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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
TomR,Worc, MA says: “You guys are obviously swimming in “Big Cattle Money”, ya poor demented things.”
Thanks! No doubt the Wikipedia tag-team will soon be calling him a denier of almighty CO2 climate god.
So sad that it took him 40,000 elephants murdered to figure out he was wrong. So good to see that he did have the courage to realize it.
Animal “poo” and pee are an essential part of fertilizing land. I have some Amish ancestors and it is part of the tradition my Dad taught me. Cattle and other grazers to be rotated between fields (as others noted above per Holland) and “manure spreader” for things from the barns and pens.
Absolutely nothing surprising to me in what he has learned. (What surprises me is that they didn’t know it.) Looking at that land near to desert, my first thought on ‘how to fix it’ was manure. Naturally delivered if possible, spread if not. (You can also do ‘green manure’ but that’s another topic… but possible to use hardy drought tolerant crops like some desert buckwheats to get the goats started…)
When ground is too dry and hot, the answer is ‘cover it’. With growing desert hardy plants if possible. There are whole sequences of plants that are known. Some that move into bare and disturbed land. Others that follow. Let any plant get started, then start raising the manure rates and increasing soil tilth. (Tilth is a word that ought to be mandatory for anyone doing ‘land management’ to study and understand). All that talk of ‘soil carbon’… it used to be called tilth…
Ah well, give them another 50 years and they might catch up with old time farmers. Maybe they all ought to be assigned an internship on an Amish farm…
FWIW, in my back yard I have a “toy farm” agronomy system. An essential part of it was “some herbivore”. I have “free range bunnies” (they are hind gut fermenters) that take that role. I sometimes call them rapid self mobile compost piles… I was always taught that you need some livestock to keep the soil tilth up, and fertility high. My Dad learned that back before the great depression… from folks who had known it even longer.
I have a system of ‘small fences’ and let the bunnies into a ‘square’ when it is time to graze it off. Just like he’s talking about with larger herds… You’d think they would have talked to a farmer or two at some time or other…
I have no worthwhile comment to add, but simply say how much I enjoyed this brilliant presentation.
A bridge to nowhere, Mr. Watts.
Why would honest people need a bridge in a debate with charlatans, in the first place?
You couldn’t find more unsavory character to build this bridge for you. Alan Savory is an epitome of everything that can go wrong in a scientist. He is an alarmist, there is nothing new in what he says (except for framing traditional methods in tasteless “holistic” language), his approach will never turn Sahara or Gobi into a green paradise, and any good methods of farming, however “enlightened,” are impossible to apply in countries lacking consistent application of private property laws and effective, rational land use regulations — that is, in most of the countries suffering from desertification.
Alan Savory politicized science throughout his long career, serving a bloody dictatorship. Were I a believer, I would hope that souls of forty thousand dead elephants ravage him forever in a place where he soon should be spending the rest of eternity.
AF
‘Anssi V. says:
March 10, 2013 at 2:25 pm
To Alexander Feht: I have always regarded you as a reasonable and very intelligent guy, but in this case I kindly suggest that you think again. I present you with just one simple point:
1) Quoting from his wikipedia page (you may contest this but that’s another question): “When Savory made a public statement that if he had been born a black Rhodesian, he would have been a guerilla fighter and although he urged white Rhodesians to understand why he would feel this, Ian Smith denounced him as a traitor”
And this proves me unreasonable — how? Traitor he is.
Mugabe is a mass murderer who destroyed his people and his country.’
Traitor to what? Traitor to Ian Smith who ran a self-proclaimed government which had an electoral franchise that simply excluded the vast majority of citizens? Traitor to a regime that could only maintain itself by force of arms? The closest analogy is that of the American patriots in the American Revolution who were fighting for no taxation without representation in much the same way as were the black Rhodesian who were fighting for their democratic rights. They were not traitors. They were democratic patriots.
Using Mugabe’s subsequent career as an ex-post facto excuse is illogical.
No-one then knew that the consequences of the colonial era, Smith’s illegal grab for power, the impact of a civil war, or of the treatment Mugabe got during his 11 years in prison for doing nothing much more than promote democracy. I had heard he was tortured but cannot find a link.
No-one knew then that he would go on to destroy his country, starve his people, wreck an economy, and treat vast numbers of his people in much the same way the colonial forces, starting with Rhode’s invasion force, treated black Zimbabweans during the colonial era, and indeed the way in which Mzilikazi’s impis treated local Zimbabwean tribes before Rhodes.
Anthony.
Like you, I am interested in what this person is saying and think it is important. However, he severely undermines his credibility by talking about CO2 and … we’re heard too many cranks with dreamt up schemes who tell us they have the solution.
So, can he back it up? Can he demonstrate that the greening was not just a fortuitous coincidence. E.g. you are most likely to try such schemes when things are really bad. It is therefore extremely likely that things will get better naturally.
However, he did show a number of apparently control experiments, but even so, I can’t personally endorse someone who talks so much rubbish about CO2 unless I’ve seen corroboration from other people.
So, can his work be corroborated?
EMSmith
Humans have the capacity to change virtually any desert into a grazed or even a farmed landscapes. The great aerial shots of irrigated centre pivot crop circles surrounded by bare desert demonstrate this point completely.
Humans can do this by adding water, energy, nutrients and propagules. In fact, humans can turn concrete inside a shed into ‘grazing country’ or ‘agricultural land’. In our farming circles we called this farming ‘out of a bag’. It is not generally sustainable, btw. Salinisation of irrigated desert lands, mining of fossil ground water, and the sheer uncompetitive costs of adding all nutrients, water, energy and propagules make the long run sustainability (economic and environmental) of turning the desert into farmland a questionable proposition.
The issue here is whether one particular human action: adding more cattle and following a rotational grazing regime, will reverse desertification in rangelands and/or whether it will turn deserts into rangelands. There is no evidence at all for the latter. For the former, there is some trial and error evidence provided by Savory, but there is also some hard science that questions the trial and error evidence.
As I understand it, the key point being recognised and taken into account by Alan Savory is this:
Herbivores and semi-arid or seasonal grasslands did not evolve as a simple two component system, and when our grazing practices, whether as nomadic herders, multi-million hectare rangeland farmers, treat it as such, then the system breaks down and ends in soil erosion and desertification.
They evolved as components in a three-part system: herbivores, grasslands and PREDATORS, the predators being essential to keep the herbivores bunched together in large herds and to keep them MOVING, so that they do their work of trampling and fertilising, but do not stay on any one patch of pasture long enough to completely destroy it.
The first thing that mankind has done anywhere where they have put down roots and farmed has been to eliminate the predators, and if Alan Savory is correct, then that is why our grazing practices have become unsustainable.
The simplest and most cost effective answer then should be to re-introduce predators to keep the herds moving. And yes, limit their numbers: one pride of big cats can only eat so many weak or sickly cattle a year, plus the occasional slow-moving, elderly geologist. But put them back and restore the balance of nature in the grazing lands and, if Alan Savory is right, you will protect and restore the soils too.
Australia must be a slightly unusual ecosystem in this context, as it had no major predators apart from us, as nomadic hunters, some rather scrawny-looking dingos, and the occasional wedge-tailed eagle. As a result of which the grazing fauna have had no need to swarm together in huge herds for protection, and have simply got away by moving fast across rocky/thorny ground for relatively short distances to escape from the occasional lone predator.
Over the past 150 years though, at least here in the Western Australian rangeland grazing country, this ecosystem has been impacted destructively by the complete removal of those ‘predators’ that were on the land, the fencing in of vast enclosures, and the provision of unnatural supplies of bore water to support large flocks of introduced herbivores (sheep and cattle, but also enormous numbers of feral goats, camels, donkeys and wild horses).
In the West Kimberley for instance, there are hundreds of thousands of feral donkeys. When I was working up there a few years ago on Diamond exploration, the mustering helicopters we were using had just spent a season culling an estimated 30,000 of them, in the in the vain knowledge that at least that number would be replaced by the following year. They cull them because they spread bovine TB amongst the cattle, eat the stockfeed and damage the soil, tracks, water tanks, troughs, etc.
But how much more effective might it be to put some large predators on the ground that would then carry out this work for free? These would concentrate on the smaller donkeys and avoid the larger and far more dangerous Brahmin cattle, but might also remove the occasional brucellosis case that was coughing up blood in a corner somewhere, thereby improving the overall health of the herd.
And what to introduce? Well, the last time I worked up in central Sumatra, there were still enough tigers around to worry you as you made your way back to camp, alone, along an overgrown jungle track at dusk. But there won’t be for very much longer with the rate at which the jungle is being consumed for timber and plantation land. So for my money, I’d establish half a dozen breeding colonies of them up in the greener, better-watered gulleys of the King Leopold Range and see how we go from there.
I mean, there are already a couple of million large cats up in the Kimberley: huge spinifex-coloured versions of the domestic moggy of twenty generations ago (now straw coloured I am sure because the wedge-tailed eagles get all black and white or coloured kittens), but it’ll probably take them another ten thousand years before they are big enough to eat the donkeys.
Larry, as you probably know, Australia used to have major reptile & marsupial predators, such as a giant, Komodo dragon-like goanna & this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsupial_lion
But then humans arrived to assume the top predator role in this complex ecosystem & directly or indirectly caused the big carnivores’ extinction on the mainland if not always in Tasmania, where the thylacine “wolf” or “tiger” survived into the last century & the T. devil is fighting for its life against cancer.
There are places in America where tabbies are evolving into bigger cats, too.
Larry Kirk
Good one. You are right about the huge numbers of introduced large grazers and browsers and rooters (horses, donkeys, camels, goats and pigs) that are wrecking Australia’s rangelands and deserts. Incidentally, in Savory’s terms, they move big distances to get to new sources of food but they may also be concentrated for lengthy periods of time while dying in large numbers near isolated water holes.
But, but, but… great big furry striped cane toads in the Kimberleys? Now, where did that go wrong the last time?
http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/eserv.php?pid=UQ:12564&dsID=Grigg__Pople_Beard._1995._Movements_of_feral_camels.pdf
“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.”
It seems possible from the wording that they are talking about seizing cattle and relocating it for greening purposes elsewhere. Africa would be best served by having cheap and abundant coal power, and by expanded ability to sell and ship crafts and products worldwide on ebay.
@Grey Lensman
So that’s another bridge, between the ivory towers and the rural poverty. Maybe that’s the more important bridge. It is the “little people” on the ground who might make this work.
Broadcast it by word-of-mouth (text message; lots of villages have a cheap mobile) and let people figure out if it works.
Interesting to read the replys here. After 450+, just like Willis’ posts, there are people who clearly don’t read, don’t watch, and don’t think about what is being said. He isn’t proposing to irrigate the desert, he isn’t proposing to introduce ferilizers other than those produced by the animals themselves. He does have demonstrable proof that it works, at least in certain areas, and works quite well there.
Good ideas and good science are independent of the political views of the propagator. You have to think about what is being said, not who is saying it. Linus Pauling was a pacifist, his contributions in Chemistry are exemplary, stop mixing up the message with the messenger folks!
Savory is quite right about the status quo as you can tell by a recent ‘Green’ decision here-
http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2012/01/31/437171_latest-news.html
although unlettered mavericks like Peter Andrews were obviously on the same wavelength and could demonstrate similar results in Australia-
http://www.naturalsequencefarming.com/
Holistic Management International has a set of freely downloadable materials (free registration required), giving a more detailed explanation of Savory’s decision making framework (one version of it, as it has evolved over time).
http://holisticmanagement.org/free-downloads/
There were a couple of common misconceptions when reading through the comments, which I would like to address:
Savory is NOT suggesting that “rotational grazing” would be the only way to reverse desertification. Instead, he argues that without using the tool of ANIMAL IMPACT (which most commonly translates to controlled grazing, but not always) it is not possible to achieve positive changes in large enough scale. For example, what Geoff Lawton has done in Jordan is kind of cool, but try to make that kind of thing work over millions of hectares… The same applies to all mechanized tools to break up the hard top layer so that moisture can penetrate: Yes, it is definitely better to have something growing on the ground instead of leaving it totally bare, however this kind of system does not rebuild the soil very well – compare that with for example Joel Salatin’s farm, where topsoil is being built at a rate of inch per year on some areas.
Savory also argues that unless land use and optimization of the four ecosystem processes is not deeply integrated into the decision making framework being used, decisions are unlikely to be financially, socially and environmentally sound, very possibly resulting in degradation in at least one of those areas. He has created the Holistic Decision Making framework to address the issue, but he is NOT claiming it to be perfect. It is definitely a big step in a right direction, IMHO.
Paul Wanamaker says:
March 10, 2013 at 10:03 pm
“And we are burning every year in Africa more than one BILLION hectares of grasslands……..He’s not talking about sequestering in that case. Yes he’s talking about c02 production, and he’s talking about how damaging burning is to grassland because it leaves the soil unprotected.”
I’m interested in seeing the evidence that fire is categorically harmful to grasslands rather than an essential element. It is estimated approximately 50 million acres of North American prairie historically burned yearly (Assuming a 2.5 yr fire return for tall grass and 7.5 yrs for mixed and short grass prairies). And this figure doesn’t include the forest and savannah fires.
Most people have grown up in the era of fire suppression—my question to you is – where is the billion hectare African burn rate derived and what was this burn rate 100-200 years ago?
I’m also unsure how you describe this natural process (fire) as producing damaging pollutants. I see it as a natural process that transport bio-available nitrogen, mobilizes phosphorus, and a host of other critical system effects.
It is estimated prehistoric California burned 4 million acres annually. The mountains of California were normally obscured from view by a haze of smoke until very recently. http://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/FireForestEcology/FireScienceResearch/FireHistory/FireHistory-Stephens07.pdf
EPA is making it nearly impossible with its air quality standards to burn prairie land at the return rate needed to keep the land from seral change to shrub and brush. The narrative that fire is harmful to grassland will do to our remaining prairie what the old narrative did to elephants. I cannot emphasize enough that this “no fire” meme has immense negative cascading consequences.
As the result of fire suppression and the CAA we in NA are living with the “cleanest” air quality in centuries if not thousands of year. If we take the historical emissions of prairie and forest fire we see that EPA’s reference conditions for PM2.5, NOx etc are a joke.
What I liked:
“One acre of land emitting the equivillnt of 6000 cars and we have over a bllion of acres emitting, “We incresed the grazing stock by 400%”
What I didn’t like:
Fossil fuels is bad, methane is bad, “I shot 40.000 elephants” by mistake.
And all the posters here giving credit to a guy who really has the ability to adapt and improve himself but refuses to see the elephant in the room which is the fact that our huiman civiliztion burning fossil fuels, driving SUV’s, eating steaks is not the problem.
Allan Savory’s TED Talk was inspiring, although I did wonder how many cows it would take to re-vegetate the Sahara.
The hour-long presentation at The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability– which goes by the acronym of FEASTA (?)–was also inspiring, but given more time, the New Agey parts of his thinking are more salient. “In 1984 we discovered the “Holisticgoal” (no typo), etc.
It was disturbing to read FEASTA’s promotional flyer for Mr. Savory’s speech, which used his words and photos to promote the same overgrazing myths that he has spent his life fighting:
“According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, raising livestock contributes 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in CO2 equivalent terms, if the forest clearance and pasture degradation to which it leads are included.”
Under two photos that Mr. Savory uses to prove the benefits of livestock grazing, FEASTA writes the exact opposite:
“This river (above) in Zimbabwe used to flow year-round. Then overgrazing by wandering livestock bared much of the soil in the surrounding area. Today the river flows only as flash floods following heavy rains. Biodiversity loss is severe, livestock are starving, and most wildlife has disappeared.”
“This shot (below) of a nearby river was taken on the same day. It used to have similar problems but now it always has water and flows most of the year. Drought is rare, biodiversity is increasing, and wildlife has reappeared in large numbers.”
Typical underhanded environmentalists.
Alexander Feht – I did not mean to imply any unreasonableness on your part – just suggested that you would reconsider your position (something that reasonable and intelligent people can do).
My point was that Savory was exiled and had thus used up all the leverage he had to influence the political situation in Zimbabwe. This does not imply that he would have condoned the actions of Mugabe.
In some post-911 terrorist attack “ramblings” written by Savory (http://theconversation.org/archive/ramblings.html), he writes “I am not indulging in hindsight as many times on the public platform I said that Mugabe’s greatest allies were Ian Smith and his generals who, while waging a ‘war against terrorists’, were winning political victory for Mugabe and ensuring the end of democracy for years to come.” (there’s also a more detailed explanation about the guerrilla warrior statement in the text)
He has worked towards his life’s goal, i.e. finding ways to reverse desertification, with what has been available to him. That might still make him a traitor in your book. I think we can respectfully agree to disagree.
Instapundit doesn’t usually link directly to WUWT but today he did, after I reported his initial link as being unrelated.
“HOW TO GREEN THE WORLD’S DESERTS AND REVERSE CLIMATE CHANGE by eating more meat! Well, sort of.”
So, after watching 20+ minutes of video purporting to be evidential, I come away with the understanding that peer-reviewed research by well-trained, sincere, dedicated scientists created increased desertification while needlessly destroying 40,000 elephants, and so we must now abandon peer-reviewed science in favour of charismatic road-shows and join in a true-believer crusade in order to save the world.
My conclusion: we are so screwed!
“The simplest and most cost effective answer then should be to re-introduce predators to keep the herds moving.”
I think what he suggests in this video is the most cost effective: farmers keep cattle moving according to a plan mimicking the effect of predators. It is cost effective because any farmer can buy some semi-desertic, desolated land for a low price, and turn it into productive green pasture assuming the proper technique is used.
IMO it would not be easy for an ordinary African rancher to do this. It would require substantial capital to buy the land & cattle, to carry the livestock over the rainy season, to herd & tend them & guard against rustlers & predators, plus the pastoralists’ society would need to recognize & defend property rights, as well as provide the necessary financial institutions, to include sufficient acceptable circulating cash, which is often in short supply in much of the world.
A herd of 1000 head could start with perhaps 500 cows & 50 bulls. The amount of privately owned land needed depends of course on its eventual quality, but would also be substantial. The arithmetic is simple, based upon whatever assumptions you make as to the average acreage needed to feed 1000 head for a day, multiplied times roughly 240 days, depending upon actual dry season period, plus pasture for the rainy season, mainly summer in southern Africa.
A co-op might work, with the cattle sorted by branding after the rotational grazing season. The governmental role should be kept to absolute minimum.
Alexander Feht says: March 11, 2013 at 2:18 am
Gee, Alexander, you seem remarkably sure of yourself, absolutely certain you are correct.
Hang on, is that not what you are criticizing in others?
Are you not doing exactly that which you criticize? (albeit with the addition of considerable mouth foaming).
Anthony,
reverse global warming? You can’t reverse what’s not there, for a start.
Also, I’d suggest that those people living in these semi-arid regions know absolutely best what to do and what to leave to keep their environment healthy – because that’s exactly what they are doing for centuries and generations, IMHO.
More often than not it’s the implemenation of ill-perceived “western” agricultural methods, which is ruining these peoples’ lands and lives, rather than sticking to their own inherited, tried, tested and proven methods of living off the land..
So rather than driving them into yet-another agricultural adventure of continental scales, I’d suggest to rather stop selling them western high-yield seeds, which need vast amounts of fertilizer, pesticides and water to thrive, but leave them alone and do what they know is best for them for millennia, already.
And this goes for farmes, herders and nomands, alike.
Hah, If the phrase hasn’t already been coined… I’d like to:
Skeptical genius says:
March 10, 2013 at 7:16 am
Can we please get back to science…. Jeez.
http://www.srmjournals.org/doi/abs/10.2111/06-159R.1
———————————————————————————————-
Seems to be the same synthesis paper used by wikipedia to support the quote provided by adrien in the post after yours that
“Land management researchers have heavily criticized the concepts of holistic management […] Virtually no active academic rangeland ecology researchers have come forward to espouse holistic management principles”.
The problem is that, if you look at the entire paper (available here http://allenpress.com/pdf/i1551-5028-61-1-3.pdf ) rather than the abstract, you find the following quotes from the literature this paper references (table 2 of the paper):
Sampson (1951, p. 21) ‘‘two fairly distinct viewpoints [exist] among range conservationists and operators regarding the merits of rotation or deferred-rotation grazing.’’
Heady (1961, p. 191) ‘‘specialized grazing system has no advantage in live stock production over continuous grazing, at least with good or excellent ranges under comparable stocking rates and degree of care in other management practices; … other management factors
are more important in the production of livestock than system of grazing.’
’
Van Poollen and Lacey (1979, p. 253) ‘‘land mangers should place more emphasis on proper stocking intensity, and less on grazing system implementation.’’
O’Reagain and Turner (1992, p. 43) ‘‘stocking rate is a major determinant of both range condition and animal production, and is possibly the most important management variable under the direct control of the grazer. Relative to this variable, the grazing system employed is of minor importance, with there being little apparent difference between continuous and rotational grazing systems.’’
Given that these quotes have been elevated to “table” status in the introduction of the paper, it’s fair to assume that they’re the strongest reflection of the paper’s own conclusions that the authors could find. That’s fairly normal academic practice – introductions are generally the last part of a paper to be written and you may well refer to research that counters you conclusions but you sure don’t highlight it in bold on page 1!
So, out of those quotes:
Sampson(1951) [ https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/jrm/article/download/4410/4021&ei=FPQ9Ue7ROvGB7QbyuoHoCw&usg=AFQjCNEuLJN-rRp1YZONP7Rh_xrLbN60NA&bvm=bv.43287494,d.ZGU ] is, in it’s own words, an “incomplete resume of the literature” and is fairly non-committal in its findings, although it does give credence to the practical experience in favour of rotational grazing of stockmen actually working the land.
Heady(1961) [ http://ojssandbox.library.arizona.edu/index.php/jrm/article/download/13372/11410&ei=y_U9Uej8L47b7AbVmoDACA&usg=AFQjCNFax9SS7N8_fRR0hxpQDkWiG_R4Cw&bvm=bv.43287494,d.ZGU ] is focussed heavily, in the body and conclusions, on livestock production rather than land recovery. Indeed, it states clearly in its conclusions that there appears to be little difference “at least with good or excellent ranges” while allowing that several studies show benefits of rotation in recovery of poor pasture. The studies it reviewed also tend to relate to “conventional” rotation where areas are graze for a significant portion of the growing season at low stocking levels compared to wild herding.
Van Poollen and Lacey (1979) [ https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/jrm/article/download/6946/6556&ei=Dvw9UarCI4eM7Abm74GIBQ&usg=AFQjCNGSFgYbRaLoJZjBx7XuIXtlhfJUCA&bvm=bv.43287494,d.ZGU ] fails entirely to effectively address the effect of high intensity, short duration grazing, The nearest it comes is in the paragraph immediately preceding the conclusions, where it states in relation to simultaneous changes of intensity and grazing duration, “These values can be added proportionately to account for the overall herbage response. It is assumed this would be an attitive effect”. What Savory is asserting is precicely the opposite – that the effects are NOT additive or linear. His assertion appears to be based on practical experience which, whether scientifically controlled or not, trumps assumption every time!
OReagain and Turner(1992) doesn’t appear to be freely available but the abstract is here [ http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02566702.1992.9648297 ]. Note that in the abridged conclusions available, as well as the one selected above, they say ” regular seeding or vigour rests, or rests to accumulate fodder, appear essential.”
I’m not going to spend time going through the other references in Briske et al because I’ve been doing this as a distraction from a troublesome Longines repair and can’t really justify more time right now.
But the point should be clear – when “getting back to the science” be very wary of pointing at a paper without actually checking the claims it makes about previous conclusions! IPCC report anyone?