Can sheep save the planet? Yes - says Allan Savory!

thank you thanks good morning ladies and gentlemen thank you for the opportunity to be with you today and to talk to you because I think by the end of the talk you'll realize you're one of the most important groups in the world if we're going to save civilization as we know it anybody who's at all alert reading thinking is aware that while we're getting on with our daily jobs and businesses an enormous tsunami of our own making is approaching us with population rising to ten billion people with no real signs of sloping off with us producing more than ten tons of eroding soil for every human alive today when we only need half a ton of food with global finance in a shambles and driving environmental destruction global economy's in shambles many things we're managing the pigeons are all coming home to roost and we are facing enormous threats the greatest threats globally that civilization has ever faced with this rising population global desertification spreading and ultimately changing the climate I want to talk to you about just one component of that which is a hundred percent relevant to you you are your whole role whatever part you're playing it in the wool industry is vital as you're going to realize now I want to talk about the desert vacation component of this problem areas like this you see here in the biblical lands with a few camels on thousands and thousands and thousands of hectares of shifting sand dunes these are grasslands of former times these are not deserts these are man-made deserts right and that is a global threat now feeding into climate change in one of nature's loops and that feeds climate change climate change fee and so we go on now this is not a new problem there are ancient civilizations covered by the desert sands that we dig out of the deserts today all along the now the only place that we've maintained civilization which is city based by definition where we've maintained it for a very long time is Lower Egypt nowhere else and it took the destruction of much of Sudan Ethiopia and Africa to sustain that civilization and send the silt down the river every year to the Delta are we immune from this today China's biggest city Beijing what is happening there is that city secure no it's no more secure than any of the cities in the past if you read their documentation the sandstorms are increasing in frequency and severity and up to quarter of a million tons of sand are being deposited on the city in some days please believe me nature will win if we don't change what we're doing no city has ever survived that now is it just sand blowing into our cities no as I flew into Cape Town I took this picture out below the wing of the plane as we flew over amazing amounts of shanty towns it's not just sand blowing into cities it's people blowing into cities from environmental destruction which is essentially the desertification that I want to talk to you about now what extent of the world is threatened by this fortunately NASA pictures can show us fairly easily and I've marked in red the main areas of the world where desertification is extremely serious and getting worse and worse and worse and as you can see this is roughly two-thirds of the world's land that I'm talking of enormous areas of United States up into Canada South America right across North Africa to China 95% of that land if you look at that big chunk across North Africa can only support people from animals not from crops and everywhere that we look at is desert vying now what are we going to do about it mine's not a doomsday talk I came here to offer you more Hope than anybody could have offered you frankly in the last 10,000 years while this problem has been destroying civilizations around the world and now threatens us globally so let's look at what desertification is it's a fancy long word all it means is land degradation because ultimately if you let it go far enough you have camels and a few goats and that's it you have deserts man-made deserts the true deserts are very small the Gobi in the Namib etc all right so let's try to understand what desertification actually is what brings it about so here is the Tehama desert in North Yemen now I was with the worldbank team the day I took that picture and we were very close to a research station so we were able to see from them that 25 millimetres of rain had fallen as we arrived at the research station that is 25 millimetres of rain falling how much rain is that if we think of it in drums of water of 200 litres it helps us think a little differently well that's 1,250 drums of water on every hectare of land that's a hell of a lot of water what are you going to do with it because the next day that's what the land looked like and we had to use the keys of the car to break the soil surface in the foreground there so we're had that rain gong that is desertification when you're available rainfall becomes non effective it disappears now where is it going when we look at that bear covered soil and we watch that rain falling we could see in the picture that some of it was running off to eventually become floods if you give it enough of it and the incidence of floods and the frequency and severity of floods in the United States and all over the place is increasing because of this just like the dust storms are now some of that water soaks into the soil but as soon as the rain ends and the sun is shining on that soil what happens is the water that soaked into the soil now evaporates out of the soil just moves upwards back to the sky so all that rain that the Tehama man-made desert got that day was not effective what should be happening is we should have soil covered if it is covered when the rain falls the majority of it soaks into the soil because the rate of application of the water to the surface is slowed down it can't flow easily so you're slowing the application and more soaks in some flows off now what does flow into the soil should only leave the soil in two ways it should flow through the soil to Springs sponges bore holes wells whatever or to River flow to maintaining river flow but flowing through the soil not over the soil now what doesn't flow through the soil and leave by that root should only leave through green growing plants so fully effective rainfall like we would have had over most of the world's grassland seasonal rainfall environments that we're talking about the brown areas where the perennial humidity doesn't exist it isn't humid every day of the earth right in those areas over millennia before mankind those soils were highly productive retaining vast amounts of water the soil is the greatest reservoir of fresh avail water greater than all the lakes rivers dams in the world if we can keep the water in the soil all right so it leaves the soil through the soil being exposed that poses the question what exposes the soil on the scale that we're talking about of billions of hectares we know what causes it sheep goats camels you guys and the producers you support you're the cause of this you've been blamed for 10,000 years I was taught that at university we all were all scientists believe that all governments believe that all environmental organizations believe that all farming organizations believe that and keep trying to control the numbers carry the correct stocking rate don't carry too many sheep or goats or anything you'll destroy the land you know it do you know we were once equally certain the world was flat we were wrong then and we're wrong again what did it take to wake me up at this I'm not a farmer by nature or anything else I was a biologist my passion was wildlife now when I as a young man went to the claw into colonial service we started to set aside incredible areas of Africa as future national parks and we removed the people from there who were gardening drum beating firing muzzle loading muzzle loading guns doing all the things you can't have in a national park so as bureaucrats we were good liars we removed them for their own good because of sets of lie total lie because they'd lived with jet sea flies for thousands of years but we intended to form national parks now no sooner did we do that then the land began to deteriorate as we see that now there were no livestock no sheep no goats no camels there was only elephants buffalo Nealon kudu all the rest of the animals so like a good scientist I realized it has to be to many animals wildlife it has to be too many elephants too many Buffalo so I did the research and I proved there were too many established the the research the data it all proved it because we scientists are human we interpret data to fit our beliefs we don't fit our beliefs to the data and realize that the data is telling us our belief is wrong so I proved there were too many elephants it was highly controversial because I said we're going to have to start killing thousands of them to bring the stocking rate down to what the land can support we had my work checked by a team of scientists they checked it all they agreed with me we went ahead we were all wrong totally wrong we shot forty thousand elephants to try to bring the carrying capacity down to what the land could sustain and it got worse it didn't get better now that was a big jolt to me how I could make such a blunder because of my scientific training my beliefs as all scientists have so I really began my reeducation over totally again left government service became an independent scientist and said I'll support myself in any way I can but we are going to solve this problem now when I got to the United States I got a shock to find national parks with no sheep no goats no donkeys no camels almost no animals in the state in that as bad as anything we've got in Australia Africa North Africa South Africa China anywhere and I found people weren't even curious they were just saying it's a national park it's conservation therefore it must be good that is terrible now what are we to blame we've blamed too many lana muls for causing it but here we've had no animals for 70 years and we've had millions of dollars spent on soil khan's evasion measures and planting grasses and so on and it just turning to desert so what do you blame something must be causing it then I began looking at research stations around 3:00 in the United States long ago their range scientists intended to shoot thousands of Navajo sheep because they were causing the deserts to spread so they needed evidence and they put in protected plots and took all animals out of them just like if you stopped cutting your lawn it grows and the projected plots the grass grew they took the photographs gathered the data had the evidence and they shot I believe two hundred and fifty thousand sheep but the desert got worse not better and then they went to sleep stop enquiring stop questioning just giving up what do you know if that's going on in the world now research stations like this that had green grass in 1961 by 2002 looked like that now I got these pictures from the position paper of the International range Society on climate change and there is no explanation for this other than unknown processes something unknown is causing it now what is your industry going to be based on unknown causes undermining it because you have no industry if you have no sheep so are you going to do something about that what are these unknown causes this is what I want to offer you hope about let's look at what is really happening and go back in our minds to before it all start to go wrong here is a grassland on land we managed in Zimbabwe and by the way we're not just to northern sort of province of you all you in America I always say all you Canadians Americans make that mistake about Canadians we're a different country altogether and we've got this big neighbor to self but anyway here's the land we manage in Zimbabwe this is grassland essentially and these were the most productive areas of the world all the great grain areas of the world grain producing areas do you notice they're not former forests they're all former grasslands where that mass of soil was built up with organic matter water retention etc so here we have a grassland in Zimbabwe in seasonal rainfall it's comes through four months of rain it's grown extremely well now what happens the rain stops right now about this time of the earth over the next month watch that piece of grassland and see what happens everything above ground all the grass parts above ground are dying they're never going to be used again the plant is an underground plant these are its leaves shoots flowers stems and the main plant is underground so it's now pulling energy down underground leaving some up there for animals etc and next season after eight months of dry it will try to grow again but it's bugs at ground level cannot get sunlight unless something removes that grass so that grass is dead now above-ground and it is going to kill the plant if it is not removed so what removes it if we don't remove it it turns from biological decay it needs to break down biologically it turns to a chemical process of oxidation like a rusting ship on the seashore rusting tanana the outside of a thatched roof turns black the inside doesn't it's in sunlight and it starts oxidizing that is a very gradual process that's why you can stretch shrews in the Cape with Thach and why it doesn't break down in one year so it's the same on the land so this oxidation is now taking over it's very gradual it blocks sunlight from reaching the base of the plant the plants start dying you start getting bare ground loss of soil loss of water etc and woody vegetation moving in which is all tap rooted and you see that all over the Cape and all over many countries now for thousands of years when people started noting this they began saying you have to remove that dead old material how can you do it obviously with fire you burn it it's gone the plants can grow freely but the fire led to atmospheric pollution it led to ruthless exposure of soil and less effectiveness of rainfall more floods etc where do you think the great floods of Kruger Park are coming from South Africa is getting terrible flooding in Kruger National Park it's coming from your high felt grasslands that are just burning and burning and burning and burning we justified that because the grass does flush green so it keeps the grassland adult plants alive while exposing soil between them alright so how are we going to get rid of that old Ross humans are tool-using animals the number one tool we use is technology every single thing in this room including the clothing you're wearing was made possible with fire and technology every single thing in this room you can't even drink water now without using technology unless I tell you to drink water and you go to the nearest river and drink with your mouth for thousands of years we only had two tools technology and fire so what technology could replace biological decay over two-thirds of the world every year when we believe in technology frankly there's no technology even imaginable that can ever do the job and yet we've tried every government is trying to use technology it's not even imaginable the technology could do it and deal with that oxidation now if the areas are humid enough and there's enough humidity through the year and thus the oxidation problem isn't as great as in the China in the loss plateau area you can use technology and manpower shovels picks bulldozers and they have done an incredible effort of terracing whole Hills planting trees using technology to plant the trees using technology to take to stabilize the ground by terracing etc that's where there's enough humidity now where the same techniques are used in America what happens where you don't have that high humidity doesn't work and they've spent millions of dollars on it machines to mimic animals to break the soil surface crush the vegetation and provide litter reseeding the whole failed and what about the efforts in Israel in the Negev desert what I'm showing you here is costing 10,000 euros per hectare to build earthworks that you can see from the black lines show them up a bit for you to capture the water running off the soil the runoff and to grow trees no growing trees is going to restore biological decay and trees don't die from oxidation because they can shed their own leaves which grass has gone do that's why we call it fall when the leaves fall so magnificent effort costing enormous amount of money not any hope of reversing the recertification meanwhile they're removing the Bedouins sheep and reducing them and paying the men an allowance based on how many children they have and settling them in artificial towns what do you think the unintended consequences of that would be to Israel if you destroy the culture of ancient proud Bedouin pastoralists and pay the mint 400 number of children they have what do you think they do except breed I had dinner with the mayor of one of the towns and he asked me what the average age of his citizens was and I said I don't know you'd have to tell me and he said they're 12 years old average age of his citizens that's just a dynamite waiting to explode United Arab Emirates most countries most people are doing the best they can people are good people are trying and they're using technology to desalinate irrigate the desert you see the lines of trees they're planting and they've spent I believe untold over 30 billion dollars on 1% of the land frankly that is it's not respecting it it's just moving through so looking at our possibilities then we have all of the tools here that mankind uses we cannot do anything other than through to all the creativity in the world can't do anything all the labor in the world can't do anything all the money in the world can't do anything until you pick up a tool so I can have a beautiful tree standing here terribly creative I can picture the furniture I can make the tree will just stand I can bring all of you to creatively think in the tree will stand I can say all come and join me let's cloth the tree with our labor our hands the tree will just stand I can say bring money and pile billions of dollars around the tree it will just stand please believe me as I said you can't even drink water without technology so all the tools available to mankind are here that we've ever used in the last 10,000 years the only one I've left out is small living organism to make cheese and wine because we didn't use that for landscape management scale so if we look at technology none even imaginable is going to solve your problem of maintaining your sheep and saving city based civilizations and businesses fire causes the problem of desertification and climate change some major cause resting land causes the problem as you saw in the national parks and the rest at plots planting trees and grass can't ever restore biological decay many nations have tried that so what are we going to do our tool bag is empty to understand what we need to do we've got to go back before we started agriculture the production of food and fiber from the world's land and waters which is what agriculture is these vast grasslands of the world where most of this developed they were populated with incredible numbers of animals billions of animals numbers totally unimaginable to us today that's what the key to it was and those animals those vast numbers of animals didn't destroy the land because of their behavior because they were accompanied by ferocious pack-hunting predators the pack-hunting predators didn't come from the tropical forests tigers jaguars come from there they don't run in packs because they don't eat insects and the main herbivores are insects when you get into the grasslands and savannas the main herbivores are large animals and then you get pack-hunting predators in large packs and they're extremely ferocious how did these animals protect themselves from pack hunters most of the females don't have horns in many species they protected themselves by getting into large earth because the pack hunter is afraid of the herd and when animals are in large herds and there are grazing animals and their dung and urinating all over their own food they have to keep moving and they cannot come back to that until it's fresh it's weathered and fresh and if we look at the science and not our beliefs we found the science has been telling us all along a Frenchman Andrei was an over 60 years ago published in four major languages showed that over grazing of plants has nothing to do with animal numbers it's got everything to do with how many days is the plant exposed to grazing and how many days does get to recover before it's grazed again whether there's one sheep or a million sheep makes no difference except to the number of plants over grazed and the few of the sheep the more the over rest and the more plants kill themselves from resting so this concept of stocking rate and you set the stocking rate and if you're above that you'll damage the land below that you won't damage the land that all governments believe in has no basis of science it's only based on beliefs that assume scientific validity all right so if we look at those herds then that kept moving we realize okay that would have kept cycling the grass biologically into dung urine that would have kept the soil covered etc so that is what we maybe need to do and I put it to you now that in fact it is the only option and no scientist likes to stick their neck out and say something is the only option unless you 1,000% so I've been working on this problem for nearly 60 years now and there is no other possibility than to use the very thing that was condemned most but managed differently to restore the world's grasslands but we're going to need far more numbers of them for more education and training on how to do so so let's just test that idea a little bit here's this grassland we were looking at what if we simulate in the foreground using cattle in this case just to imitate those herds of the past so this big herd is going to move in it's going to graze and it's going to move on and what happens we find all of that dead grass is now covering the soil it's done litter or urine any rain falling on that soil now ninety percent of its going to soak in a hundred percent of it unless it comes in a very heavy fall and that is going to remain in the soil to leave through the soil or through green plants and that we see it doing starting to flush again and here's exactly the same scene after its quarry grown so animals did everything that we've ever tried to do with fire technology everything else did it perfectly alright we first realized we were going to have no option but to use live stock cattle sheep goats etc and much of the early work began with sheep in Namibia and here where I was working with farmers because the land had got too poor to carry cattle in many instances now how were we going to do it was a dilemma we faced in the 1960s when we discovered we had no option but to use them we'd had ten thousand years of extremely knowledgeable people who had developed the breeds of sheep goats cattle horses chickens all the stuff we use today they had sat around their campfires they had incredible knowledge built up over centuries they knew their land they knew their relationship to the land but they caused the great man-made deserts so herding the animals wasn't good enough they've been doing that for 10,000 years they're still doing it and the deserts are expanding then we'd had a hundred years of modern rain science fencing grazing systems rotational grazing and that had accelerated the desert off' occasion and the first people to spot that were South African farmers who long ago said we acknowledge that our land is deteriorating but the deterioration accelerated with the introduction of fencing and they were ridiculed because they weren't scientists they didn't know what they were talking about they did know what they were talking about they couldn't explain it their observation was correct so how were we going to run the livestock when we faced that dilemma I realized that it's no good reinventing the wheel we ecologist biologists etc had never addressed anything as complex as this the different soil types the growth rates the different plants the different breeding stages of the animals the wildlife the crops the other uses on that land how can you sort out this complexity in nature so I began looking at other professions looked at Harvard Business School planning business techniques looking for people who had at least planned very complicated situations and how they done it I discarded all the business techniques because they were way too academic hadn't dealt with enough complexity and it took so much training to understand them and I doubted that they did understand them at the end of the day and then I looked logically at the military because armies of Europe for hundreds of years had keep developing their skills in immediate battlefield conditions and you can't imagine anything more complicated than immediate battlefield conditions where things are going wrong goal posts are changing you're losing key people you don't know what the hell the enemy is doing but you've got to come up with a best possible plan right now how do they do it and I just took Sandhurst military training techniques and said ok I see how they do it they just break the problem up into tiny little components that build on one another until the story bills and the confused tired wounded man whatever he is can break his thinking down into these little compartments and you emerge with the best possible plan but armies had to plan for a week a day whatever short battle farmers have to plan for a year two years where there's a ratty rainfall or two rain seasons and so on they had to plan for dimensions time area behavior all of these things different dimensions so it was much more complicated than battlefield conditions so said all right the Army's not wrong they've broken it down to that all I need to do is to put it on a chart and if I can put it on a chart that even a child can understand so can a farmer and that worked we did that in the late 60s it worked immediately and we've never ever had it failed because it had more 300 years experience behind it we have had thousands of people failed to do it we've never had any person who does it fail on the farm and it literally can be taught in days I have taught African school leavers in one and a half hours how to do it and they've done a beautiful job it should be simple armies developed it all right now that process we had in place by the 70s and we were getting incredible results in five countries around here run Zimbabwe but we were also getting some failures so we had to look at those and say now what's going wrong because in science we have to develop a hypothesis and then prove it consistently this wasn't a hypothesis this was management but I said let's treat it like a hypothesis and let's now see where this is going wrong because something is missing and when we looked at it we found it wasn't breaking down in the planning of the grazing it was breaking down in social cultural areas or economic areas on the same farm and at that point the name hole came in and in 1984 we got all the parts together and consistent results from there right across the board when we brought together the cultural social economic and environmental together because they're absolutely indivisible you cannot separate the hydrogen and the oxygen in that water you can't separate the culture of a people from their land and their agriculture and their economy they have to be treated as inseparables so we got that in place with what we called a framework that brought the whole lot together and it's simply if you look on the left of this picture you see the genetic way we've always managed we have a simple context of need desire problem to be solved whatever then we have an objective in our management in your life any any business any walk of life and then we use the tools available to humanity technology far rest etc and we always make the decision on one or more of many factors past experience research results expert opinion cash flow cost-effectiveness expediency political compromise whatever and that's how you buy this jacket buy this computer whatever all right so we realized that the context was too simplistic for bringing together the culture of a people their land their agriculture their livestock and their economy and we needed a more complex context for our decisions if we weren't to have unexpected outcomes loose cannons on the deck we realized we had to add the extra tool to the toolbox of livestock without which we can't save civilization now we can't stop global climate change even if we stop all use of fossil fuels climate change will continue because of desertification unless we can use your sheep and the cattle and the goats and the things we need to put that right so what we did was just come up with a holistic framework where we have a holistic context tying people's deepest cultural spiritual values to their life supporting environment to give us a meaningful context for any actions in management and the extra tool in there of livestock and that began working now we have young woman like this one in a community in Africa she's got very little education but she knows more about management of complexity probably than any professor in any university in the world I call our senior herd of the professor now because he's so knowledgeable about pulling complexity together a really simple man she is doing the same just teaching villages now how to deal with that complexity in their lives put their livestock together begin healing the water the rivers the livestock the wildlife everything simple Maps simple training and it's beginning to work showing you more results here's a bear spot that I know very well because this used to be on the road to my home in a large ranch I owned about 25 miles west of this and I bought this as a small ranch to put my staff on to give the big place wild and I used to drive past chalant it's been bare for forever it was bare when I bought the ranch over 30 years ago and it didn't matter what rain we got it just stayed bare and I've marked the tree there because literally we've done nothing here no receding no using technology nothing except increase the livestock and plan the grazing that's all we've done that's the key to it and there you see it changing to grassland here's another site bare and eroding for years and years and years no matter what the rainfall again we've done nothing except increase the livestock and plan the grazing and you can see we'd had over 30 centimeters of loss at the base of the small tree by the arrow and there's the same scene after we've treated it heavily with livestock doing the opposite of what we ever believed in the past we would have protected a plot like that now we just hammer hell out of it with livestock and the plants start growing as long as we get the planning right the timing right here's a shot in Mexico and I had to mark the hill in the background because the change here was so profound after this rancher started managing holistically as you can see has just totally changed the scene and that tank dam as they called it that he was putting in to catch the runoff to water livestock it doesn't catch water anymore it's now going into the soil now the boreholes on the river of getting the water not the runoff from the surface in the Horn of Africa which is a very violent region we have pastoralists now training on this we beginning this all over the world and they are openly saying nothing that they can see will change save their culture other than managing ballistically he has a shot in the Karoo where that desert like condition we're just turning it back to grassland with one of the families in the straw Frenette area years ago down in Patagonia it's the same the man in the center here he was for years a government research officer he has all the data of them consistently destocking with the Sheep taking the Sheep numbers lower and lower and lower and the land getting worse and worse and worse finally he learnt about managing holistically he's got involved he's now trainer and he's on the land explaining this and they put 25 thousand sheep in one flock unplanned grazing and they got apparently a measured fifty percent improvement in the animal performance and the land in the first year doing that alright so I just remind you that we're talking about most of the world's land here the most problematic the most violent areas and if we are going to cut out all fossil fuels to try to save us from climate change it's not going to work as long as desertification couldn't and in any case we have enormous problems to deal with of increasing droughts floods sand storms poverty social breakdown violence recruitment to dissident organisations immigration to our cities and into Europe from these deserted fiying lands and they're right through as you see from United States to China and again I reiterate to you nothing nothing nothing can save us except properly managed livestock and millions more of them so the importance of this to your industry I believe it's just mind-boggling and as you most of you I believe live in cities please start talking because our cities are in the greatest danger throughout history we have abandoned the cities we can no longer abandon the cities you are the greatest people in danger I read over and over again talking about the poor poverty-stricken people in the rural areas don't worry about them they still know how to grow food worry about the cities the chaos the suffering is going to be mind-boggling if the city people don't wake up to the fact that this is a city problem it's not a rural problem because you control the politics you control the money you control the universities you control the education the rural people don't so you control your own fate thank you you

Channel: IWTOCHANNEL

Views: 100,728

Rating: 4.8084664 out of 5

Keywords: Allan Savory, IWTO, Sheep, Wool, Desertification, Grasslands, Climate Change, The Savory Institute, Holistic Grazing Management, IWTO Congress 2014

Id: WUMQVqtjUAQ

Length: 44min 1sec (2641 seconds)

Published: Wed May 07 2014

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"Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert," states Allan Savory in his quiet but inspirational form. And it's happening to about two-thirds of the world's grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes, and his work so far shows, that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert. The role of livestock in a new agriculture that can save city-based civilization. Allan discusses how animals, such as sheep, can be used to heal landscapes, combat climate change, restore economies, increase soil fertility, produce clean water, provide healthy habitat for wildlife, and more.