A bridge in the climate debate – How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change

Thanks for that, Anthony. Great presentation.
Seems like a win-win proposition, even if AGW should prove to be overstated.

As much as I think TED talks are good I really do wish they’d get Al Gore out of the opening frames.

That talk is brilliant!

Cows, not wind turbines.
I’ll have some of that!

Real people understand this!
Enviromentallist dont! Its hard to profit from and hard to tax … and it gives you hope .. the most forbidden tinking in the green religion.

A great idea that he appears to have been proved…and I am all for that. However he does not know the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide or that NASA report that the planet is greeening due to more CO2 in the atmosphere.
It is the soot and things such as sulphur dioxide that we need to address…..the extra CO2 is of great benefit.

Many have read the book “Collapse” by Jared Diamond. He writes about the demise of various civilizations, large and small. In almost every instance one of the main contributors is destruction of soil resources.
A community that is originally successfull increases its population and expands agriculture from the best lands to the maginal lands. Then during lean times they find that their practices have destroyed those marginal lands. The greater population is forced to overburden the originally better land, and destroys it also.
Today, one of the not so brilliant ideas is to use our most precious resources – land and water – to make fuel for cars. This will lead to disasters.
See, for example…
“Taking Measure of biofuel limits”
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/taking-measure-of-biofuel-limits/
Or
“Nobel Prize winning biochemist says ALL biofuels are ‘nonsense.'”
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/nobel-prize-winning-biochemist-says-all-biofuels-are-nonsense/

http://www.picturehistory.com/product/id/14860

That’s great, but I see a flaw… How can you graze thousands of cattle in an area with no grass or other such vegetation?

I mentioned Mr. Savorys work here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/13/to-sahel-and-back/#comment-828805 and here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/16/water-evaporated-from-trees-cools-global-climate/#comment-744521 in a wider context.
Regenerative Agriculture (RegenAg) takes the principles even further, RegenAg uses Savorys Holistic Management techniques alongside keyline ploughing (developed by P.A. Yeoman) and the integrated design principles of Permaculture (developed by Bill Mollison) to provide a proven system to regenerate soils and landscapes in a productive, profitable, manor.
I attended the UK RegenAg design course run by Darren Doherty in 2011, highly recommended for farmers, landscape designers, and environmentalists, this is the future of farming IMO. see links for further details.
http://regenag.com/web/
http://www.regenerativeagriculture.co.uk/

A scientist willing to admit a mistake, and Savory’s mistake was enormous, is a real scientist. I’ll bet you don’t see him too often behind a desk or tied to a GIGO computer program. I am a little amazed that this is the first time I’m learning of his work, but in the little shown, it sure makes sense and sure gives one a sense of hope for all the species on earth. With the constant din of gloom and doom from our politicians, media and nay-sayers, this is a breath of fresh air.

Now that I think about it most ruminates (cows, buffaloes, etc) have developed a symbiotic relationship with grasses. Many species of grasses have seed coats that survive going through a cow’s stomachs and are deposited with a capsule of highly nutritious plant food.Then they are tilled into the ground by the hooves of the cows. Cows are natures little farm combines running around tilling the soil and planting seeds for next years crops.
Ask any farmer what happens if you use raw manure on farmland. Your fields get full of whatever plants the cows had been eating, so they compose or heat the manure first to kill the seeds in it.

“2 Ancient African Civilisation in the Sahara”

“Historian Basil Davidson looks at ancient rock paintings in Zimbabwe of civilised black-skinned African peoples. “The evidence of these paintings suggests a continuous community of peoples, lving right across the Saharah from the Atlantic to the valley of the Nile.”
As the Sahara was overtaken by desert around 2000 BCE, these peoples moved southwards and eastwards”.

@ tommoriarty
I wholeheartedly agree with your biofuel sentiments. However I would suggest being circumspect with regards to Jared Diamond. He is a bit of a Malthusian in my opinion and his work made him the darling of the “chicken-little, let’s see who we can scare into giving us money” crowd. I find his theories interesting, but not exactly hopeful as you see in Savory’s work.

Wonderful talk and I can ignore his comments about carbon as he says himself, “I’m no expert on carbon”. It’s not his discipline so has simply accepted the ‘consensus’.
I doubt it will get the backing it needs, as it goes totally against the thinking behind Agenda 21 which is to return as much land back to ‘Nature’ as possible and move the people into confined urban areas.You won’t get the environmentalists on board, either, as other commenters have said, as their focus is on forcing vegetarianism on us all. The Law of Unintended Consequences is a foreign land to them.

Hi Anthony,
sorry but I do not see the light here, on the contrary. Having worked as a scientist, development aid administrator and consultant to major international developing agencies on land and water management for about 30 years in Africa and Asia, I am sad to see the lack of skepticism – especially on this site – when people promote ideas like this without proper documentation.
Several statements may be challenged i the presentation, but let’s just recall what a team of scientists have concluded on the subject in a Synthesis Paper on the issue (Briske et al., 2008, Rangeland Ecol Manage 61: 3-17) with reference also to Savory: “Continued advocacy for rotational grazing as a superior strategy of grazing on rangelands is founded on perception and anecdotal interpretations, rather than an objective assessment of the vast experimental evidence.”
Further:
“The rangeland profession has become mired in confusion,
misinterpretation, and uncertainty with respect to the evaluation
of grazing systems and the development of grazing
recommendations and policy decisions. We contend that this
has occurred because recommendations have traditionally been
based on perception, personal experience, and anecdotal
interpretations of management practices, rather than evidence-
based assessments of ecosystem responses, which is
a common phenomenon in ecosystem management (Pullin et
al. 2003; Sutherland et al. 2004). This has seriously impeded
the development of more robust, consistent, and unified grazing
management recommendations and policy decisions to govern
this predominant land use on rangelands.”
Finally, recall that the socalled Sahel crisis of the 1970-80 with widespread “desertification” has later been found to be driven by decadal changes in rainfall pattern. The vegetation has largely recovered in recent years with more “normal” rainfall.
regards .. jens

The following paragraph is very important as it should alert people to the ‘solutions’ being proposed to ‘tackle’ global warming climate change. It may all be for nothing.

Imagine, shooting 40,000 elephants to prevent the land in Africa from going to desert because scientists thought the land couldn’t sustain them, only to find the effort was for naught and the idea as to why was totally wrong.

Something similar was carried out in Africa earlier called the Cattle Killing Movement of the Xhosa.

Send it to the BBC.
I dislike immensely the continuous use of carbon as opposed to CO² (a minor thing but annoying) and the absolute assumption that CO² of itself fuels (climate change) global warming. He like many other environmentalists has adopted the “climate change” description of global warming to avoid conflict with reality.
However, one cannot fault his work and his passion and his drive and he should receive all the money currently being wasted by Hansen et al so it can be put to real environmental restoration instead of the destruction of human civilization. We are all environmentalists. None of us wants to destroy the planet on which we live. Give him all the backing he needs to get on with his work as fast as nature will allow.
Thanks to Anthony and to Mark Steward Young

Australia shows a high % of desertification on the maps. The Savory approach has been tried in parts, without, I suspect, the scientists knowing that there needed to be a more coordinated plan. Some plus and minus policies compared to the Savory plan.
e.g. 1960s, CSIRO Division of Tropical pastures introduced legumes and grasses to assist beef cattle area. This is the good part. I helped in a very small way and time in my early graduate years.
e.g. 1979, start of eradication of 20,000 water buffalo from Kakadu national park because they were not native. Some were machine gunned from helicopters. Current National Park thinking is here, including fire management. http://www.environment.gov.au/parks/kakadu/management/conservation.html
e.g. recent decades, culling of brumby horses and camels from the arid interior
e.g. spreading the misconception that agriculture is self-conserving and does not need inputs like animals
e.g demonising cloven hoofed animals for the reason that they break up dry soil and make it more dust bowl.
If it is shown that the Savory plan is sound, it will take quite some time to provide at least minimal pasture for carrying capacity to be increased. That is not insurmountable, it’s just slow.
There is a strong push here, with the national broadcaster the ABC strongly involved, for a silly idea called ‘organic farming’. I’ve formally complained about objectivity in this pseudo-science by the ABC and been treated badly.
There are variants, but I can’t close without quoting “Biodynamic agriculture uses various herbal and mineral additives for compost additives and field sprays; these are sometimes prepared by mystical (and controversial) methods, such as burying ground quartz stuffed into the horn of a cow, which are said to harvest “cosmic forces in the soil”, See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodynamic_agriculture and more.

This sounds a lot like the work of Joel Salatin in Virginia. He is a farmer that focuses on land restoration. He has written several books that are simple and well written.

A character in a ’60s UK radio comedy had a catch phrase – “the answer lies in the soil”. How true
I am now on a mission to make sure as many people as possible listen to that talk, understand the importance of the message and take action.
What more important way could there be of spending the West’s overseas aid budgets than promulgating Dr Savory’s message? A solution that yields results in such short timescales could save so much human suffering.
Sadly, I fear that those with vested interests and a desire for power will deny the benefits and prolong so much suffering.
To the warmists out there I would say that here is a way to massively increase biomass which can provide alternatives to fossil fuels – forget your crusade against technology-driven CO2 producers and get fully behind livestock-led CO2 sequestration.

With his vilification of CO2 and MEEthane he clearly does not yet have both feet in the canoe. All we need to do is get him to realize that more CO2 is beneficial because it reduces plant stomata count reducing evaporation even further from reduced transpiration AND increases a plant’s resistance to drought AND makes for faster growing plants able to support more animals AND has no measurable affect on earth’s temperature – then he’ll be free to paddle all the way over to our side.

Re: Willis’ previous post: I agree. I have a farmette with chickens. It is amazing that they eat anything: grass, garbage, bugs, dead mice, simply everything. They keep the yard clean, clear out the weeds, eat ticks and fleas, and every day I get a dozen delicious eggs from my little flock. As they age they become stewing chickens. They do indeed increase food for me not decrease it. You won’t catch me eating all that junk that they do.

Thanks ever so much for posting this. An amazingly fruitful lifework, and a terrifically potent testimony to the tremendous good that can come of realizing and admitting one has been WRONG, as opposed to circling the wagons. Mr. Savory’s wisdom is amplified by his gracious humility.
Willis also sometime back referenced Polyface Farm and Joel Salatin, and I had the extreme pleasure of making a pilgrimage to that Farm in Swope, Virginia this past October, and hearing from the matriarch herself of the trials and challenges of those early days starting over after the expropriation of the property she and her husband had farmed for over a decade in Venezuela.
We live in interesting times and great heroes/legends of our time are the Savorys and Salatins, who bring salt and light into the present darkness.

Could I just mention something I only learned of earlier this year, and that’s that dust from the Sahara fertilises the Amazon. We would need to understand the pros and cons that the effects of greening the Sahara might have on the Amazon.
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100809/full/news.2010.396.html

Beautiful. The best & most important 22 mins of my life this year.
I will be spreading this around.
What a slap in the face for the Eugenicists at the UN.

Allan Savory speaks of losing carbon from the soil. In the short presentation at 3:20, there is a black arrow that says “CARBON” pointing up out of the soil. If instead he had said “ORGANIC MATTER” it would have been much more informative.
Having grown home gardens in both heavy clay and sand, the solution to having the soil retain moisture suitable for plant growth is adding organic matter. Composting and frequent tilling improve the soil noticeably.

Confession of an academic: Around a half century ago, a young academic studies a natural phenomenon, and proves (his word) the cause. Being politically supercharged, his work is checked by a team of experts from the government, who agreed with him. So they eliminate the cause, and not only did the problem not go away, which would have been “totally wrong”, but it worsened. The cause was the antidote!
Sound familiar? Is anyone surprised that that academic, now an old man, subscribes to the carbon model for global climate? Post Modern Science is a communicable disease.

Half of what that man argues are laughable falsehoods. So, who did he steal the good idea from? I doubt very much that he is the original.

Hi Anthony – Thank you for alerting us to this TED talk! With respect to desertification, see also this study of Inner Mongolia
Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, 1992: Grasslands and grassland sciences in Northern China, Office of International Affairs, National Research Council, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 214 pp. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=1942
Roger Sr

Thanks for sharing. The answer to most of the environmental problems are to just let nature do nature, right?
I’m definitely going to spend some more time researching and learning about this!

I have ‘reclaimed’ degraded land along the railway line where I live in
Melbourne Oz and turned it into a wild life corridor. In the early days of
the global warming scare before I’d done the reading 🙂 I wanted to play
my part in covering the earth and sequestering carbon . I still do this but
no longer motivated by fear of unprecedented warming. I’m happy to see
clay become good top soil and grow bushland and support life.
Say, … ..’O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee……
…. (but
true
to the incomperable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerwst
them only with
spring)’ H/t e.e.cummings.

Does this mean we can export all the radicals busybodies that are now infesting Washington to give them something to do, and leave my power bills alone?

P.S. I’ll have my steak medium rare with a nice domestic beer.

And for our own health, on Willis’ article that he linked above, someone recommended this book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, here on amazon http://tinyurl.com/b4vfek8
All the wheat, pasta, carbs we eat are not the healty way to go. A big part of that may be the processing.

Fascinating talk. Kudos to Mark Steward Young and Anthony for bringing it forward. This makes so much sense.
I’m reminded of a paper I read back in the ’70s that was part of an assignment for – of all things – an aesthetics course I was taking in college. It described the interrelationships among the various species of grazing animals that migrated through the Serengeti Plains of Africa. The first species to migrate through were those that fed on the softer tips of the grasses. After that came species that had evolved teeth that equipped them to feed off the thicker stems. And so on. Each subsequent migration benefited from the preceding due to their being able to access the parts of the plants that had been exposed by the last species that went through. Thus, the plants and soil benefited from the selective, but progressive, pruning and fertilization such that the entire ecosphere of the grassland was elegantly balanced around large scale migrations. It was a fascinating read, and was one of my most memorable assignments as an undergrad.

Here is a paper that presents an analysis of one of the locations discussed in his talk
Beltrán-Przekurat, A., R.A. Pielke Sr., D.P.C. Peters, K.A. Snyder, and A. Rango, 2008: Modelling the effects of historical vegetation change on near surface atmosphere in the northern Chihuahuan Desert. J. Arid Environments, 72:10, 1897-1910, doi:10.1016/j.jaridenv.2008.05.012.
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/r-2973.pdf

tobias says:
March 9, 2013 at 12:28 am
I grew up in Holland post WWII and as you can imagine farmers were, all over Europe in those days, an important group (sorry if I cannot express myself well), But some of my farming family always, always showed me small ways to grow things (composting and propagating, milking, birthing etc.) and to how ROTATE crops and grazing animals . Every week, or less, live stock was moved from one pasture to another to give the grazed pastures a rest and recuperation to give the “shit and piss” a chance to do their thing. As Holland was small it had to be done on a few hectares (if not acres) at a time but by darn it worked.
This no new news and was done by farmers as they cared for the land.
He has learned how wrong the “consensus science” can be and still does not understand and is not a bit of skeptic for the “climate-change” meme.
He tries to point to real problems, but this will not have the same traction with the religious part of warmista community as it does not have the religious elemtents in it: the sinns that we commited and the need to do penitence for the sinns.
And sorry but, before killing those 40000 elephants would it not have been good to test the solution on a couple of hectars to see if it works?
Stephen Richards says:
March 9, 2013 at 2:28 am
I dislike immensely the continuous use of carbon as opposed to CO² (a minor thing but annoying) and the absolute assumption that CO² of itself fuels (climate change) global warming. He like many other environmentalists has adopted the “climate change” description of global warming to avoid conflict with reality.
Totally agree Stephen, same for me. To mention also black-carbon use instead of soot. I feel it is done to use “carbon” in connection with polution, identify it automatically as polutant.
I find this being language phychology.
Now if the planet greens it is because of the added CO2, this works.

And who will manage these vast herds? Why the big, giant central government that’s who. They will direct where and when they go and hell be to any private person that stands in the way. No thanks. I’d rather live with Edgar Friendly than follow the Cocteau plan.

I notice Dr. Savory includes a scene from Jornada Experimental Station. Does anyone know if he has ever expressed an opinion on (or perhaps influenced) cattle management on the station? I seem to recall someone commenting, when I took pictures out there, that there had been some problem with the critters wanting to get into the weather station fenced enclosure. Given the general bare ground, I can see why they would:
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=66229

I have a hunch that desert land and cyclical catastrophic droughts that enlarge such areas for a period of time are a necessary part of oceanic fertilization from iron dust carried to the oceans on the waves of hot, dry winds. This is not to say we have any hope at all of greening up the African fertilizer store. We can green the edges but that is about it.
Tinkering with our lands, oceans, and air in order to somehow orchestrate climate and weather is a silly pie in the sky dream. But it could keep us benevolently occupied with that sky instead of filling it with bomb carrying planes. However, I don’t want to pay for it out of my hard earned salary.
So…No thanks. If this dude wants to volunteer his time to pursue such activities fine. But I can’t afford to foot the bill.

” Alexander Harvey says:
March 9, 2013 at 6:52 am
All very good but it is underpinned by holism and at its core profoundly anti-science.”
I see no reason ranchers who own private land couldn’t do this. They can sell some of the cattle to make a living. The input costs will be small compared to intensive cattle feed lots.

What makes this man look smart is that he gets to compare his successes to his epic failures.
Dry land framers in North America have been employing the same practices since the dustbowl years of the dirty thirties. Burning of stubble used to be standard practice, now it is almost unheard of, and for the precise reasons he mentioned. Crop rotation, not new. Livestock herds being rotated through pasture land in segments, not new.
But the part of this video that p*ssed me of the most is this guy’s certainty that this solution of his is our only choice. He’s just as wrong about that as he was about shooting 40,000 elephants. He made a gross ignorant mistake resulting in massive damage due to his certainty then, and he is repeating his certainty now. Not that what he is advocating will cause the kind of mess he caused the first time round, but by being so entirely certain again he is cutting off the possibility that there are other options still. He can’t think of any, so in his arrogance he makes the same mistake he made with the 40,000 elephants and decides that his ignorance dictates the answer.
Dry land farmers grow 5 foot tall grasslands every year. Then they cut them down with swathers. Run the swaths of grain through combines which take the grain out and return the broken up straw to the land. Zero til seeding preserves the root systems in the soil to better hold it together and keep it from drying out. Manure collected from cattle in livestock operations like feed lots is spread mechanically on the crop land. In other words, we’ve been getting similar results using different techniques to tackle the exact same problems for decades. These techniques are in part why the American and Canadian prairies have not returned to the dust bowl times even in years of reduced rainfall.
But this guy is absolutely certain that his way is the only way.
Just like he was certain that killing those elephants was the only way.
Other ways are under his nose and have been in practice for decades by thousands of farmers.
His service to the world is to undo some of the damage that he had wrought, while pretending that his ideas are not only new, but that they are the only ones that will work. What a giant pretentious…
I have nothing further to say about this guy that won’t get snipped.

Saw this video several days ago and watched it a half of a dozen times since. Spent an entire day watching videos based on Allan’s concept and Allan Savory himself — probably 50 or more on Youtube. Very intrigued. Wasn’t sure whether this community would like it or not because of Savoy’s comments regarding CO2. Wasn’t even sure that alerting Anthony to it would be anything more than wasting my time. So I didn’t.
Good to see Anthony’s post and the positive comments as well as the skeptical ones too.
For a similar idea you might want to research terra preta, the pre-Columbian South American manner of chracoaling the soil (either intentionally or accidentally) and sequestering carbon for thousands of years as charcoal is very stable in the soil. I’ve been charcoaling my soil now for about 8 years. It works to add biodiversity to the soil.
If I had a farm or ranch I would use both of these concepts to enhance the soil.

Where can I buy shares in such ventures?
Of course greenies don’t like methane producing cattle (even though they are vegetarian) so this could be an obstacle to removing lots and lots of the hated CO2 from our cooling atmosphere. In any case if these nasty even toed ungulates were to be responsible for such reductions there would then hardly be an excuse for centralised world government ruled by eco-warrior elites. It would wreck their plans for population reduction (at first sight – which is as far as they can see) so I think the idea that bridges might be built by posting such an excellent video expressing great hope for the world is moonshine.
The greenies will respond with ridicule. Demonstrable truth is anathema to them. There was hardly a model in sight and thus nothing for them to profit by.

Buffalo (bison) will grow fat on land that cattle will starve on. The meat is better as well.
Perhaps the plains Indians weren’t quite the ignorant savages they were portrayed by the white man.
“Endeavor to Persevere”

It strikes me that this could work in Australia and perhaps Mongolia, maybe other parts of the world with stable governments – but North Africa? What army will stop the Tuareg from raiding and destroying the herds and dwellings of anyone trying to do this in their area? That’s what they do. (as the French have been dealing with lately) And Libya has turned into a collection of petty gang controlled fiefdoms most of which most westerners don’t even dare to enter anymore.

profitup10:
Nice ideas but a few gaps in the technology/cost chain there.
davdmhoffer:
Spot on. The guy is just another blinkered knowall who thinks that whatever he says must be true just because he said it.

davidmhoffer says:
March 9, 2013 at 7:55 am
But the part of this video that p*ssed me of the most is this guy’s certainty that this solution of his is our only choice.
========
I didn’t get the message that it was the only solution. Rather that it works, and is contrary to what we have been taught.
A lot of the world is too poor to afford the equipment for mechanized dry-land agriculture. For these people livestock provide a self-manufacturing and self-repairing alternative, that still provides an edible byproduct (meat/milk) for the people that manage the land.
As has been shown in Canada and the US, you can replace the livestock with mechanical “livestock” and harvest the seeds of the grass (grain) as food in place of using livestock as food. However, to do this requires that you first create the industrialized infrastructure to produce and repair the “mechanical cattle”.
I found the talk an eye opener and it directly contradicts Packy and the IPCC’s claim that vegetarianism is the solution to reducing climate change. What has been shown is that reducing cattle numbers does not work to restore the land. You need to mimic nature. Grazing animals and grass evolved together. You cannot remove one without destroying the other. Either the grazing must be done by herds of animals, or by herds of machines.

Stephen Wilde says:
March 9, 2013 at 8:20 am
davdmhoffer:
Spot on. The guy is just another blinkered knowall who thinks that whatever he says must be true just because he said it.
===========
You are reading between the lines to reach a conclusion that isn’t in the talk. Clearly “mechanized cattle” works as an alternative in countries that have the industrialized base to support if.
What I took from the talk is that:
1. Our education system has largely ignored the simple fact that gazing animals and grass co-evolved. You cannot remove one without destroying the other.
2. Fencing in animals and limiting their ability to herd and move is turning the grass lands of the planet into deserts. This is a significant problem that can be solved by changing farm management practices.
2. 1 hectare of desert = 6,000 cars. 1 billion hectare = 1/2 the desert of the word = 6 trillion cars. By reclaiming 1/2 the deserts we would remove enough CO2 for everyone on earth to drive 1000 cars.

Scientist invents farming. Planet saved.
Do we need any further evidence why ecologists, environmentalists and climatologists should be locked away and not allowed to tinker with things they do not understand?
And rather delivers a blow to vegetarianism being the way to save the World.

By reclaiming 1/2 the deserts we would remove enough CO2 for everyone on earth to drive 1000 cars. each.

Somebody said
The vegetation has largely recovered in recent years with more “normal” rainfall.
Henry says
I knew that. I have been able to correlate the flooding of the Nile with the warming / cooling periods.
In a cooling period the cloud formation/condensation shifts a bit more towards the equator: :more flooding of the Nile.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/

It will be another eureka day for Mr Savory when he figures out yet another “common knowledge” consensus came out of the southern end of a northwards traveling buffalo. May he live to enjoy it.

Sometimes you have to couch an argument in terms of what people might listen to to get your underlying point across. I pray that Savory was using the co2/climate change talk to keep his brainwashed audience open to his ideas. In fact, the lecture might never have happened had it not included the climate change part.

Imagine Michael Mann standing up to do a speech 20 years from now about climate. He could say he made some terrible mistakes that weigh heavily on him. He could say that the decisions were too important for him to make alone, so very important committees of highly qualified people looked in detail at his research and agreed with him. Then he could explain why he was wrong, and present a whole bunch of articles from WUWT as his own “new” research. He could emphatically state that his new point of view was the right one, that there are no other possibilities. He could even talk about how people once believed the earth to be flat, but they were wrong. Then an audience with no background in the subject matter who have no way of judging his past work or his current work could applaud and rise to their feet in a standing ovation.
That’s what this absolute self serving bag of ********* has accomplished.

Interesting, but be cautious of a one-solution ‘solution’. Here is another view and another ‘solution’ that may be just as valid:

Only goes to show that these problems are multidimensional and may requires unique combinations of solutions to reverse desertification dependent on geography and underlying causes in a specific area.
Also recommend reading about the research on the Konza Prairie in Kansas where fire and bison are used to ensure the continuation of the tall grass prairie system.
http://www.konza.ksu.edu/knz/

Fine presentation, thanks Anthony.
Thought provoking, common sense and a workable method at local levels, that does not need foreign interventionists involved.
If it works as well as his demonstration plots, there is hope for subsaharan Africa.
Makes sense when I think of the migrating herds our forefathers described when they took over the plains.

Savory gets global warming and carbon dioxide wrong as well as current global population trends, but he doesn’t really claim to be an expert in these areas. Rather, he’s nodding to prevailing opinion. His recommendations for land management are quite revolutionary. They would require a change in customary practice and probably changes in the treatment of property in land. To get an idea of these changes watch some of the classic American western movies, Shane, for example. Many of them presented a clash between an older herding culture (ranchers or American Indians) and farmers who fenced off the land and called it their own. After bitter, war-like encounters, the farmers eventually won out and usually came out as the good guys in these movies. But if Savory is right all this “progress” needs to be undone since the farmers were an ecological scourge, we now learn. If it took war to establish property rights suitable for the farmers, it may well take something almost as severe to institute property rights suitable for growing free-ranging cattle.

This is break through thinking and doing. I watched this right after listening to the John Lovelock discussion on the GAIA Theory (liked on Climate Debate Daily) – the scientific GAIA. The interconnections are interesting. I also loved what Lovelock had to say about peer reviewed science – Savory is a prime example of countering the consensus.

We used rotational grazing on our farm, and it worked. We took classes from Ranch Management Consultants by Stan Parsons, who early on, was associated with Alan Savory. I know that there was also a group in Australia with an incredible group of guys. The classes teach not only grazing techniques, but also business and ranch management fundamentals. They also hold workshops in various parts of the country, and you might be able to attend some of them, just to get an idea of how the system works. http://ranchmanagement.com/about/about.html
There is also an emphasis on working with natural cycles and less machinery. Most ranchers calve in the dead of winter, so they need calving sheds and lots of hay to feed the new Mama cows. RMC would advocate pushing back the calving time to late spring, so that the cows could then graze on the new grass growth without the need for hay. If you don’t need hay, you don’t need the tractors and tilling machines and balers etc. I have seen Riparian areas regenerated with the use of rotational grazing, because the cows aren’t constantly trampling the stream banks, instead, the
stream banks are only disturbed occasionally.
This is the type of ecology and “Green” that truly makes a difference in the lives of people and the land we live on. I am glad that Anthony is giving it the attention it needs.

In Australia we have developed Cell Grazing where instead of having a 100 acre paddock you have 10 x 10 acre paddocks. You put grazing animals into the first paddock for a week, then the next paddock for a week etc . By the time the animals get back to the first paddock it has been 10 weeks, two and a half months. What happens is that the plants have 2 1/2 months to recover and when they first tried it out in our outback suddenly new plants appeared that had never been seen before.. (Janet Holmes A’Court tried it on the Barkley Tablelands in the Northern Territory with amazing success)
We also burn, like he said they do in Africa. From May this year to October right across the top end of Australia there will be fires so that every inch of the country is burnt.

This whole story is like one giant DUH!
I am not saying this Alan is correct but I have ALWAYS been skeptical of most of the widely held beliefs preached by scientists regarding the environment. We spent 50 years fighting fires in North America only to discover that fires are important to the health of the that ecosystem. Now the forestry service spends much of their time burning forests in order to restore health.
The message or takeaway is that in many complex situations scientists STILL DO NOT UNDERSTAND FULLY what is going on. When it comes to nature we need to be wary of scientists making strong statements and preaching with total conviction. They are USUALLY WRONG when they simplify things too much!
Alan was equally convinced that killing 40,000 elephants was the right thing to do – so how can we trust him when he now says the exact OPPOSITE with equal conviction!
Nature and climate are more COMPLEX than simple one dimensional high school simpleton rules. Just as you do NOT control climate through CO2, you do not control desertification through herd control. Nature is NEVER so ridiculously simple.
I have personally observed that spreading animal manure over the soil is great for increasing plant yield. Perhaps I should do a TED talk? Oops – it appears some humans have already figured this out 1000’s of years ago and any farming and gardening book will mention this simple fact.
WHY DO PROPELLERHEADS HAVE TO REDISCOVER WHAT EVERY ORDINARY PERSON KNOWS AND THEN MAKE IT SOUND LIKE THE HOLY GRAIL?
Scientific PRIESTS are so very tiring and boring and WRONG.

John F. Hultquist says: March 9, 2013 at 9:05 am
The following site provides a short statement and then 6 links to critiques of Holisitic Resource Management – also known as the “Savory grazing method.” Bottom line: They say it is crap!
http://www.publiclandsranching.org/htmlres/myth_grazing_solution.htm
You may well be correct John, I see quite a few reasons why it may not be quiet so simple (eg – feeding the initial mob in desert conditions, and dealing with (ie carrying feed to or selling) increased herds in times of true drought (which always have and will occur).
… .but I really have to worry about a critique in which the main objection on the subject page is based on an irrelevancy – surely it is a matter of trialling this management rather than simply saying “We are different, so it won’t work here!”
Eg; Quote: “….this theory has been roundly criticized for presupposing that the vegetation, soils, and wildlife that live on western grasslands and deserts are fundamentally the same as the African Serengheti(!)….”
And a from group which clearly has its own preconceived attitudes, ideas and agendas:

Keith Raether has written in Headwater News that, rather than trying to force yet another grazing method onto battered western rangelands (akin to rubbing salt into an open wound), the environment, ranchers, and the federal treasury would be better served by grazing permit retirement.
See also Myth: Rangelands must be Grazed to Stay Healthy in Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West.

Agreed. So which warmist blog will step up and join us in a funding race for this?

Anthony – this is jaw-dropping and revolutionary. Who knew such a simple solution could address so many problems (poverty, hunger, carbon emissions). Great find – hope you will continue to follow and report on this.

Excellent !
Thanks Anthony
Now, what did you all do with Gail Combs? She is MIA (ª¿ª)

Referring to the video:
I don’t accept the hypothesis of creature-cause desertification or overpopulation by humanity.. What I heard was a using fear-mongering hyperbole like “Flat-Earth” and the usual pejoratives to hype his views.
He’s just an old coot stuck in a narrow-minded rut.
Its the sun stupid.
Deserts are natural. They always have been, Arctic deserts, equatorial deserts.
Irrigation of the desert view from space:
http://holeintheclouds.net/sites/holeintheclouds.net/files/good_morning/12jan/irrigation-sm.jpg
The myth of overpopulation:

He’s just an old socialist spouting his spin on Global Warming, which there hasn’t been, for the past 18 years.

I don’t buy the bit about goats. To say that goats are the solution to desertification is just plain goddamn wrong. Cattle I can believe; sheep, hmmm, maybe. But eat-everything-down-to-the-ground-and-then-dig-for-the-roots goats? Not in a joke.

Very interesting and enjoyable. Listening to Dr. Savory’s talk elicited two confllicting thoughts. First, the tenor of Dr. Savory’s presentation (humble, sincere and anything but “in your face, I’m the expert and don’t you dare question me”) is a breath of fresh air compared to Michael Mann and his ilk.
Second, when Dr. Savory was young and a student he knew the answer to the cause of desertification. As he aged and studied the issue he came to the conclusion that what as a student he knew to be true was in fact not true. Now he knows the true and only answer. I agree that he’s probably more correct now than he was in the past and what he now believes is likely to be right; but his past experience should, in my opinion, temper his conviction that he now knows the “only answer to mitigating desertification”.
Other than this minor criticism, I was thoroughly impressed. Thank you Anthony for bringing his talk to my attention.

This article would be enhanced by applying “The Watts Standard Technique”.
That is: Find the nearest long-term stations for every single point-of-interest mentioned by Dr. Savory. Graph temperature and rainfall.
The dramatic long-term park shots and ‘research station’ shots should be interesting.

Really don’t understand the people who automatically jump on this sort of thing as “socialist claptrap, blah de blah de blah….”..
As far as I could see, watching both videos, at no point is this guy advocating anything but taking land which is of no use whatsoever to us in its current state and letting nature do what nature did for countless millions of years before the blip in geological time that’s been man’s existence.
He doesn’t EVEN appear to be saying we should stop that nice, profitable, Western-style intensive farming where the world can tolerate it. Just that we might get some productivity out of the sh*t bits of the world if we try to mimic what the plants and animals would do naturally.
Anyone who’s ever had a garden will know that leaving soil – especially poor soil – to itself isn’t going to work well. So we fertilise it and dig it and things grow better. That’s pretty much what those gazillion herbivores used to do – drop fertiliser everywhere, then dig it in by trampling it.
Only, we don’t want herds of a gazillion wild herbivores wandering through our farmlands and, besides, we found that they’re quite tasty, so we got rid of them over the millenia by either culling them or eating them. Only we didn’t (in fact, couldn’t) then go out and fertilise and dig the millions of square miles they used to live on. It makes perfect sense to let the animals do the work (for virtually no cost) that they do naturally, then eat the animals – especially in the vast areas where modern techniques aren’t viable or cost effective.
The only people who could possibly argue with that are those with interests in intensive farming or tractor production, or those who (for whatever reason) simply don’t want to see any improvement in 3rd world conditions!

Reblogged this on Minor contemplations and musings and commented:
A TED talk worth watching…an alternative to carbon trading or cap/trade to help climate change. Bring on the herds of animals to mimic nature.

” Christoph Dollis says:
March 9, 2013 at 9:56 am
“I found the talk an eye opener and it directly contradicts Packy and the IPCC’s claim ….”
Surely we can find a better nickname for the head of the IPCC than “Packy” [phonetically similar to “Paki”]?”
Instead of everyone having to remember all these PC “rules,” just get over it. Lose the thick skin, It’s much simpler and easier for everyone. IOW, don’t take everything so seriously.

A word or two of background on Dr. Allan Savory from a contemporary, compatriot and fellow exile might be of interest. Allan is not some brand new zealot with a theory. For more than forty years he has been the world’s foremost authority on the nurture and resuscitation of ranch land and the optimisation of ranch water usage. I cannot conceive of any cattleman who has ever consulted him arguing with that. It is a tragedy that he and his methods are not more widely known among the general public. His position on desertification follows quite naturally from his “Savory System” of ranch management.
I can’t imagine that he has ever applied his mind to AGW but if he has he has got that badly wrong. . He is more a practical man rather than an academic and his teaching has always been empirically based. These days he has a web site and an ‘institution’ but certainly in his younger days he never enjoyed the backing of a powerhouse sponsor and he is not a natural or a successful self publicist. He was universally esteemed within his home country but did himself no favours when he went into politics at the end of the ‘sixties, an endeavor for which few are suited. His mention of the elephant culls strikes me as a populist appeal – a little like ‘let’s save the poor polar bears’. One can ranch the white rhinoceros and the Nile crocodile and a few other large animals with no great difficulty, but you can’t do that with the elephant. He goes where he likes and cannot be fenced. Put a concrete wall between him and his planned water hole for this evening and he and his impi, perhaps three hundred strong, will go straight through it.There are solutions but short of NASA going into hibernation and donating its funding to the cause, and declaring, say, Louisiana as a reserve for Zimbabwean elephants with no right of human abode, it is difficult to see an ideal answer.
Somebody above mentioned British colonial rule and it might be thought that Britain should have funded elephant conservation. From the arrival of the Pioneer Column in 1890 the British Government did not govern Rhodesia for one day and it did not fund the country’s needs. The country first came under British government law in December 1979. That culminated four months later with ‘one man, one vote, once’
.
Having said all that, when it comes to grassland, Dr. Allan Savory has no peer. He and I were born within days of one another and I don’t think that either one of us will be making much of an impact in future.