Examples of Grassland Restoration - Excerpt from Talk by Allan Savory at Tufts University

we took an area of Verde that a visiting team of sir just headed by Lloyd Swift an American visiting British six British and former British territories looking at range etc I was with that team took him down there in this area I offered a five pound note ten dollars if anybody could show me a single grasp plant in a hundred mile drive okay we were down to that and I said to a big london-based company that had land there they wanted me to advise them as 60,000 cars on over a million acres and I said I don't want it to you to take risk everybody in the world says I'm wrong this is what I want to do and I wanted double your animals immediately and so they gave me four thousand acres of the worst land they were blunt about it they said you got better it up it's already too far gone Lloyd Swift to head that team told us that it was technically beyond reclamation with the words he used advising our government okay so on that land they gave me four thousand acres and I doubled the livestock immediately I proved wrong so I traveled them and we produced solid perennial grassland no range management no grazing system no reasoning nothing but mimicking nature with the livestock and the planning process and that produced solid perennial grassland twelve inch rainfall highly erratic and we could not cause it to fail we called it an advanced project pushing it to try to produce failure and we couldn't make it fail so after that we started letting it loose up further afield that is a picture of early days of apartheid South Africa when there was a territory called nob lower the Cabinet of Labor engaged me to help them and in the foreground that solid grassland I got them to double the livestock numbers plan the grazing and we produce grassland this is South Africa here where they were jailing people for fur overstocking reseeding Rangers etc turning to desert that was 40 years ago now let's look at some land right next to us where Seth came and visited this is land in our community this is a typical bit of land at the end of the growing season it's now going to go into 8 months of no rain this is the best it can be in the year and this was taken with an Australian visitor on the same day even to see same day pictures and this was a particularly good rainfall year that's a nearby cropland and you can see the height the crop was going to this was a good rainfall year that's what the land looked like every year now is flood drought flood drought perennial 8 here are the pathetic few livestock that are blamed and have been blamed all my life and that we're trying to reduce and here is one of their rivers dry at the end of the rains and they are on perennial faina getting us aid and other food now the day we took those pictures we then came onto our land same soil same rainfall and took that picture same day we cannot keep pace with the production now and on top of that we can have anywhere up to 600 elephants on the place we can have anywhere up to 500 Buffalo on the place as well as our management of livestock which is cattle sheep and goats and we did that with really no other measures on curbing the fires and going up 400% in livestock numbers and we use herding because we are operating with all that wildlife and with lions cheetahs wild dogs IES leopards and we don't kill the Predators we run them in a predator friendly manner so they're herded and at night they come into cars that are portable and move here with the animals and just so to see it in the same land that you're looking they're the same what we call Flay the same grassland that was a picture I took in 87 before we got that going we were about 19 whatever percent their ground okay let's look at some more of it I know this land well because it's actually on a ranch that I donated to the community and so this ground was bare for ever it was bare when I bought this ranch 30 40 years ago and this was on the road to my home and no matter what the seasons that Brian was there over rested land same problem as worldwide okay now watch the tree because you'll see the profound change as we do nothing other than break the rest and impact it very heavily with animals changes completely let's look at another scene this is another bear bit of ground again similar story being therefore yours you can exceed the exposed tree roots okay so we've lost over a foot of soil 25 centimeters of soil they say 1 9 thickness of soil represents about 20 tons per acre so you can work out if you like I'm in soil we've lost okay so that again regardless of good or bad rain that had continued in that state just like the research plots just like the research station here watch the arrow and you see the change as we impacted that very heavily without there's no question then we just get this all the time every single site we do and where many of these is different summits it's funny that coming first so it's something else no two sites react the same but all of them go from being round back to biodiversity one way or another and we are getting to the embarrassing position now we're running out of beer ground we need bare ground for training purposes because we bring people and we need about three square meters to do a little plot where we get people to pour the same amount of water at the same time on to come and soil broken soil cap soil and then we watch it through the day and see even the next day the covered soil still got the water there the other within half an hour's dry it's a just show what happens to over so we need three square meters this site we were using in my home we can't use it now it's now grossed over and we say what the hell why didn't we think ahead to preserve some grey ground for training purposes what we are doing is revert is preserving some bare ground for wildlife because we want to increase the whole biodiversity and these bare areas are terribly critical socially and so on for the giraffe the zebra the kudu that many animals that come to them this this ground we are preserving it bare we've got several sides of them we pick fairly flat ones that are not eroding and we keep them bare because they're so essential for the wildlife and we keep them bare by simply keeping the cattle off them we just keep the management off heard off them and this site it was interesting because when I had the senior research people and so on from Kruger Park a visit okay they got excited about this it man this is crazy that you guys are preserving bare ground for the wildlife and all the national parks they're trying to heal it it cuz there's so much of it the amusing thing happened we had some visitors in the hide sitting there to photograph game and three lions came on sat on top of it and they were petrified and as I said a lot of game comes here so we preserved that and then these are the Kruger National Park researchers etc visited and said now another picture of change if you watch this this is in Mexico and this is a tank Dam with a made these with bulldozers to catch the runoff to water cattle as the land gets dry and people try to harvest the rainfall watch the arrow and you see that's exactly the same ground now again no other drain is going into the soil staying in the soil and amusing thing happened one of the neighbors of this rancher who we also worked with their people visited in one day and he was on the bulldozer filling in the tank dams and they said what the hell are you doing bill bill Fagin what's his name and he said I don't want to leave these as monuments to my stupidity but my grandchildren and he was filling win and here you get the Karoo desert in the cake and this is family that I helped in the 70s and that's 200 millimeters of rain by the erratic just coming back to desert from desert this is my wife with some guests sitting in an elephant hide just constructed of cow dung and sand and rocks but it's it's solid enough that the elephants don't look for you and you can photograph elephants as close as that that elephants about where village from me and you can just sit there photograph then and we did this at what we call elephant pools where the pool of water was the only water we had never gone dry it was fed by a spring and elephants would come there by the hundreds okay to water now there's the hide you can see and with bandages now we haven't abandoned it because we haven't got visitors now got elephants we've abandoned it simply because so few come now why they're not coming now because they got water all over and they've got water higher up the river and took these pictures from said mrs. elephant pools and that pool where the hide was and now one and a half kilometers upstream from it where it's been dry for all my life never had rain had water after eight months of dry we now have permanent water fish and water lilies and as you drive up it's water pretty well all the way and what I love is we've now even got resident Egyptian geese the last four years we've had resident peace all you after eight months of no rain that to me that's exciting that's your biodiversity coming back and nothing in the world could do it but much vilified livestock here are two people that we work with down in Patagonia Pablo Pirelli Brian Marshall and Australian Brian trained with me for two year period and he's doing some wonderful work he is trained Ellie who's a researcher ex-government extension person range people Pablo Pirelli has kept wonderful data and so on of range just steadily turning to desert no matter what they did with conventional range support France thinking and those folks now have put twenty five thousand sheep into one flock and they got a measured fifty percent improvement in production of the land in the first year I long for the day we'll be seeing America's deserts turning around United States hopefully leading the world ins instead of the desert buying America we look at today and other countries following suit thank thank you thank you you

Channel: Steven Noble

Views: 126,923

Rating: 4.8841138 out of 5

Keywords: Tufts University, Fletcher School, Medford, Massachusetts, Savory Insitute, Allan Savory, Holistic Management, Livestock, Global Warming Reversal, Climate Change, Pastures, Grasslands

Id: xMjKcCfBtfI

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2013