help they had the liebig's ranch in Rhodesia over a million and a quarter acres 60,000 cows and that was badly turning to desert they wanted my help and I said to them look everybody in the world says I'm wrong including laws and because I wanted to use a radial layout of fencing and they said what do you propose I said give me the worst land you can find let me have some of your cattle let me see what I can do with this process and if you like it we move on so we chose the worst land in the country four thousand acres I offered Glenn Richards who was then chairman the religion cattle grows I offered him a five-pound note if he could show me a single grass plant in a hundred mile drive that's far worse than anything you've got or will ever see in Britain right and on that four thousand acres of the worst land they had we went to three times the stocking rate immediately and we produced solid grassland no receding no machinery just the cattle three times as many cattle on one thirtieth of the land at any point in time with the process planned and it produced solid grassland that was called an advanced project we didn't call it a trial because we were trying to cause failure my reasoning was if I push this and push the envelope ridiculously hard if this is gonna fail let's make it fail right away we could not cause failure that situation we ran for eight years war our civil war was getting worse and worse finally we could only visit this with armored cars etc cause of the mines and so on the last night I resisted it I had to sleep under my plane with a machine gun all night while trying to work all day we were really getting into a chaotic situation and then I was out I was exiled because we were fighting a civil war during this time and it was four years till I could get back and when I got back this is what I found complete collapse so we could not cause failure for eight years and then the same managers in the next four years it completely collapsed what had happened we went over it I said what was the first thing you did and they said frankly we breathed a sigh of relief you'd buggered off because I had an airstrip next to that and I used to fly in and land there and insist that that planning be done it was one hours work to two hours work twice a year it was four hours work a year but I insisted that they did it when I had gone they said the first thing they did was drop the planning why did we need to plan it was flat ground they'd been doing it for eight years all they needed to do was graze every one to two days keep the cattle concentrated and rotate them well there's four years of rotation complete collapse they said it was due to drought I walked on the land and pointed out that every single plant was over grazed I've never in my life seen drought to ever grace a plant only animals do that now what about higher rainfall when we did that advance project we did another one at I gave a fella called Rutherford in higher rainfall about 40 inches of rain and again same story we greatly increased the livestock we produced grass right up to the water point this is the water point in the foreground you could see that tree in the background you can see how dense the grass was at the gates not even any trailing this is holistic plan grazing as we today call it right now the same story when I was gone and no longer landing on the airstrip for it next to this and keeping it going when I got back that's what it was it's not a complete collapse I think there were a few cattle left on it but virtually every plant over grazed same story he blame drought but every plant was over grazed once he converted to rotational grazing so I put that as a warning to you to be careful now what this led to was us going back and saying why are we getting these erratic results why are people not follow through what are the other reasons because I was working in five countries at that time with hundreds of branches and every single one of them had slid backwards so we had to ask well why is this happening and start to look at social and economic reasons some of the metals economic reasons etc that led with me being in America and working with 2,000 scientists and many thousands of ranchers on solving that and that led to holistic management which only finally we got going in 1984 in New Mexico at that point the planning process became holistic plan grazing the holistic meaning that decision making social economic etc as with the grazing planning now that is what we suggest we use because that works well none of the other ways have worked on these vast areas of the world with the dry now what happens in society is when I tell you something and you tell someone else the message gets distorted we used to say in in my country we used to say when you pass the message send reinforcements we're going to advance by the time it had gone through to people it became send refreshments we're going to a dance and so with holistic plan grazing when I went to the United States and started to train thousands of people right at that time there was only continuous grazing in Vermont some people who are working with was Anne's work and there was ghusl maize race rotation system that's all there was within six months there were something like 13 grazing systems developed the search for novelty corrupts and people have to twist something and give it a name of their own unfortunately it's like me taking your joke and telling it as my joke but forgetting the punchline they all dropped the hand of the process so you can try any of these many grazing systems there are now grazing gurus and grass whisperers all over the place you can use any of them in the UK they'll work but if you promote those as solutions to climate change you will do damage in the bulk of the world through your aid organizations universities education etc now if you want to know if you should ideally use the planning process which has been developed for over so many centuries or you could wing it and just do it with a map and a calendar if you want to know I actually have a simple test and it you can test yourself so let's have some fun with this one and test so it's a very simple test it's slightly complicated I'm not even going to give you a complex problem so I'm not going to throw in anything complex I just want you to count the dots do you think you can do that let's let's try how many did you get how many dots did you get eleven dots hold up your hands all the ones who got eleven good never alright let's do it again Levin dots is well done now I'd like you to count the dots in the crosses so we'll do this at the same time okay how many of you got 14 dots and 11 X's hold up your hands the liars if you didn't get 14 dots and 11 X's do yourself a favor if you're a farmer use the planning process because if you had got that you might get away with the other please take me seriously I've done it with so many thousands of farmers giving them a very simple farm plan really simple one you've got so many herds and heifers and cars and you've got some maize and you've got a bit of an orchard and you've got some game birds and just a very simple thing I've given them a map given them a calendar giving them unlimited time and said plan the grazing and they just get in a muddle and then we've said forget it just use the process even though you've never used it before just follow the steps that it tells you in this process and boom out comes a perfect plan there isn't a farmer in the world can do it in his head so you can use any of those techniques but it'll be used like using a any brand of car or you can use a rolls-royce or whatever it'll make your life simpler so I'm really urging you to think about that seriously yes in environment like yours this is in Sweden people using electric fence and planning their grazing properly and doing very well with it I want to finish up now by pointing out how central this is again these are the things said to be leading to climate change carbon dioxide nitrous oxide methane black carbon and desertification and from fossil fuels roughly the stuff that's in black and from agriculture us guys the stuff that's in brown so we've got roughly often half I believe I don't have figures I believe agriculture is actually a bigger cause of climate change then even the fossil fuels so let's look at what we can stop putting in the air all right without livestock so what can we stop putting with technology fire and rest we can stop that and people are trying to find alternative fuels only technology can solve that part of the problem what else did we stop going into the air climate change will continue unless we farmers get off our backsides ok so let's look at what we can stop if we add livestock properly managed what can we now stop oh my god the whole lot it now becomes possible that is why I believe we have no option but to do that now what about the atmospheric excess there's already a lot up there apparently now where are we going to put it and how we're going to put it if we look at that excess if we try to put it in the oceans apparently they're already acidifying badly if we try to put it in the trees as people believe we can use technology and plant trees all right trees are just part of the ambient cycle they recycle it like all of us do we're part of the ambient cycle you're all carbon and when you die it goes back same the trees ok so where might we put it if planting trees is really going to work and putting in the ocean isn't going to work we're gonna have to put it in the soil thank goodness people are beginning to wake up to that and talk about the importance of the soil because that's where we can put it in the soil now how are we going to do that with technology geoengineering make bio carb make this make that use energy use technology and try and shove it in the soil geoengineering is highly dangerous it's like playing Russian roulette with all chambers loaded nothing without risk there take livestock and now we can begin to put it in the soil safely helping us with our crop sub mix drops all the stuff that you've been hearing at at this wonderful conference and using livestock as an additional tool to help put it down safely in the ground so to summarize without livestock we can stop roughly half being generous we can't remove anything and desertification will continue add livestock and the whole lot becomes possible if we could go to any nation and ask all globally say where could we go around the world and look at some land some management and understand how the technology of that civilization is doing we wouldn't look at crop lands because many things can be blamed we can for what is happening we can blame machinery you can blame corporate malfunction we can blame all manner of things one place we find in any nation where we don't have anything we blame is national parks so we did a little check on that the other day done where I live and we took a drone and we did it the best time of the earth this is the best the land can be and we looked at national parks compared to land managed to rustically where the only difference is the management let's see if it'll show gas just one minute and remember that covered soil is the key this is the Zambezi National Park with all the knowledge of the Western world predominantly bare ground desert fiying causing climate change communal land around us dominantly bare ground habitat for humans deteriorating Chobe National Park in Botswana bare ground bare ground and then we fly over demon GaN me same time same animals same climate same soil holistic management all that's changed is dealing with the cause of climate change and this is after 16 bad years and this year being the driest we've ever known and that's the only tool we've used it's livestock and we greatly increased the livestock and now we have to double their numbers to just keep pace with the production of the land there are thankfully hubs now developing all over the world where people are getting together academics researchers farmers phosphorus just getting together to start learning together how to manage holistically and begin seriously attacking our problems thank you there's anybody got any questions so sorry Thank You Adam that was completely hand time yeah one on the front here man and a hat a lot of stuff on the on the BBC and things like that is all telling us all right stop climate change become vegan and I think that we need more animals and why isn't the message getting out that we should be using animals to stop climate change he said it was all being told become vegan they've got hearing aids and I was battling to hear that a little bit so why why is a media focusing on encouraging people to go vegan and get rid of it yeah and don't forget the vilification of livestock is very ancient you go back in ancient texts and see them blaming the nomads for causing the deserts that hatred of livestock fear of livestock is throughout society hundreds of celebrities now are putting their fame and their fortune behind the vegan movement etc and they've also got people condemning livestock because of the methane and you've also got people arguing discussing how much carbon could be put in soils of the grasslands of the world let me deal with all three of them together let me assume for a moment that every human became vegan we never eat beef again or cattle again livestock again we just let them died naturally let's assume that cattle put out 20 times the methane that they actually do and let's assume that we could absorb no carbon at all in the grasslands of the world so take those three as assumptions to be true now what would you do about five change you've still gotta use livestock what would you do about desertification all the immigrants pouring into Europe all the droughts and floods there is no option we are just wasting time with petty arguments and academic arguments and tragically vegans are putting their fame and fortune behind that I mean celebrities Oh the problem of oxidization happens in the number two and environments how does it express itself in the brittle environments it's so booming in my earth yeah right no in the brittle enviros in the non if you all got that I understand he's asking why does oxidation occur in the brittle environments at seasonal humidity where there's a long period of dry why doesn't it occur in the non brittle environments and the reason for that is in the non brittle environments like here the atmospheric humidity is so high throughout the earth that the populations of microorganisms and fungi and everything in the soil in the litter in the plant bases is so high that biological decay is able to continue without having to have the moisture of the gut of the animal [Music] I've been battling together know here as I mentioned you can manage as badly as you like you can't create the bare soil Europe your plants grow close to each other you just walk out onto the grassland here and you see how the plants are so close to each other that is a function of your environment and the humidity that you have now when I was at university learning basic plant ecology we were told that in the dry areas and the seasonal areas the plants were widely spaced because the roots fully occupied the site and so you had these big spaces between the plants well no that wasn't true as I was able to find out from masses of observation in the field and and interpreting what I was observing we finally realized that in the brittle environments of seasonally dry ones the plant spacing is a function of animal behaviour when we change the animal behavior the plants close up that's why we have to change the behavior of the animal in the holistic plan grazing we don't just change the timing we change the behavior as well I it might help you to fortify that point in Balochistan once I went to a water point that the bosphorus had used for 5000 years and I got the guy taking me there doctors Ahura to explain how the Posterous behaved and he explained them coming to the water in family groups with their sheep their dogs their camels unpacking their tents the kids run around the dogs run around the sheep run around they're coming there one off the other for five thousand years he said it's devastated as it will let me form my own opinion and when we got there it was down to a monoculture of one species of grass that could withstand 5,000 years over grazing I asked him to put his foot on bare ground without touching a living plant he couldn't do it the plant spacing was sufficiently close then I said as we left the water how did the pastures behave and he described them over five thousand years protecting their flocks from the wolves in other words keeping them calm letting them spread out as they grazed under supervision watching them and I said fine you're now describing a very high level of rest of the land because the animals aren't disturbing it and you're describing a very low level of over grazing of plants that sample every mile as we went out and I stopped at the 16 mile point and I have a photo of him in a big area as big as this floor here of bare ground between the plants and looking at 1-over Gray's plant but as we got out from the water the grass got taller and taller but the space between the Bloods got wider and wider the desert location got worse and worse partial rest we call that where animals are on the land but you've changed their behavior and the plants open up and desertification occurs but it's it was sufficiently difficult that it took us ten thousand years to work it out I'd like to us on the example of the drive that you had for 100 miles and you couldn't find a blade of grass and then the answer was to put 40,000 or something what did they eat until the system I don't care I have always asked that question it's what I did was I said okay on the picture of this room and I said all right this land is so bad there isn't a single Ross growing let alone a blade there wasn't a grass plant growing we had weeds and we had some shrubs and trees with leaf fall but that was keeping some cattle alive cattle were running on that woodland still as it got worse and worse so I said right now I want to take those cattle and greatly increase them on that land now how do you do it you do it with the planning process by dividing the land up so picture this room with cattle in it low numbers because there's so little feed but we can carry them for the earth so let's say it's X number of cattle now if I divide this room in half and put the cattle on this side it can hold them for a hundred and eighty days that is let those plants grow if I divide it in quarters it can hold those cattle for 90 days that has let these plants grow for 270 days to get the idea so I took that land and I divided it into 30 pieces of land now I only had to put those animals and plan their movement wherever they went to plan with a one day - two days occasionally maybe three days and then keep them moving and I had to make sure that they didn't come back under at least 60 days 30 to 60 days so I planned that way and I said why don't we go to doubling the animals immediately which we did found it was too few so we traveled in the first year that's how we did it another way of picturing it is when the cattle or the goats or whatever are out there all day and every day as I've just been looking at in Spain and Portugal they are shaving the ground they're not letting plants grow so if I shave one side of my face every day or second day it stays smooth this size becomes a bloody bush where did this hair go I never let it grow when you keep animals on the land all the time they don't let the plants grow so that's how we did it the planning process and just understanding that principle of let the plants grow and of course once we went to three times the number of animals on one thirtieth of the land that's the equivalent of what is at nine hundred percent increase in stocking rate now you're getting much more hoof action dung and urine to get more plants growing and the result was they grew if you have difficulty understanding that join the old ladies in tennis shoes in the garden club they'll tell you cover soil break the surface plants will grow [Applause] I think most of us have followed the logic of the case that you put and seeing is believing in terms of the photographs there but in terms of the science is there any independent researched figures there to demonstrate the carbon sequestration rates that go with the pictures that you have shown I can't hear a word of that there's a lot of data on what carbon can be sequestered and more and more will come forward the savory Institute is working with researchers and various organizations and universities to get more of that data the point I'm making to you and that's the personal one I think that global climate change desertification should have been put on a war footing 50 years ago I think with fiddling and wasting time when you want to establish something like that when you know that you still have no option so go ahead and start healing the deserts healing the land while you gather more data but what people are doing is saying let's not move until we've got more academic information that is just institutional stupidity to me I'm speaking personally yeah very anxious about the future for future generations one last question can you hear me yes No I've got you I don't advocate anything except that you managed holistically that's the only thing I know to advocate for years well I was developing this I was a consultant and operating internationally as a member of parliament I got access privy to figures on other consulting firms and big ones and I always thought I was a little guy and when I got access to the privy to the figures of others I realized I wasn't the little guy I was actually earning way more than many people were in that field and so here I was operating in all these countries and doing this and trying to work it out and then it dawned on me and I stopped consulting it dawned on me that with the people I was helping the advice I gave I was wrong 99% of the time the only times I was right or sure damn luck so I stopped consulting I realized all I can do is help people train people to make these decisions themselves which will bring the best practices to the top for them there's too much complexity in the family the farm the environment the the economy the only experts on any form are you the farmers and we have to just give you a better way of dealing with that complexity and that's all I advocate and I do say to you you will need to put livestock in your tool bag and you'd be wise to change policies quickly thank you thank you very much completely wonderful tour thank you and a hopeful hopeful message message for Humanity and particularly for you lot as farmers and just like to say thank you very much and what an honor it is to have you here [Music]

Channel: Groundswell Agriculture

Views: 12,312

Rating: 4.7770491 out of 5

Keywords: Groundswell 2019, Holistic Management, Managing Holistically, Allan Savory, Savory Institute

Id: -vILw12ecPM

Length: 58min 11sec (3491 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019