This is one of the most important posts ever on WUWT, it will be a top “sticky” post for a few days, and new posts will appear below this one during that time.
People send me stuff.
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. That alone was a real eye opener.
Every once in awhile, an idea comes along that makes you ask, “gee why hasn’t anybody seen this before?”. This one of those times. This video below is something I almost didn’t watch, because my concerns were triggered by a few key words in the beginning. But, recommended by a Facebook friend, I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did, because I want every one of you, no matter what side of the climate debate you live in, to watch this and experience that light bulb moment as I did. The key here is to understand that desertification is one of the real climate changes we are witnessing as opposed to some the predicted ones we often fight over.
It is one of those seminal moments where I think a bridge has been created in the climate debate, and I hope you’ll seize the moment and embrace it. This video comes with my strongest possible recommendation, because it speaks to a real problem, with real solutions in plain language, while at the same time offering true hope.
This is a TED talk by Dr. Allan Savory in Los Angeles this past week, attended by our friend Dr. Matt Ridley, whose presentation we’ll look at another time. Sometimes, TED talks are little more that pie in the sky; this one is not. And, it not only offers a solution, it shows the solution in action and presents proof that it works. It makes more sense than anything I’ve seen in a long, long, time. Our friend Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., champion of studying land use change as it affects local and regional climate will understand this, so will our cowboy poet Willis Eschenbach, who grew up on a cattle ranch. I daresay some of our staunchest critics will get it too.
To encapsulate the idea presented, I’ll borrow from a widely used TV commercial and say:
Beef, it’s what’s for climate
You can call me crazy for saying that after you watch this presentation. A BIG hattip to Mark Steward Young for bringing this to my attention.
“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it’s happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes — and his work so far shows — that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.
Published on Mar 4, 2013
There’s a longer version with more detail below, about an hour long. Also worth watching if you want to understand the process in more detail:
Feasta Lecture 2009
Extracts available at vimeo.com/8291896
Allan Savory argued that while livestock may be part of the problem, they can also be an important part of the solution. He has demonstrated time and again in Africa, Australia and North and South America that, properly managed, they are essential to land restoration. With the right techniques, plant growth is lusher, the water table is higher, wildlife thrives, soil carbon increases and, surprisingly, perhaps four times as many cattle can be kept.
feasta.org/events/general/2009_lecture.htm
Recorded 7 November 2009, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
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markx says:
March 9, 2013 at 8:14 pm
The fertilizing effect of the manure merely recycles the nitrogenous compounds synthesized by the grasses and legumes….”
_________________________________________________________________
Not true. There is a net gain in nitrogen. Ruminants have nitrogen fixing bacteria in their stomachs. This is why the can survive on such low quality forage. Cattle can be fed on news paper and molasses and can still produce weight. I can not cite page, but this is discussed in the book “The Science of Producing Milk for Man”. This was a text book from a dairy science class at SFASU in Nacogdoches, TX in 1980.
Well, Willis, grab a beer or two, find a comfortable chair, have your mouse ready to Close and watch the video.
I know it won’t be as exciting as watching our favorite fishing hole, but I thought the pictures “before and afterwards” were worth the time.
If not, just click “Close” anytime–and finish your beer. (And don’t worry about citations–assume what you see is original, field-based results.)
Interesting video. Not read all comments. I’ve returned to 11:08 seconds three times to confirm what he said about burning grassland. He says “one billion ha of grasslands are burned annually in Africa.” That’s 10,000,000 sq km or one third of the entire land area of the African continent is burned annually. Is that possible? Seems a stretch.
If it is not correct, it is an important error and puts other “facts” into question.
Going by my own experiences in Zimbabwe/Zambia and Mozambique it could even be an underestimate.
davidmhoffer says: March 9, 2013 at 7:33 pm
Christoff Dollis; So yes, he owned up to what he did, which was advise that it take place.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“Oh bull. What took place is that he did the research, he presented it to the committees, he persuaded them that he was right, and that the only choice, ONLY CHOICE, was to kill 40,000 elephants. ……… If it goes awry this time, he’ll use the same excuse, lots of other people looked at his work and agreed with it…whine….not really his fault….don’t look behind the curtain….”
Hoffer, it is my opinion there is is something disturbingly wrong with your thought processes, perceptions, and probably hearing. Savory clearly says he did the calculations and came to a conclusion, that his conclusion was a hugely contentious issue, that committees were formed and politicians were involved and Savory had to convince them all. He says “I was wrong”.
One thing this debate needs is more laterally thinking, open minded people.
It has enough stubborn know alls who will unashamedly put a spin on another man’s words and turn an open honest demonstrative admission of error into something lesser to prove their own point of view.
Uhm … Savory has been banging on about his concept of holistic land management for about 40 years and has (so far as the Bear can find) failed to convince any mainstream ecologists/land management expert that there is any scientific validity to his ideas.
Just one point from the presentation: the Bear knows a bit about cattle farming and the idea that a large herd of cattle or sheep (etc.) can be released on land with little grass coverage is simply mad; they will all predictably die within a short period of time. In Australia, if you stock land with no available feed you will also be prosecuted for cruelty to animals. And quite rightly.
This is a serious, unexplained and gaping hole in Savory’s presentation; how livestock survive on land with no feed, while they wait for a lost annual land-cycle to kick in and rehabilitate the land. It’s a bit like the good old perpetual motion machine.
Not impressed.
Talking about managing land. This immediately reminded me of the consequences of the US destroying Yellowstone by killing off the wolves, which led to over grazing and then the land was destroyed and animals starved. This 22 minute video is a better approach. Leave it alone and it will thrive as herd animals are good for the land!
No. I don’t agree with his theories or techniques or even his observations and experiments.
Look at Europe, especially the French. Each spring, they till the land in the city and the farms to pump air into the soil because it becomes hard on the surface, unable to absorb nutrients and water. This is a known farming technique to “disturb” the bacteria, unlock barriers in the top soil etc. Then he talked about putting animals on land that have no grasses. That was ridiculous. Animals need to eat SOMETHING. I was not sure of the disconnect there when there were Q & As at the end of his presentation.
Also “evaporation” of 8 ft. of water does not occur as he seems to indicate. Much of the monsoon moisture in some of the seasonally dry areas simply seeps back into the Earth as underground aquafers that dominate the globe.
If you want to re-claim desert…do what the israelis do, what we do in the Southwest: Cultivate, plant stuff, irrigate, put in nutrients. We don’t need a bunch of methane-farting cows (or goats, or sheep, or whatever) running crazy…especially when we should stop eating animals that just cause us heart disease anyway. We have machines that aerate soul. We have plenty of phosphate mines, composte from uneaten food, mulch and whatever to re-forest areas that have become dry through cycles of Earth climate.
Me, I live near Las Vegas where nothing has grown for thousands of years except for cactus and mesquite and such. The Las Vegas Valley now has more trees than ever and even pollen problems each Spring, where there was never any real growth.
It is also well-known that simple nutrients added to soil cause a total change, no cow required.
The “only” choice presented, is NOT the only choice. This guy is just like Hanson: too much ego, too much drama, too much academia and white papers. Not much thinking. Give him an audience, and he is a preacher.
Not being a farmer, this presentation sounded as old, well-proven, knowledge to me.
As a student of climate, it sounded old and wrong to me. After all, “dirty” CO2, even if you call it “carbon”, is the gas of live.
I would say its the” ORGANIC MATTER” which the cows have left behined that has made the bigest change to the land.
All grasses grow faster and greener with a bit of urea fertilizer.
Urea Makes more nitrogen available as a nutrient to the plant. … Stimulates a more drought-tolerant plant.
With all due respect, this is severely misguided. We evolved on a diet of animal fat and protein, with more modest amounts of carbohydrates, particularly during the warmer months — without heart disease being widespread or an exploding diabetes epidemic.
These are caused by an overconsumption of carbohydrates, particularly refined carbohydrates, and particularly fructose, as well as a seriously out of whack omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid ratio and the resulting inflammation.
The lipid hypothesis of Ancel Keys is just plain wrong.
geran says: March 9, 2013 at 6:12 pm
“…… you must ask why you are impressed. Is it because he killed 40,000 elephants (think polar bears), or is it because he is slim/lean, articulate, resonate voice, soft-speaking, urbane, and sophisticated?………I’m talking about the illusion of “messiah”. Get a clue folks…”
I found him impressive – because he is an articulate speaker, who (in my opinion) strongly believes what he is saying. He puts forward a sensible and logical background of concepts and thought processes as to why he holds those beliefs, and while his ‘proofs’ were anecdotal as presented, he created a few “aha, lightbulb” moments in my mind. I, for one, do not believe it will apply to every dry ecosystem and work with every soil type, but I feel it goes a long way towards further demonstrating the complexity of our world’s systems and deserves attention. I’m not big on messiahs, he is just a man with an idea, and I can already seem some faults with this one, but it does not mean it holds no good.
The elephant story is blown all out of proportion in this debate. Here you have a man who relates a story about errors in scientific knowledge, calculations, beliefs and conclusions, and uses it to demonstrate that entrenched “truths” are often wrong. While it was undoubtedly a pity, these were not sacred animals, their demise probably did not cause any lasting harm to the environment, and while some who knew them personally may mourn them, the event would have been lost in the vague mists of time had Savory himself not brought it up for a greater purpose. (Rather than polar bears (what?…why…?) think of 30,000 British dead lost in one day of the Battle of the Somme … mourned…… then gradually forgotten, the world goes on, and though plenty of blame was allocated, no-one ever came forward to claim it.)
Well duh. The point is the livestock walk from feeding area A to feeding area B, fertilising and disturbing the soil in barren area C along the way.
It only took over 30 years and the slaughter of 40,000 elephants for this environmentalist to find out what has been known about for centuries, maybe he should have done his homework before becoming a maniac elephant killer. This guy does not deserve the praise that he is receiving, he should be punished for his environmental ignorance. But, obviously he is sorry and bears a lot of guilt about what he did and I believe in forgiveness, there is a morale to his story that Alarmists and this new breed of environmentalists need to take heed of.
Geoff Sherrington says:
March 9, 2013 at 8:43 pm
farmerbraun says: March 9, 2013 at 7:02 pm “Organic” because it arose from a concern for conservation of soil carbon , or organic matter.
If you don’t mind me asking Geoff, what exactly is the problem that you have with that?
……………………………
I do mind you asking because the movement has gone from one stupid concept to another.
FB: we are talking about sustainable agriculture, right? I tried to make that clear. So I provided a definition. Who cares what the whackos think?
Of course the scientific method and everything that it implies is taken for granted.
” If you have been sucked in by the mistruth of some of the basic assertions, ” . . .
Try not to put words in my mouth; you appear awfully defensive or condescending . . . or something.
Here it is again:
‘To work as much as possible within a closed system, and draw upon local resources.
To maintain the long-term fertility of soils.
To avoid all forms of pollution that may result from agricultural techniques.
To produce foodstuffs of high nutritional quality and sufficient quantity.
To reduce the use of fossil energy in agricultural practice to a minimum.
To give livestock conditions of life that conform to their physiological needs and to humanitarian
principles.
To make it possible for agricultural producers to earn a living through their work and develop
their potentialities as human beings.
Those are the aims; the tools are the various sciences. What’s the problem?
@ur momisugly Mike,
You weren’t suggesting (March 9, 2013 at 9:23 pm) that Allan Savory was unaware animals need to eat, surely.
You just HAVE to wonder what the affect of snow plows is on the historical albedo from snowfall. 10 inches of snow melts faster now because we clear the heat abosrobing surfaces we have to drive on…
On the whole very good. Never the less, at 50:30 of the film Savory is explaining the Holistic Framework, culminating in the statement “and then we assume we are wrong and we complete the feedback”. Advice to Allan Savory: listen to your own advice. You need one more epiphany.
CO2 is the chemical feedstock of all biological growth starting with plants. Carbon sequestration is so wrong headed it makes my head hurt. Desertification was happening long before the industrial age and the carbon scare. CO2 is not the problem, it is a part (holistic) of the solution. If more plant growth is desired, more CO2 is needed. The results of numerous FACE experiments prove that the benefits of increased CO2 across the botanical spectrum include increased biomass crop production and increased water use efficiency (drought tolerance). I guess being shunned for heretical views about animal husbandry was traumatizing. Who wants to be banished again over CO2 heresy. To quote the film again: “birth, growth, death, decay.” CO2 is recycled through the ecosystem. Hooray for decomposers.
Did he just say six trillion cars worth of pollution come from burning grasslands?!?!
1 hecatare = 6,000 cars
Burning 1,000,000,000 hectares in Africa every year equals 6,000,000,000,000 cars, right? That is a pretty massive source of GHG, yes? Is it accounted for in the models? On that scale? Are his numbers even correct? I am wondering. He seems pretty knowledgeable.
OK, Willis I get your point.
I felt the same way when I watched the video days ago which my good friend (which sends me stuff from SKS) posted on his Facebook pg , but he is at least open to debate so I hung in there. To be honest I thought Allan Savory was a bit of a kook (a global warming kook) because he was talking about carbon and climate change etc. I did a search for Allan Savory on all the skeptic and warmer websites and came up with no matches, nothing, nota.
So I was surprised to find it on WUWT and so I watched it again with an “open mind” (my open mind is pretty skeptical) ignoring all the climate change, carbon – methane stuff. It seemed to make some sense, and I was surprised to see your first post:
“Nice find, Anthony. No news to me, I wrote about it ‘here’.
Best to all,”
I clicked on “here”, and didn’t see anything about Allan Savory or his works so I was a little disappointed with the first Willis post.
That’s why I asked whether you thought he was right or wrong.
Also, at Burning Man, “Willis’ Excellent Adventure” would you have misted Allan Savory thoroughly (all exposed skin), if you knew then what you know about him now?
Thanks for answering my question, I really enjoy all your posts. Wish I could express myself as well as you can.
Phil
Calvin Long says: March 9, 2013 at 8:44 pm
“… Ruminants have nitrogen fixing bacteria in their stomachs. This is why they can survive on such low quality forage. Cattle can be fed on news paper and molasses and can still produce weight….”
From my memory, Calvin, that should read newspaper, molasses and urea... …. cattle can survive on some very low protein feed, but if you go too low eventually you need add nitrogen to keep the rumenal bacterial population alive …
Sparks says: March 9, 2013 at 9:40 pm
It only took over 30 years and the slaughter of 40,000 elephants for this environmentalist to find out what has been known about for centuries, maybe he should have done his homework before becoming a maniac elephant killer. This guy does not deserve the praise that he is receiving, he should be punished for his environmental ignorance.
I’m starting to worry about the level of debate we are attracting these days … one little mention of carbon, a simple hat tip to the CAGW beliefs, and some start foaming at the mouth, go into full “anti” mode, and perhaps miss the rest of the story…
There are plenty of scientists out there forced to, or choosing to not take the CAGW doctrines on head-on, yet who still go about promoting their own programs and beliefs.
Isn’t “Reversing Climate Change” the same as “Producing Climate Change”?
dang …sorry mods – third try ..(italic quotes) please delete above
markx says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
March 9, 2013 at 11:08 pm
Mike says: March 9, 2013 at 9:23 pm
… seeps back into the Earth as underground aquafers that dominate the globe…
If you want to re-claim desert…do what the israelis do, what we do in the Southwest: Cultivate, plant stuff, irrigate, put in nutrients. , composts from uneaten food, mulch and whatever to re-forest areas that have become dry through cycles of Earth climate.
… I live near Las Vegas where nothing has grown for thousands of years except for cactus and mesquite and such. The Las Vegas Valley now has more trees than ever and even pollen problems each Spring, where there was never any real growth.
It is also well-known that simple nutrients added to soil cause a total change, no cow required…
The “only” choice presented, is NOT the only choice.
Hi Mike … all the above I agree with … we have a huge capacity to regrow forests grow trees, and re-vegetate areas … but, some dry regions are not so easy and have resisted our best efforts.
In my opinion Savory is simply supplying another method of doing so which may be highly applicable to some environments… it also makes much sense to me that herbivores/ruminants may play a vital role in maintaining grasslands and this should be explored, we should not simply take the simplistic approach that they only cause harm. Jumping on the CAGW bandwagon thusly: We don’t need a bunch of methane-farting cows (or goats, or sheep, or whatever) running crazy… verges on lunacy IMHO.
And there is something ironic in such a debate to state the following …especially when we should stop eating animals that just cause us heart disease anyway…. when the debate on the causes of heart disease are hugely contentious and becoming more so, and new discoveries and old falsehoods are revealed every year.
This statement too may be in error … “.. We have plenty of phosphate …”
The Achilles’ Heel Of Algal Biofuels: Peak Phosphate
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml (and many other references)
Willis did ranching, FarmerBraun does pastoral farming (Producing livestock?), I worked on a dairy farm and we were close friends with the family that owned the farm; so when there was some kind of urgency my father rousted his sons (5) and we went to help.
Dairy farms are work, every day, all day, every year. Cows get darned unhappy if they’re not milked on schedule and the milk loses quality if the graze loses quality. Manure collected while the cows are inside (bitter cold weather, milking) is dumped into a spreader, or shoveled if the collector breaks down. Hay, timothy and meadow grass is harvested from the fallow areas of the farm, dried and stored for winter food.
What a dairy farmer does is likely no different in process; but they sure don’t use anything that requires extra effort every day. Like Willis I have a healthy respect for farmers, but the moment someone tells me they grew up on a farm and learned to get up before dawn every day and worked till after dark rain shine winter summer, they most likely grew up on a dairy farm. Yeah other farmers do get up before dawn and work till after dusk, but only the dairy farmers must.
Old news and has been practiced actively for a very long time. Chickens, ducks, geese and other birds have been moved from location to location; including gardens. The birds are quite good at eating bugs and weeds but leaving vegetables alone, something cattle and other browsers are not good at.
Many of the so-called organic chicken producers are using a similar process so that the birds get to ‘free range’ along with exercise. The difficulty with the organic producers here is making the operation cost effective.
If you do not smell manure on a livestock farm, then your nose is broken or you have a cold.
Animals are funny that way, the more that goes in the front, the more that comes out the back. Collected manure gets rather sharp and collected concentrated animal wastes are not chemically locked in sawdust/woodchips. Unless someone changed the meaning of absorbed. Collected absorbed animal wastes should be spread sparsely as their urea content will burn vegetation. Fowl wastes (including chickens) and even rabbit droppings exhibit these properties. Composting is another way to render the animal waste kinder to plants.
Aye! Or even beat the basic concept of rotational farming that, as an above poster pointed out, is described in the bible.
Willis, thank you. I posted about a friends goats in a different thread where I couldn’t figure out they munched seven feet up the trees. I never saw them reach that high but I certainly believe they could jump up and use the tree trunk to get higher.
What’s missing from most off the above posts is that water is required to reclaim desert. If land is tenable for reclaiming from desert without adding water then planting and fertilizing are the ways to go. Sorry for those that are offended; fertilizing using critters works so does using fertilizers made from bat, gull, elephant guano, or phosphate/nitrogen/potassium chemical reclamation of other sources. Without a fresh water source, adding critters and plants to desert land will yield skinny critters (if alive) and few plants.
One of the cool things in the Western United States is desert land after a thunderstorm swings on by dropping the annual quotient of precipitation. Plants that were lucky enough to be where the water fell quickly sprout, grow and flower; the standing plants are put on a quick growth and flower and perhaps fruit. It becomes a beautiful river of flowering plants for a few weeks; seeds form and the land reverts to that gray brown dusty look. But only where precipitation actually fell, or if it fell in sufficient quantity in the runoff areas (washes and gullies).
Hardpan is mentioned above several times. Hardpan is not caused by critters. Yes, a lot of critters repeatedly walking standing in the same spot will make for hard soil; but that is not hardpan. http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/hardpan.aspx. A farmers quick solution to hardpan is deep tilling to break up the upper surface of hardpan.
Hardpan is a layer where water collects and often stands causing a ‘sour roots’ condition. There are many plants that will not tolerate standing water as their roots rot especially during dormant seasons. A frequent recommendation for hardpan soil is planting alfalfa, a nitrogen fixing legume that’s great for soil and animals love it. Alfalfa requires water though, but the roots reach deep and break up hardpan over time. Which is a major reason farmers plant their fallow fields with alfalfa.
Three more things:
1. I have seen first-hand how neglected/abused soil can be restored to productivity by rotational grazing. If the bureaucrats don’t want to believe it, fine. That’s their loss. BTW, one of the things you watch for is the presence of dung beetles. When they are absent, the piles of manure just sit around. When dung beetles are present, they break up the manure and disperse it within a few days, if not overnight.
2. I have to wonder whether some desert dwellers don’t actually prefer to be surrounded with an impassable no-man’s-land (as a defense against incursions by neighbors), or whether deserts haven’t been created by those who sought to get rid of nearby neighbors. In other words, if you remove your neighbors’ food sources, you force your neighbors to move away (or weaken and die).
3. People who practice this type of grazing talk about “building up” the soil. Once the organic matter (a/k/a “carbon”) is re-introduced to the soil, it doesn’t simply disappear when the next crop grows. The benefits of it continue as long as you avoid killing and dessicating the soil with chemical fertilizers and such. Therefore, if Savory wants to talk about sequestering “carbon” in the soil, I would allow it.