Grasslands, Livestock & Hope with Allan Savory

coming you to the northern plains grasslands symposium and I think we're all kind of aware of what's been happening to our grasslands over a number of years and who in who in the audience knows the first year of crop production in North Dakota the first recorded cropped in North Dakota that's really close 18:01 you could have done better okay you should have remembered that what was the crop potatoes potatoes and vegetables were planted and the following year this gentleman harvested a bushel or two of potatoes and the horses ate the vegetables so everything worked out China to a man's favor okay and so that was kind of the start of annual crop production in North Dakota and where would have that been that would have been in the far extreme northeast corner that would have been in the Pembina area why how did those so you know settlements started in the northeast corner why fur trade exactly when ships learned how to get into the Hudson Bay and came up the river to present-day Winnipeg and then up the river to present-day corner of Minnesota North Dakota Canada okay and so then we started that production system I would imagine that first farmer probably didn't envision our landscape of today which is a little different looking than described in 1801 okay mister loons burry first editor of a newspaper in North Dakota wrote that book early settlement in North Dakota and consequently it's a wealth of information on the landscape because he describes it so well okay he also describes animals and so you start to get a pretty good understanding of that whole situation this morning we had a meeting on egg policy with mr. savory and it was intended for government agencies and I already was explained to me why there was some teeth in there there are some gaps in the G so we'll get that corrected and then after that we did host the don't family hosted us at Black Lake Ranch I think that was something over 200 the registration people tell me so that's a lot of people Jerry we didn't know that many people even like you you know wherever you are okay there you are all right and I really want to recognize the team that put this together but it was a combination of the Burleigh County SCD Burleigh County Soil Conservation District the Martin County Soil Conservation District the North Dakota grazing land coalition and Dakota prairies are C and D so if you're affiliated with any of those four would you please stand if your affiliate e affiliated with any of those four entities would you please stand give those people a hand [Applause] next item of business cellphones if you want to put them on vibrate please we'd appreciate that if you want to step out and take a call that's your business but and you know as long as we have the ringers under control we would appreciate that okay I think a little bit of this has come kind of full circle visiting with mr. neighs and mr. Miller and mr. dhowan and myself and 1986 I believe it was we all took a holistic class in Bismarck and really it was when we first kind of met as a group we probably you know didn't really know each other very well and tell them there was a number of other people and Jean Jean Goldwyn yeah I'm not sure if you were in that one or maybe an earlier one were you in that one too okay and I'm I know there was others there as well and I remember kind of myself being a USDA employee came out of that meeting thinking man those guys are strange but that was kind of the start of a journey or of a path and I think the we started taking a look a much more serious look at holism and a much better understanding that when you push something over here it impacted way over here okay after the after mr. saverese talk there will be a reception I guess before that I should say we'll have a question and answer period okay we've got a couple of ushers with microphones so there'll be a question and answer period after that we'll have a reception out the doors and a little to the left down the hall I think in the general vicinity of the old entrance so a lot of used a lot of you that have been here before know where the old entrance is so out the doors to the left and we'd welcome you two to the reception and I was going to challenge mr. savory that he should be able to remember everyone's name he meets tonight so when I quiz you tomorrow okay we're good there and so I think that reception will be very nice so with that Ellen savory born in Zimbabwe and educated in South Africa bachelors science and zoology and botany founder and president of the savory Institute the Institute based in Boulder Colorado serves the world through an international network of entrepreneurial innovators who offer holistic management training and implementation support so with no further ado we're going to give you mr. savory [Applause] well thank you is this working all right and yeah okay I have hearing aids that I sound like Donald Duck sounds funny to me thank you for coming along this evening we've we've had a I've certainly enjoyed the day and I wish we could have all been together through it because I it's flow from policies to what we're doing on the land and as I was asked to do I spoke about agricultural policy our Achilles heel as a nation why that was this morning then we had some fun on the land and then was asked tonight to talk to you about the other part of the real issue we have to solve in the world and that's the role of livestock in the essentially the grasslands savannas of the world so let's get on with looking at that when we take one of the biggest issues today climate change whether you believe it or not it doesn't matter just taking that issue and all the brains in the world the most intelligent people we have the views what do we blame and you know what it is we blame livestock for putting off methane etc global to certification they've been blamed for that for years and we blame coal and oil now if we just use common sense aren't these resources how can a resource cause your problems as I said earlier today globally we've got the ball by the other we really have seriously these are resources we'll need for centuries to produce products that we need from God bhai bit large carbon molecules etc and of course livestock will need to feed clothe people produce meat and fiber for centuries to come and to reverse a desert vocation etc alright so if these things are not causing climate change then what's causing it top climatologists are blaming them but they're clearly not causing it so what is causing it anybody got any idea hmm no it's not no it's some because even if you just take global desert off' ocation of which is no doubt whatsoever it's happening so something is causing it and if it's not those then we need to look at what it is causing it and it's a hundred percent due to management if you think about it it is management the way that farmers and ranchers have managed livestock and pass trusts for thousands of years that created the great deserts of the world the biblical deserts of the world informa grasslands it is management that puts cattle sheep pigs whatever in factories it is management that claims that it takes 16 calories of grain to produce one calorie of beef when cars don't have a damn beak they're not made to each grain that is management that is causing the problem it is management that calls coal and oil fossil fuels and burns them at a rapid rate so 100 percent our problem is due to management now if we're not going to talk about that how are we going to heal it so we've got to get all of us starting to talk about what is causing our problems and I don't believe any scientist in the world can argue the fact that management is causing the problem and how many people do you hear blaming management in the press over now universities or anywhere we not okay so that's what we've got to do and we've got to change this attitude to livestock because only livestock can save humanity now the situation is desperately serious desperately serious and nothing but livestock can save civilization as we know it we have destroyed more than 20 civilizations already through agriculture more than armies have ever done and we're now facing a global situation like that and livestock only or the only thing that can save us now I made myself very unpopular when I said that in a TED talk that we have no option but to you do the unthinkable and use livestock and forget about whether they produce methane or whatever they do all right so now I'm gonna talk about that part of the problem tonight and I'm sticking my neck way out now because the situation is so serious globally I don't stick my neck out for fun all right I'm sticking it out and I'm inviting you to destroy me professionally just come up with a logic come up with a science any one of you today tomorrow next week and say this is all here's why I don't give a damn if you destroy me politically totally it's not about me it's about saving our kids our future our communities and so on from the violence that's rising around the world don't forget the mass emigration from desertified Africa is changing the political face of Europe now and we're going to have much more military involvement than everything else so I'm in sticking my neck out telling you I explaining you to why and I'm appealing to you to get somebody to destroy me because it'd be a small price to play if we could save our families our communities and everything else all right I've reminded when preparing of that for this of a discussion I had with Jim tear I don't know if any of you knew Jim I didn't know him well I never worked with him in Africa I knew him by reputation I am many years ago in the 50s 60s and but like we met in Texas Jim and I and we had a discussion that I recorded at the time and so this is virtually verbatim what took place this was 34 years ago on King Ranch and Jim said to me Ellen either you're wrong and we will not be able to dig a hole deep enough to bury you in or you are right and the world will not be able to build a monument high enough that's what the strange statement that Jim made to me and at that time all the universities of the world were condemning me and I was banned from even setting foot on any campus of any university for over 20 years in southern Africa because of what I was saying so this was a heated time in these things my reply to Jim was Jim it's not about me I don't give a damn what you do with me what do you think what do you think and Jim's reply to me was classic he said I'm sitting on the fence well Jim died sitting on the fence I'm inviting you tonight not to sit on the fence either so where I'm wrong let's get moving and save our families or keep sitting on the fence I won't be here you'll be facing the problems I'll be gone in a few years now and my days are nearly over I'm desperately worried about the future for your kids your grandchildren all right so when we look at the problem we're facing essentially it's a biological or ecological problem when we think about it we've got to stop to Luton's from fossil fuels now only technology can do that there's no possibility of doing it with any other means available to humans we've got to use our ever advancing technology to develop alternative fuels energy sources whether it be electricity from geothermal or wind or whatever we've got to make electricity from something again technology alone can do that now when we can do that we can stop putting some pollutants in the atmosphere now we've got to stop the pollutants that are coming from agriculture because roughly 50% of the pollutants are coming from not from fossil fuels but from soil destruction biomass burning over 2 billion hectares is burning I believe it is every year in Africa all right of grasslands encouraged by environmental organizations rain science etc and a one and a half acre fire puts out more and more damaging pollutants than 4,000 cars per second we're burning that every year and then we're burning tropical forests as well all right so we've got to stop all of that and then we've got global desert a'f occation and the american desert off' occasion they're whole states here that are just turning to desert Nevada New Mexico etc okay so that's a biological problem it cannot be solved with any technology even imaginable because it's a biological problem and then we've got to remove and store the excess pollutants somewhere and that again is a biological problem if we do it with Geo engineering or technical in any way we are going to invite problems and repercussions at some point all right so that's the situation we face we've got three things to do now when we look at the world what we didn't realize was how much of it is essentially grasslands and that's really the area circled in red that are turning to deserts etc our former our grain growing areas of the world are former grasslands not former forests with their deep soils and these areas are almost all entirely seasonal in nature seasonal humidity dryness etc to varying degree and we never recognized that we have two types of environment we recognized that arid areas returning to desert but when I working in Africa was working in some of those areas they had 50 inch rainfall how do you call 50 inches of rainfall arid there was something wrong in that what it was was the seasonal nature of the moisture so we get environments like this which may be low rainfall there could be 10 inches or 15 inches of rain but the humidity is there every day of the earth because of altitude or proximity to an ocean or whatever it is and so they are humid all the time whether the rainfall is high or low and they don't turn to desert we can mismanage as badly as we like it's impossible to create millions of acres of bare soil you just can't do it you can plow you can use chemicals leave it alone and it'll cover up immediately start covering up with vegetation and when we find that we abandoned our cities in those environments when our agriculture failed in the past we find our cities under recovered vegetation all of them under recovered vegetation and they still being turned up spotted from space or whatever now that's about 1/3 of the world's land and we call that non brittle because if you take dead vegetation there and crumple it up it just soft the crumples up no we get the other type of environment like that all right and those can be high or row rainfall and that's the sort of environment I live in in Africa where our rain comes over roughly four months and then every year we've got eight months with nothing all right and there those environments we call them brittle environments because if we take any dead vegetation in in those areas and crumple it up it snaps and crackles and and breaks because it's brittle the dead vegetation so it's quite easy to spot what you're in and it would be somewhere along these environments now it makes a great difference wäôre because in these environments these are the ones turning to desert in the worst scenarios and as we see in America and parts of Europe now etc and when we abandoned our civilizations in America like the Chacoan civilization or in the biblical lands like that up there which was the Garden of Eden according to the Quran all right when we abandon our cities and saved our families we now find those rooms under advancing desert not under recovered grasslands at soil so we get the two opposites are happening here in in the world alright so what we've come to realize is that in all environments across the world wherever they are on the land all right the soil the soil life the plant plant life the Anna life developed together you didn't get soil before you got plants because you can't form soil without plants doesn't form you didn't get plants before he got soil you didn't get animals before he got plants it wasn't one before the other they developed together and that was the same worldwide now in the humid environments let me call it the soil the plants the animals all developed together and they still together and most of the animal life was insects and most of the animals that ate plants were insects now you had bigger animals that eat plants a copy or deer or whatever and they had predators tiger Jaguar etc but tigers and jaguars and so on was singular they hunted singly you didn't have them in packs you didn't have high numbers because they didn't eat insects now when you go to the brittle environments which were the grasslands the seasonal the soil the plants everything co-evolved there with millions millions and millions unimaginable today of animals large animals that's where they came from and we got rid of those thousands of years ago began killing them off on this continent over most of Africa Australia you'll find each continent somewhere from seventy to eighty eighty-five percent of the general were killed off we try to study that many people have doubted it increasing they're coming to understand it you'll find in all the studies about that because the human population was so low we couldn't understand how we killed them off etcetera and if you read all those papers that one biggest issue was missed I've never seen it mentioned how we were able to kill them or force language we had language because we had language we could organize so if you watch other Apes returning predator like we were and I'm never they can't do much because they can't talk they can't organize we could talk we could organize so we could wipe out whole herds at mastodons whatever they were driving them into boggy ground driving him over cliffs surrounding him a fire we began to change whole continents alright so in these environments then these large animals occurred they didn't occur in the wet tropical forests etc now these animals occurred with pack-hunting predators this is where the tax of predators came and they are ferocious and those prey of theirs had to protect themselves somehow now how on earth could they protect themselves most of the females don't have horns and the males have horns but they like cowboy belt buckles they for and show they're not for protecting females okay the males use them to fight each other etc so how did those females having the young protect themselves same in all of them you even see it in fish they bunched together bunched bunched bunched and the tighter the bunch the safer they were because the pack-hunting predators terrified of the bunch if you had a four or five Lance here now facing you you'd be totally safe because you're bunched they're terrified of that bunch of you they've got to get you isolated to kill and you see they're from National Geographic films and everything if you if you watched it or it so we had ferocious pack hunters and they'll tackle anything right up to two elephants absorb now what was the significance of that that behavior was there day and night millions of years that behavior when animals bunch like that and they're grazing animals they done in urinate all over their own food and no animal likes to feed on its own feces including us we'd like to get far from our own feet to feed again and same for a cow same for a horse any animal we're not doing them a favor when we have them feeding on their own feces they had to keep moving to keep off it and then the Sun the weather wind and beetles and one thing another weathered it and then it's okay to come back and so they were constantly on the move with that hoof action laying litter mulching vegetation breaking up vegetation because in those long dry months all right that vegetation had to break down biologically and the moisture had gone down the moisture in the soil had gone down the microbes and populations had died off insect populations have died down when all that vegetation is dying millions and millions of tons of it station take the whole of North Dakota how many millions of tons of vegetation grew every year here when these grasslands were healthy and all that had to biologically decay every year biologically not with fire or anything else and that moisture was in the gut of those animals so that was out was what's happening right now if we take that away and we take those animals away and we replace them with pathetically few cattle sheep goats whatever what happens and what happens is basically biological decay turns to chemical breakdown oxidation in sunlight the grass in sunlight just starts to turn black decay chemically and break down chemically and it kills the plants and you start getting bare ground etc etc now humans thought they'd solved that problem and environmental organizations still think they've solved that problem oh it's easy to just burn it just burn it well it's not that easy because burning is oxidation so you're replacing gradual oxidation with rapid oxidation which is chemical you've got it's got to be a biological process okay so now we can understand that now how did that affect a lot of the areas we see it all over the place in this country the government wanted to shoot about ninety thousand shet Navajo sheep way back many years ago they needed proof and evidence to back that policy so protected plots were put in by researchers in most of the western United States and the recovery of the grass was great grass grew when you didn't over graze it they took photographs they wrote the reports etc they shot the Sheep and it got worse thank God they left the research plots and you can go and look at them yourself go and find them I've gone found everyone I can Arizona California and New Mexico Texas etc and this is just one of them that grass that was green then in 61 by 2002 was looking like that now I I actually took these pictures got given by the range society in the paper that they published a position paper on climate change and the explanation the scientific explanation for this turning to desert that's in that serious report is that this is due to unknown processes in other words we don't know why it's turning to desert you see it just wasn't in our belief that protecting land could lead to Desert conservation could lead to desert it just wasn't in our belief system right so when we look at land turning to desert like like this you fortunate in North Dakota did that on that brittleness scale you're not as brittle as these areas are so you as we looked at that today on the land you'll get away with practices that will be good for you you'll do well with them the land will be improving alright but not because of your practices it's because you've got relatively high humidity if you did exactly the same practice in New Mexico you on your face quickly you as your further over on that scale of brittleness so what you're you're very fortunate here you you've got it's allowing you some slack which we not don't get in some other states some of the areas all right so what really happens is the rainfall becomes less effective now we didn't have that concept I was mentioning to Jay I think it was today that I think it was you I mentioned chef talk to 70 people years ago we had a terrible drought in Botswana Rhodesia South Africa on the Limpopo River system and I couldn't help but notice that with this terrible drought that we had the same river flowing to Mozambique we had floods in Mozambique and a lot of people lost their lives so it was the same season same River top of the river drought but in the river floods and that doesn't make sense to you didn't make sense to me and I started to investigate that and say what the hell's going on and I found really was just non effective rainfall so we need to understand what's happening with the rainfall so when we get the rain and it comes tumbling down like like that is on that land most of that rain is non effective now it's non effective if it flows across the soil or it evaporates from the soil so if the rain that we get flows across the soil it gives us the floods that we have all right if it soaks into the soil but then it evaporates out of the soil then it gives us the drought so the two are giving us the floods and droughts and that's why they keep coinciding floods and droughts floods and droughts are so often linked now effect of rainfall is rainfall that penetrates the soil and then it only leaves the soil by two roots it either leaves the soil through plants transpiring it or it leaves by flowing through the soil to wetlands sponges underground water river floo it doesn't leave the water doesn't leave the soil through the soil surface or by runoff okay so it's very very important to know the difference between the two now if the rainfall starts to become less effective as it now is over most of the United States then you start to see what we've seen in this country where many years ago flooding became the major weather-related cause of death even with no change in rainfall no change in the climate yet flooding became our leading weather-related cause of death now that's what leads to what we call desertification which is so serious in New Mexico Nevada many of the state's you know Southern California etc now the symptoms of desertification and why we've got to take it so seriously or increasing floods and droughts they they you get many more floods and droughts and they're much more serious and then if you get a genuine rainfall failure a genuine drought it's 10 times are bad ok if the rainfall is effective you get almost no droughts almost no floods and when you get a genuine one it's not too serious you and weather it and we're experiencing that and some of you are beginning to experience that down right so that's one of the symptoms poverty and social breakdown ok automatics symptom immigration to cities and across borders that's what you're getting pouring across from Mexico into this country and what's pouring into Europe now and changing the political face of Europe destruction of cultures whole cultures are being destroyed now proud ancient pastoral sculptures are literally just being destroyed by the Israelis the Chinese etc and displaced their livestock being taken away from them because their livestock are believed to be the problem biodiversity loss obviously violence and recruitment to dissident organizations one of the fundamentals of tragic Lee of guerrilla warfare is you've got to cut the recruiting well we're not we reaching the recruiting because of desertification is no mystery to where most of the problems in the world are coming from now because there are most violent and desert of an area and then ultimately of course it even if some of you don't believe in climate change at all once you understand a certification you will understand it had to happen if we'd never discovered : oil we would have been causing the plant to change because as one speaker I heard many years ago speaking and she showed evidence from space if you viewed us from space over time you would describe humans as a desert making species because you can just see the deserts expanding around the world as we began to create them alright and if you take this floor and you make it bare like that and that's bare soil out there I can promise you that dawn it's colder than soil nearby that's covered with vegetation or litter the bare soil will be golden and I can promise you by midday or shortly after midday the bare soil will be much hotter than this covered soil I know that because I go barefoot all the time in Africa and I'm conscious of the temperature of the soil every place I put my foot and it by 2 o'clock in the day it's all you can do to go barefoot you can't walk more than three paces without your feet burning unless you get on to litter or plant an immediate relief so by time you're doing that two whole states and whole regions of the world changing microclimate you're changing macro climate it would have been impossible for the weather not to be changing it just couldn't have happened so it's not it's not really open to bait if you understand desertification so these are all symptoms of non effective rainfall and together all of these become a greater threat than all the wars ever fought so you can see why I'm putting such emphasis and on what I'm talking to you about tonight and appealing to you to to get off your backsides or destroy me we've gotta get moving all right so when we look at the region of the world that most of the problem is coming from there it is and that's about probably at least twice the size of the whole United States just that area of the world you couldn't even fit the whole of United States just into North Africa that this is a very big area now that whole area is desert fiying extremely badly that's the most violent area of the world right across North Africa to China up into China and across to India that land that you're looking at that a normos area of land only about three to five percent if we're lucky can grow crops so we're looking at at least ninety five percent of that land can only feed people and their families sustain their cultures and everything from livestock and because of the teachings from this country the training the range science thinking in this country those people are having their lives destroyed the Israelis are spending ten thousand euros per hectare planting trees taking the sheep away from the veteran they're paying the men for the number of children they have and building towns to put them in if you take Bedouin man's sheep away from him when he's an ancient proud prosperous tribe you put him in an artificial town and you pay him for the number of children he has what do you think he does he breeds and I had done it with a mayor of one of the towns and he said to me Allen old do you think my citizens are average age of my citizens and I said I haven't a clue you tell me twelve years old he's the only mayor of a city city where the average age is twelve years that's because of the policy and the thinking which is flowing from this country it's serious it's really serious the Chinese are doing the same displacing wrong rules and so on and those are proud postural spirits people so expect it that your army is going to be over there more and more and or more and more people are going to come back in coffins because we're causing it from here they're not causing it you it's coming from us mainly because we have such an entrance through our education our policies etc all right so when we look at this seriousness this and we look at what's causing climate change essentially it's it's said to be you know carbon dioxide nitrous oxide methane and black carbon which is strictly not a gas it's a particulate matter now there aren't exact figures but roughly half of those are coming from fossil fuels being burnt and roughly half is coming from soil destruction we're destroying an enormous amount of soil more than 20 times as much as food we need every year in agriculture just the published figures 75 billion tons a year of dead eroding soil all that's releasing carbon and so on all right so we got about half of these coming from agriculture and desertification and about half coming from fossil fuels now we've very limited on the actions we can take when I said in the TED talk we have no option people who criticize me for that said of course we have many options but what fool would say you've only got one option you've always got lots of options well have we you see we can't do anything as I explained earlier today I can't even drink water without using technology Piper tap something everything we do we do through some tool and we only have very limited tools we have technology it's everything you see in this room the cameras computers everything technology artefact of the human mind we have fire to tools and for 99.9% of human existence we only had technology and file2 tools can you name another to most people battle after that yes we did find another tool about ten thousand years ago came from probably farmers and we developed the eye of conservation or rest rotate crops move livestock let the land rest and recover so we developed the idea that we could positively use rest or conservation as a tool and other than that there's nothing we can use living organisms as a tool but we cannot do it without technology so we can't plant a tree even without a spade in other words technology in some form and so we do that we try and plant trees but there is nothing else and that's not just my opinion that's from training thousands of people and getting them to list every single tool they've ever used in their business their profession whatever they are whatever profession they're in what we have trained list every tool you've ever used and then break it down into categories and becomes technology far rest or technology and living organisms now so those are the tools we have so when we look at the tasks we have and we say what can we stop without livestock we want to stop pollutants getting into the atmosphere so of those with fire rest technology what can we stop getting into the axe atmosphere and it's wonderful we can stop off coming from fossil fuels with technology and the thank goodness there are lots of people working on that there's millions of dollars being invested in that the world is moving with that we're moving backwards at the moment on that and not wanting to do it but the risk the world is getting moving and finding alternatives quickly as they can okay so what about climate change it'll continue that's where we're screwing up because they're saying that's the answer it isn't the answer it's only part of the solution because the rest is going to continue that's not going to do anything to stop the soil erosion or the biomass burning or desertification all right so what can we stop if we add livestock so we just add livestock to the toolbox now and what can we stop of the pollutants adding to the problem and the answer is the whole damn lot all becomes possible I'm not saying easy it's possible whereas without them it's impossible and that's beyond argument nobody has told me where I'm wrong in 50 years they've shot the messenger but not said where the messenger is wrong sitting on the fence will shoot the messenger it's too serious for that to come first to continue like that all right so now let's say where are we going to put the excess there's a legacy load there's an excess up there if those climate scientists are right where are we going to put it the only places we can put it or limit it we can put it in the oceans but they're already apparently acidifying because of the amount of garden okay so that's not too secure where else can we put it we can plant trees and we believe in technology we believe in that so a woman in Kenya recently got a Nobel Prize for planting trees is it going to save us no it's not gonna stop the certification because it doesn't stop the oxidation process doesn't deal with the course of desertification is it going to store the carbon no because trees die and then it goes back the great drain growing regions of the world weren't former forests because far as soils don't store much carbon it's the grasslands to do okay so that's not gonna work so we're left with the soil long term that's where we're gonna have to put it bulk of the stuff now how are we going to do that with the three tools that mainstream reductionist management s how much can we store safely in the soil and you can think about it you can read all the research papers you can do what you like and it's nothing without extreme risk geoengineering which is like playing Russian roulette with two revolvers with all six chambers loaded but people are beginning to talk about geoengineering now because we're getting desperate what can we if we add livestock if we just add livestock to the box now we can do the whole damn lot all becomes possible do you see what I'm saying we've got to start stop vilifying livestock I know you guys aren't doing it but the population is okay we've got to stop doing that and face the reality of what that we need them so summarizing that without livestock we can stop about 50% of the pollutants going up from the fossil fuels the rest will continue if we add livestock to the toolbox it all becomes possible and I'd rather have hope in something that's possible then have no hope with something that's impossible and I'm praying that somebody will tell me where I'm wrong because nobody has in many many years and now hundreds literally hundreds of good people celebrities are putting their reputations their celebrity status their money into vegan-vegetarian movements things like that believing they're doing the right thing and most of us are sitting on the fence not speaking up not doing much about it all right so only alternative absolute rubbish okay academic view many alternatives do we and I've been through it we're to losing animal as I said we can't even drink water without using a tool we can be as creative as we like we can use all the labor in the world all the money in the world and you cannot even drink water unless you pick up a cup of mug a pipe we can do nothing until we pick up a - it defines us as a species we are a tool using animal that's our definition of us okay so we have got to use some tool now we've gone through them we've got technology but as I said we've got technology far resting the environment or using technology to plant plants all right so oxidation is the problem with the two thirds of the world roughly most of the United States as I said that's a biological problem think of all the technology even imaginable in science fiction clearly there is no technology that's going to be produced and I'm sticking my neck way out that can ensure rapid biological decay of billions of tons of vegetation every single year over two-thirds of the world's land so we can forget that one what about fire no it's rapid oxidation it pollutes the hell out of the atmosphere exposes the soil leads to desertification floods and droughts now I got taken to task by National Geographic and Nature Conservancy they actually published a letter in the National Geographic on how ignorant I was about the grasslands of the world how do they have to be burnt to keep them alive that's the beliefs that's the stuff we're teaching in this country that's being supported by millions of dollars put into big environmental organizations to support the burning of Africa burning of National Park something's it's not gonna solve our problem and then we've got resting the land now that desertification is about as anything in the world and that's in New Mexico and that's a national park that's the best of management that we know how in the Western world that's had hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on soil conservation measures to try and stop that soil erosion that's terrible to certification that is resting the land that is causing that and when the public go there we preach like anything that they mustn't even step off the path because they'll damage the algae the algae is the last life left and we're treating it as the first life and it'll advance if you don't trample it no it's the last life left again we got the bull by the other it's amazing how we've done this so often and then near my home where I live half the urn in Albuquerque we've got the elder Leopold forests and Aldo Leopold is a hero to me and many of us wonderful man and elder if he was alive would be rolling in his well he couldn't be rolling in his grave you his life could he but he'd be horrified that this is a memorial forest and it's supported by good organizations you know they're all supporting this forest now what does it look like well those are pictures in it this is the Aldo Leopold memorial forest what do you think of that what would he think of that that's conservation that's totally predicted nests 500 meters from my house house I'll take people they often when they come to I say alright to come just go and look at it that's right there so the evidence has been right before us we just couldn't see it and they're no peer-reviewed papers or anything because you don't research what you don't believe I love this picture I don't like contrast ones for the same reason Jean that you don't like it's it's offensive in your contrast how well you're doing on your side of the fence somebody else and I've always loved this picture I put it in the textbook because that's pretty bad desertification okay now that was a thriving grassland with same climate we've got now no evidence of real change that was an irrigation based civilization okay now it's desert and you got a fence there and on one side of that fence is everything that we want to do we praise we're putting millions of dollars into it worldwide its protection its soil conservation measures etc etc etc now no park it's everything that we praise the best we know how to do in the Western world it's us National Park Service land the other side of that fence we've got ignorant greed stupidity it's Navajo Indians they don't know any better they're over stocking with sheep over grazing it's terrible we've got to condemn it we've got to get rid of the Sheep etcetera etcetera etcetera now you've had these two different practices totally opposites for nearly a hundred years now I want you to tell me which side is which surely to God it should show some difference after a hundred years of modern range science management conservation and ignorance greed and stupidity that's the same result now that the learning in that picture alone is enormous because that was one of the hardest things for us to discover what was going on the reason this is the same on both sides is because it's the same influence on the land the main influence and that is rest that land is being rested on the one side its total rest because all animals have been taken off and it's turning to desert on the other side it's got sheep okay but they've got no wolves and the sheep are too few so the sheep are walking around gently they don't disturb the soil much they don't play much litter they don't cover the soil and they over graze the odd plants there aren't enough sheep to graze many plants and so you've got partial rest and grazing of plants and over grazing of plants and total risk and the result is the same because rest is the biggest influence so that's how we came to understand partial rest and we could never have discovered that in Africa because we just have too many animals everywhere and why I had to come to this continent to see enormous areas we don't even hear a bird don't hear a sound no animals we don't have that in Africa we got animals but here we didn't and we could discover that and find it so remember that one of partial wrists now what we see here and it's harder in your state to see it but the exact same principle I was seeing it on the ground today when we went on that on the ground that Jerry kinda took us there should be many more species new guys who you're botanists and so on here we'll know that as well as better than I do we should see many more species I was I'm a falconer and I was out talking with some friends in New Mexico while back and I took this picture and this is typical of a good ranch in New Mexico this is typical of a whole state and into Texas and down to Mexico and almost to Denver we've got rangelands like that it's dominated by three grasses this should be 20 to 50 species they're free and all three are rest tolerant the grasses that can survive not being grazed and these ranchers are told they're over stocked and they've got too many cattle etc that land is just dying from ignorance and we wonder why ranching isn't a paying business of course it isn't a paying business this road should be carrying five to 10 times as many animals and becoming grassland again and the first time I worked on one of these ranches was over in you know the Davis mountains in Texas we had three species of grass just like this rest tolerant crosses on the transects we could find two species that they weren't occurring in high enough number to show up on the species and three years later we had 19 species by just doubling the cattle numbers and getting them moving so we've gone from three to nineteen and we could do exactly that yeah as well I I mentioned briefly the Israelis has a picture of it spending ten thousand euro per hectare and removing the Bedouin sheep etc it's no hope of stopping the desert no hope at all but they're very fiercely proud of what they're doing this is the United Arab Emirates they've spent over 30 billion dollars on 1% of their land drip irrigated desalinating water etc planting trees look at the desert is just going through it it's not dealing with the cause no amount of planting trees if you come and visit and I hope you will where I live in Africa any of you welcome to come and visit we got an airfield right there and accommodation right there will show you how rids of thousands millions of acres of tropical dry deciduous forests bigger than whole states in this country all turning to desert what's the point in planting a tree there are already millions of trees and it's turning to desert but we believe in planting trees so we do that we do what we believe in not what we don't believe ok now China is doing the same thing they've spent millions and millions of dollars and planting millions and millions of trees and now apparently in some days they're getting it more than half them I think it's a quarter of a million tons or half a million tons I could God should check that figure again of sand dumped on Beijing in one day from the desert storms coming so it's serious alright so looking at our tools technology forget it fire forget it resting land forget it planting trees forget it now what are we gonna do tool box is empty no Sui I'd like to get all those critics and say okay you guys know they've got a lovely but crude term in America I'd like shit-or-get-off-the-pot what are they gonna do these people that say we've got lots of alternatives there aren't any and as I said at the world meet Congress down in Uruguay a little while ago I was talking to 150 countries I think it was meat producing people I said you you've being vilified you bring it on yourselves you're cattle in feedlots and things we desperately need your cattle back on the land you've got the one tool that can save humanity and you're just playing into the hands of the vegans or vegetarians and all these people by putting your bloody cattle into feed Lots feeding them grain and fueling the opposition to you we desperately need these cattle out of bloody feed Lots back on the land if you value your family at all and don't say no they've got to go to the feedlot for profit you're putting money ahead of your nation money ahead of your community money ahead of your family that is total stupidity if you prefer to sacrifice your nation your family your community for profit and I'm being harsh deliberately so we are doomed if we don't open our minds okay so only livestock not a single person has shown way that's flawed now I first realized this in the mid 1960s you might not believe it today but I was renowned as the most violent fanatic environmentalist we didn't have that term I hated you buggers I was prevented shoot goddamn ranches because they were raping the country as far as I was concerned and I had to change because I realized I was wrong I was a wildlife biologist I coined the words game ranching it's a multi-billion dollar industry now I was wrong and I realized but damn it we need you we need your livestock and it was ranchers that worked me up to that because they came to me and said we need your help we listen to you we hear what you're saying we acknowledge that our land is deteriorating we don't know what to do and they appeal to me and I said okay I'll work with you on one condition they said what's that I said I don't know what to do we'll work together but it'll be the blind leading the blind but dammit will solve this so we now knew we had to use the livestock we didn't know how how would you do it we had no idea how to do it we knew we had to solve it had to use livestock didn't know how so some ranches and I began working together and working out health so we had this problem of extreme desert if ocation and we had to use camels goats sheep cattle some animals we knew that we'd had ten thousand years of mob grazing rotational grazing with pastoralists moving their cattle moving this sheep and they'd created the great deserts of the world so we knew that wasn't going to work ten thousand years of evidence not a single exception everywhere that had been done and it was brutal environment to turn to desert then we'd had a hundred years of modern range science fencing and refinements and all the fine work that people did in that field and the problem got worse and we picked that up in Africa first then we confirmed it back here on the ground when we stopped reading your journals and came and looked at the evidence and your journals you were claiming that you were solving the problem when I got chair and checked it on the ground we found you weren't this is public lands in the United States this was worse than anything we hadn't Africa with all of that knowledge so modern range science was making it worse because of more fear of animals more control of animal numbers fewer animals etc so nobody was being bad we just didn't have solutions so what would you do in that situation we didn't know what to do but we knew we had to solve it so we looked at the key to it which is complexity we're trying to deal with the complexity of the situation that's what the problem was so if we look at and I did this in more detail earlier today I'm not going to do it in detail now if we look at everything we make in the world it's more and more successful it needs expertise the computers computer stuff for everything in this room space travel exploration everything it's what we make and everything we make doesn't work if a part is missing a battery is flat anything like that it needs expertise it's what we call complicated not complex all right and then when we look at everything that we manage oceans fisheries agriculture ranges whatever that we manage these are self-organizing our human organizations nature etc they don't stop when a part is missing or battery goes flat because there aren't any batteries they just keep on but in changed form and or everything we manage is complex it's valves a web of social cultural environmental economic complexity so that's what we were having to deal with and didn't know how to search this web of complexity now I want to do a simple test I told you today we do it because some of you are involved in rotational grazing and I'm not critical of it it's it's it's movement it's it's it's improvement it's moving forward but I want a perfect world for you I want a better results for your etc all right so why was rotational grazing not working it didn't work in Europe we've had it for two or three hundred years was an established this he told you why he published a whole book on it that's why my wife and I got his book republished so that you could read it because people were ignoring his work alright so we'll do a simple test to see whether you should be with your cattle rotating or doing something else okay so I just want you to count the dots so I'm gonna give you a set time I'm going to show you three sets of dots and you count them and see how well you do okay time to test you how many dots with her hmm eleven well done you're clever all right so we do it again now I want you to count the dots and the crosses did you all get that hold up your hands the liars did anybody get it one lie one person okay good that's damn good now in the interest of time I'm not going to do it again normally I I would do it again and say count the dots the exes nobody has ever got it no I'm not dealing with complexity here I was dealing with utter simplicity just two variables three variables if I'd taken it to three in one plane and almost no human can do it so when you back on your farm or your ranch this is what we faced you've got the cattle and you may have sheep you may have goats and you've got the different breeding seasons you've got the different herds that you've got then you've got the wildlife you've got the crops then you've got the seasons the erratic seasons the need to plan for months ahead then you've got the possibility of fire and you've got areas where the water goes dry areas where it doesn't then you've got poisonous plants and then you've got the neighbors Bulls that get over from this side and you're with the main fire threat from that side and I often used to just give ranchers a simple plan of a ranch very few problems and then give them a notebook give them a calendar rhythm whatever they want say we worked together you can sit around this and I just want you to not tell me how are you going to move the cattle through this over the next six or nine months and it's masses of work masses work in its confusion you end with the cattle in the wrong place the wrong time not on the rising plane of nutrition because they're now in a wrong paddock etc and then we take that and we do plan grazing it just sorts itself out so unless you can do incredible things in your head that I've never met any human that can do yourself a favor and and try to rotate the cattle or anything else just do what we did way back in the 60s because we've never ever been able to make it fail and wasn't any cleverness on my part or anything else all right so what we did actually was just revert to military planning and it was fairly logical for us we were in the middle of a damn wall all of us along the war and I simply used our military planning technique immediate battlefield conditions the military had taken 300 years to work this out how to train people quickly in times of war you've all used the same equivalent probably in your country many of you that are served and so military academies of Europe worked this out long ago how do you train people rapidly to always produce the best possible plan at any moment in immediate battlefield conditions and I didn't try and change it or reinvent the wheel or anything I just said damn it we're doing this all the time every damn day in the war are just useless on the ranch's he has our answer we don't reinvent the wheel now the only problem I had was in in immediate battlefield conditions you're always fighting for a day or an hour or if you're damned unlucky it's may go on for two or three days that battle all right but ranchers have to plan for months and in the drier areas they have to plan for a whole year ahead sometimes Posterous so sometimes planning 18 months two years ahead where they're gonna move with her stock so we had to plan for much longer time where the military just had to plan for a very complicated situation we actually had to plan complexity social cultural things as well so how would do we do that and it was so logical it was so easy just put it on chart because if you put it on a flat piece of paper you can express four dimensions actually time area but you know behavior everything on a flat chart and its pathetically simple and we can train people to do this rapidly I have actually trained people in an hour and a half and they do a beautiful job just school-leavers and we've never ever had this fail if we get a failure we're gonna have to go back to the drawing board and say 300 years of experience didn't work there's a mystery here so the way to solve it was that right there we just had to look outside our profession outside ecology or rain science or anything and just looked at what the military had done to solve this problem and trib there's so it's no great brilliance on our part and that then actually initially gave us wonderful results but erratic so we were working by then in five countries with ranchers getting great results but they were erratic so something was wrong still and then went going through those to say why were these results erratic I found it was my fault I had catered for all the planning we needed to do with the cattle the wildlife the crops and integrating those and I left out the social the cultural economic aspects of it so we had to go back to the drawing board and that's when the word allistic came in and we finally got it all the pieces together in 1984 and from 84 on as long as you do this you can guarantee the results and if you've produced a failure will let the whole world know of it if you if you can make it fail all right so that's all described in the new textbook some of you've got it if you've got the old one burn the damn thing it's 20 years old it's 20 years old I'm embarrassed but now the new ones we have shorter easier to understand easier to teach etc and probably 20 years from now with all the improvements you'll make we'll be embarrassed by this one if we just keep moving all right what sort of results did we get Oh old old oh this is 50 years ago that's the boundary of labora and South Africa the government of Lavar engaged me to help them I just doubled up the number of cattle on bare ground largely with trees and things we doubled the cattle numbers immediately just got a moving did the planning taught them how to do the planning knit most of them semi-literate know you don't need a lot but it's very very simple and we produce solid grassland for mile after mile and on this side were South Africa where there were jailing people forever stock and was actually a jail sentence if you ever stopped totally nurse just continuing yes so that that's 50 years ago this is a case in South Africa and if you may have seen this picture it's Crohn's farm and I've used it often we were just turning the desert back to grassland and that's just getting steadily better that's way back in the nineteen sixties or early seventies this year picture I used in the TED talk I had to mark the hill there this is water running off this doesn't hold water any longer because now it looks like that okay this is a change in Mexico and I'm not going to bore you with too many we've got lots of these changes taking place on the land in Africa where the upper picture there would be bear like that year after year I knew this well because this is a road to my old home my kids used to drive first I bought this ranch from a guy going broke I bought it in about the mid 70s and he had a hundred head of cattle and going broke he was only too delighted when I paid him cash and he got off the ranch we are now trying to take that to a thousand head of cattle we cannot keep pace with the production and we've just come through our tenth bad yeah last year was the driest any of us have ever known this year we got the average rainfall and we cannot keep pace with a production of the land now and we've got hundreds of Buffalo elephants as well that we used not to have and for the last of the last ten years at least half those years we've had open surface water when no one's ever known it before and geese breeding that's in dry years just making the rainfall effecter now not all the ranch is good I hope you'll come and visit some areas are still very bad coming on slowly other areas coming on quicker where the soils are deeper moving faster where the soil was almost totally destroyed coming slowly but all of it in so where do we go from here one of the problems that's hitting us is when we learned how to do that and I came to this country and started training a lot of people in this country then suddenly something started to happen that I didn't understand Everett Rogers lived in Albuquerque's dead now but I met Everett and we were on think tanks a couple of times and things that he wrote the book diffusion of innovation and many of you may have read it and what Everett discovered in looking at how new knowledge spreads through society is when we learn something I come and learn something from you because I'm human and one thing in another and egos and whatever I go home I have to tell my family not that I learned something new from you Wow I've got a new idea I've got a new idea that we need to do that and so we give it a name or a twist of our own and that's how knowledge spreads and so when I came here we had ghusl Moe's rest rotation grazing and some people in Vermont and so knew about for zan working with his work there was almost nothing else there was Canadian bread and his management and so on now within six months of training people in this country we had 13 grazing systems grazing gurus grass whisperers one thing in another coming so it's normal for this to happen this twist now the tragedy in this case if I could use the Wright brothers for thousands of years we didn't know how to fly and a lot of people died trying then on a certain day the Wright brothers flew now we could let that idea go and use our creativity and thousands of planes were made different models and within seventy years we were on the moon we had rockets we were on the moon within seventy years now for thousands of years we didn't know what was causing desertification causing civilizations to the livestock were essential to saving that we learnt our 84 and it would have been wonderful if we could have let that loose and had your creativity keep refining that we'd be on the moon equivalent by now the human spirit would be flying the whole of New Mexico wouldn't be - certifying as it is Devolder and so on we didn't get moving in the case of flying when people developed hundreds of different kinds of plane if they didn't have a curved wing if they didn't have a Lauren's and rudder if they didn't have a power source the plane crashed now when we imitated the plan raising it didn't crash so some took 10 years to crash some took five years to crash some haven't quite crashed yet it's damaged us it's it's a pretty I don't think we could have stopped it but we can go back and say okay if it's not quite working let's see what we were missing in it so this imitation of stalled progress in it tragic in my view all right so that imitation began early when I came to United States I found my work was already developed in the United States in Texas I was given this written in 1977-78 okay what had happened was a student from Texas A&M was coming to Rhodesia to visit ranching friends of his I'd taken him around the country shown in many things shown him work he was feeding it back there so they knew about the work and the work was converted to short duration raising so when I came to this country I just said well I'm not gonna fight powerful universities have plagiarized the work will just change the name so we had to change the name and it carried on but the games were playing the plagiarized version apparently had a hundred percent science behind it the original version is not backed by science these are games these are academic games we can't keep doing that people are dying while we play these games the holistic plan grazing we don't know how to make it fail you can all do it it's easy you can learn and I just listed some of the things the derivations that have been listed and made all of these will fail at some point and if you're using them it's it's fine if you're happy with them keep using them you get away with it because of the kindness of the climate here if you're using them in other parts of the world they're collapsed quickly because the faults show up and the best thing is just go back to war zones work if you hear or go into and using plan grazing because we don't know how to make that fail the reason all of these will give you give us mediocre results or fail is because they're not addressing the complexity the issue is the complexity that's that's what has to be addressed now before we let this loose on the public and I'll finish up here we had to test these ideas we couldn't just let it loose on the public enormous ranch in in fact the biggest branching company I think has ever been were clients of mine for 15 years and they came to me with an enormous 1/4 million acre ranch and 60,000 cars and wanted me to help them and I said I'm not gonna I can't ask you to take the risk everybody says this is wrong everybody says this won't work so they said what do you propose and I said let's take the worst land we can find and test the ideas and see if we can cause it to fail and if we test the ideas and we cannot cause it to fail then remove her head so they agreed to that we selected 4,000 acres on this 4,000 acres in fact all the land surrounding it for a hundred mile drive I was prepared to pay the group that was selecting the land a five-pound note that's what was about ten dollars if they could find a single Ross plant so we didn't have a single gross plant that we knew off 400 miles around that that became solid perennial grassland and we were trying to make that fail we trebled the stocking rate in the first year on that background with planned grazing and it just became grassland no feeding no supplement and we took the most difficult animals to run first carving heifers we got higher conception rates Iowa no eights we produced five times as much beat per acre in that entire project cost us $1 AG cents an acre to produce five times as much meat we could not cause it to fail that was in low rainfall and then the situation got worse and worse as the war got on and we couldn't visit this except an armored cars because of all the mines and ambushes and things we kept us going with cowboys getting in on foot or on bicycle and could get past the mines and things and then I was exiled and out of the equation and there was four years till I could get back when I got back that's what I found complete collapse complete collapse all cattle removed same managers same guys nice come on you guys what happened they said drafter come on hang on we've had droughts before and I looked at this with them every single plant was over grazed I said I've never seen a draft of a grazer plant this has nothing to do with draft this is a man-made drought what did you do and they were frank about it they said well when you left we breathed a sigh of relief they didn't have to do that planning anymore it was about two hours work Europe but they didn't have to do it anymore I said well what did you do they said well we just kept doing what we'd done moving the cattle every one or two days it's pretty even bit of land paddocks are about the same size not much complexity to deal with there so they just took the plan grazing dropped the planning reverted to rotational grazing complete collapse in four years now that's not going to happen to you all right it's not going to happen to you because you're not pushing it to breaking point as we were and you're not in the low rainfall there in there in about an average of six to eight inches of rain can be as low as four okay with eight nine months of dry so you're not going to have the same thing but the principle applies when we're pushing at that hard and we got the collapse we could work out why but we couldn't as long as the planning was done make it collapse then we did another in a thousand millimeters of rain and further north in the country similar idea and you could see the grass that grew right up to the water we were using a radial layout similar thing we went up to three times the stocking rate immediately we couldn't cause it to fail it just got denser and denser no trailing just long grass right up to the water points and then again each of these I had an airfield near the my stool and frequently just check check keep it going watch what we're doing and then I was gone for four years when I got back there were few cattle on the land but same story ask the same managers what happened here dropped the planning blame drought they hadn't been a drought at all it's just man-made it was back to largely bare ground and over grass plants by in just four years of converting to a rotation so I can't warn you strongly enough just get back to the plain grazing and or a better process if you can do it but if you fall backwards you you will not do as well as you could do and I want you to do do well and then you guys are shooting ahead of most of us now and that's why I'm going to be excited because I've only read about and heard about it seeing some of what you're doing and Gabe Brown is doing and I actually put a good picture from Gabe which I put in the textbook because I'm excited what about what Colin Zeiss is doing in Australia and what you guys it's not just gave I'm sure here are doing whether you're beginning to integrate cattle with your crops more because I think you're going to teach us all a lot there as we do this and and learn to get better and better with it so those are the things I I wanted to cover and I hope you can see why livestock are important and I just want to remind you of what Jim tier would I began with when he said either you're wrong well you're right and and I said not about me it's about you and your future etc Jim died sitting on the fence millions of people have died in those last 40 years in unnecessarily as we've gone on with land degradation for Humanity's sake I'm peeling to you and your own families get off the damn fence and get moving and the choices are simple reductionist management we talked about that this morning and reductionist policies and no livestock we keep vilifying livestock and you guys keep putting them in feed Lots until the end or holistic management with livestock it's a very simple choice and if there's somewhere where with a logic that I've given you today not just tonight or the science is wrong just tell me tell us and I'll be the first to spread it around the world because I don't have any aim any ambition except a better world it's not about you and me it's not about our goddamn diggers it's about our families our nation's a better world so my appeal to you is strong is to get moving or or show us where this is wrong either way it's a win and I hope for the future because if you can show where I'm wrong they'll know what to do I'm not wrong let's get moving you know either way and choice is yours hope or no hope for the future thank you folks we have some time for questions and answers with mr. savoury we've got a couple of Usher's Adam and Brandon that'll each have a microphone and if you kind of put your hand up you probably get a microphone and one thing I would ask if you ask a question that's wonderful and then but not admit you may or may not have time for a second question so that way we can kind of give everybody a chance okay there was a book written a number of years ago Ghia GI a in terms of the whole earth and how it evolved and handling things in the same passion it appears that you're handling this with Prairieland with the same concepts apply if you were talking about a salt estuary or other things of hey managing it in the nature that it was originally in I've got hearing aids my battle to hear that a bit can you can did you hear it clearly what is it good you didn't it was muffled for you yeah because I couldn't really hear that well you managed in and and if that's consistent there was a book called Gear g IA Oh Gaia Gaia subway yes oh yes that's James Lovelock's work yes yeah yeah he gave us the concept of of the earth operating as a living organism regulating in life etc and I think increasingly we're realizing he was right he I've never met him I've tried to correspond with him and wasn't able to connect I'm here that he is very very worried about the situation and actually thinks it's too late already to be able to correct things but I'm much more hopeful than that and we've all got to be more hopeful met but wonderful concept that he came up with I would love to have him understand this stuff that we talking about I got a question regarding the increase in stocking rates so if you double the stocking rates to achieve the hoof action and to incorporate the seeds and the grass and the work all that do with the same vegetation that's out there was it just accepting the fact that to be decreased production in the calf crop or were those cattle sold off earlier in the season or to to compensate for you know once you've went through your whole grazing system with the increased stocking numbers okay I'm betting weaning was exactly the same seven months no selling them sooner or anything a question I'm asked frequently is when the ground was as bare as we had it how could you possibly double the stocking rate immediately which is what I did immediately then I found I was wrong so I went to three times their stocking rate okay now people say how can you possibly do that it actually is very very simple it's because plants and everything biologically grow on an s-shaped curve so if I shave one side of my face every day alright it remains smooth the other side of my face within a month or so is just a bush alright so where did all this hair go on the side the answer is I never let it grow I was just shaving a little bit off every day I didn't shave off anything like this amount of hair it just didn't grow I didn't let it grow and your cattle are doing that so when they're on the land all the time they're shaving the plants all the time and not letting them grow all right so if we took this floor this room whatever size piece of land and the there are few tricks they're few sticks there's some forbs there's the odd grass plant is leaf fall and it's only capable of keeping a hundred animals alive on on 10,000 acres whatever it's ridiculous it's so low all right but it's keeping them alive every day of the year so if I divide the area in half it can keep those animals alive on half the land for half the year that leaves those plants to grow so if I divide the land into quarters and then I can keep the animals on this quarter of the land for 90 days that's let those plants grow for 270 days to get the idea and so all I did in both of those was divided the land up into about 30 divisions and then planned the grazing so now by doing that and going immediately to more animals so they were in a smaller area now but a bigger herd more hoof action more dung more urine getting more plants growing all right but they were only in on a piece of land for one day or two days at the most and then they're gone and then they're doing it on the next bit of land and this is starting to grow so it was just a case of planning the grazing and moving them quickly and getting it growing and it just worked works every time so the only time we've ever had to actually feed animals with bulk feed of any sort is when we're doing mine reclamation because when you're doing mine reclamation you have a hundred percent big round there's not a shrub there's not a weed there's nothing and so when we put a lot of cattle on to a mine dump to get the plants growing we just use the cheapest nastiest hey we can find because you just want it full of weeds and seeds and that gives your the start and then it goes from that and people are doing that already Arizona in other parts but on the land no better what you saw in slides how bad it was we've never ever had to feed to get going I wouldn't advise you if you're on a very bad bit of land to double the livestock immediately like I did I just did it right away if with you if you had a situation like that I'd said no rather learn what it's about visit others learn the planning procedure and wait until your growing season and then do it as your growing season started with these projects in Africa I just started right away because I was there to watch them and yeah I wanted to ask you you talked about going from three species of grass to 19 was that all natural seeds or did you we've never had to reseed so that was all just laying there bare and yeah so yeah the the seed is always there I had a discussion with some folks range folks in Nevada once we were talking like this out on the land and one of the guys from University there said this wouldn't work in Nevada because there's no seed and I said to him well go anywhere in Nevada and just take a square yard of soil scrape off the top half inch put that in trays gone water in your study and if no plants come up you give me a call and I'll send you a thousand dollars he never asked for a thousand dollars I don't think you would find soil without sea dirt now it won't be the seed you want necessarily because it's got to move successional e and we're watching this in Africa and the place where I live most of the time we're getting us incredible growth of production etc but it's not the grass as we want these are still tall roses some of them are 14 15 feet high these are fire grasses these are grasses that evolved to over much of the country of the last half million years with too much fire and what we're wanting to get back to his animal maintained grasses so you've got grasses that survive very high levels of rest because they've always been areas that that and livestock never went to steep gorges top of some mountains etc so we've always had Ross's that can survive without being grazed but most of the grasses were animal dependent and then you also had grasses that were very fire dependent okay and most of the grass we're dealing with in Africa on the property we have there are still fire dependent grocers and so we're going to have to wait and wait and wait and gradually as soil builds up community builds up we're seeing the beginnings of the shift to animal dependent grosses and we've been at that about 10 15 years now those changes are slow the recovery period you work out in any area but you can get pretty good guidelines into there in the book if you're dealing with pastures and pasture management or runner grasses it can be a shorter recovery period anywhere from 15 to 20 30 days is usually enough on those if they're under irrigation and so on if you are out on a range and some of these very arid areas or like in Africa we won't often unless there's a real reason to do so we won't give the plants more than about two to three months of recovery even in areas where the rain whole rainy season can be over in a month we still don't give a long I mean if we give a month recovery period it's the whole growing season so don't you would have be very careful not to confuse the recovery period you give the grass and the drop period you plan for so in areas where a very drought prone we'll be planning anywhere from three four to six or nine months or more of drought reserve but the recovery period we give the grasses maybe only 60 days so they're there those are quite different and you'll get it renewed learn it yeah the the drier areas that are very drought prone some of those you'd be wise to carry almost to hold yer of reverse reserve grazing what we call draught reserve and that's another big difference between the old ways we grazed and the grazing planning in the old way if we kept land as an insurance against fire we would try to keep some paddocks ungrazed or whatever or insurance again dropped we'd keep some paddocks ungrazed we don't do that anymore that's just such a loss of production on the cattle and on the land and now we spread the risk so whether we trying to keep grazing back for drought in case next season is a drought or for fire we spread that risk over the whole ranch so we plan the drought or the fire reserve in days not area so we don't say we've got so many acres in reserve we say we've got so many days in reserve and those days will be spread over the whole ranch so you can't lose it all like insurance and that's one of the reasons why people that do do the planning well it'd been we've had some great examples in Africa and Australia etc they've come through terrible droughts still haven't had to restock because they've spread the risk locker what makes you say that livestock is kind of the only solution to humanity's salvation when there are lots of other environmental problems like energy you stagger industrial complex marine problems are that are also extremely mismanaged okay but can you repeat that [Music] yeah just well let me take one of the marine problems and see if it helps you one of the biggest marine problems I see us facing is that if you look at the oceans alright you can you can travel for days in the ocean without seeing a damn thing and then you see some fish or whatever the most productive areas are the continental shelves where they start to get shallow where in my childhood we used to have millions of sardines running up the coast of Africa and then all the Barracuda and sharks and everything following him and people would flock to the coast to to fish you know when the sardine runs were on they didn't run no because of the silt all that soil coming I used to fly with my plane in Africa around the coast of southern Africa and when rivers coming down flood red and mud it would be 40 miles out to sea discolored miles down the coast all the shellfish the shell life all covered with silt so these most productive areas of the ocean many of those now are just unproductive I've walked across the mouth of one River down in the drawn sky area of Africa with my father many years ago and it was fascinating my father said well when he was the same age as I was at the time as a child that it brought ships in there it was 90 feet deep and we just waded across it that's all marine most productive areas of the oceans around the continental shelves now how can we kill that there's nothing that can save those environments except livestock but for just other general environmental problems I mean do you mean to say that desert off' occasion is kind of the root of all problems at the moment well good give me one invasive species ticking okay okay invasive invasive species or invasive species are hardly a problem at all that's just a car just a mental attitude to because we're teaching people that plants compete and they invade no they don't they don't you you create a vacuum with a management nature is filling a vacuum all the time so when we take these invasive species and we've done lots of that work and we're doing it on Africa we we've got Dai Christakis one of our main one all my life we've we've had to get rid of that with poison because you can't mechanically could you just encourage it and it grows and grows we've got it on the ranch now and I've got the drone pictures of it and so on whole acres and acres of it now are just dying and we've done nothing but just make the rainfall more effective and what was happening was nature was filling a vacuum on as that land desertified you had been in Australia with it with same thing talking about a particular vase of plant and why you wanting to get rid of this wall because of it's amazing etcetera I said let's go out and inspect it on the ground and everyone I said look for young plants let's look for them the sights they're establishing every single establishing plant establishing on bare ground well don't create the bed round most of the invasive sets where they come in on on the background now when you create a lot of bare ground what creates that any environment in the world any terrestrial environment what creates me of acres of a high percentage of bare soil between the plants only two things created what are they yeah over rest or far and when I say over rest in that case it's too few animals wandering around they're over estimate and you've partial rest and they're over grazing plants and the only other thing it does it is fire and both those a standard practices worldwide and then we wonder why they're invasive plants all you have to do is just remove the cause yeah I'm just I was curious uh we I worked in a County where there's prairie dogs I don't know if you're familiar with that agencies but uh I just wonder what your thoughts are on that you've in terms of management and yeah just when when I came to this country I got involved in working with prairie dog problems and they spent quite a lot of money millions of dollars on poisoning him and so and so forth and essentially we can play that game right now what I did with those guys was I said okay you want to reduce the prairie dog numbers all that's happening is nature like an invasive plant is filling a vacuum you're creating the habitat and I said now if you want to cure that problem instead of all this four million dollars they were spending with poison I said why don't you just think like a prairie dog if you were a prairie dog what would you not want I just got them to think of that and what you wouldn't want is a whole lot of cattle stamping all over your Township okay why don't you just train the cattle blow a whistle and give them half a bale of hay on the township why don't you do that what else would the prairie dogs not like well they wouldn't like if there was a pole or two that Hawks could sit on right there okay why don't you put up a pole or two that Hawks could sit on right there okay what else would the prairie dogs not like well they wouldn't like it if coyotes could easily stalk them okay why don't you just put a line of brushwood so that it's easy coming in from several different angles so it's easy for coyotes to stalk them and I just got them having fun like that and I got a message which I wish I'd kept I got it some months later and they said god dammit we didn't want to wipe them out altogether [Laughter] prairie dogs are wonderful things just manage vanish properly with them folks without I think we need to give mr. savoury a big hand [Applause]

Channel: Menoken Farm

Views: 31,300

Rating: 4.8392859 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: wHzA9w0b7io

Length: 108min 53sec (6533 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2017