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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It is people like Savory and Norman Borlaug (Father of the green revolution in farming) that are the real contributors to humanity and their legacies will long outlive them. I can’t say the same for the likes of Michael Mann, the Sierra Club, James Hansen, Gore and other none contributing parasites of humanity.
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.
Too simple, no villains, no wonder it’s the first we’ve heard of it. Good to know there’s hope.
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.
I have limited download so this may have been it the long version of Alan’s talk. The first thing cows do when they stand up is take a dump or urinate, often both. A herd under attack from predators drops a lot of nutrient in a small area. That in itself is handy for growth of the new crop particularly when the soil is disturbed. The other nature marvel is the dung beetle ( actually the several hundred species) that bury the dung up to a metre below ground level. Their tunnels allow water penetration and a route for roots to find deep nutrients which plants then bring to the surface. Burying the dung also inhibits the breeding cycle of flies etc. Climate change can’t be fought as some politicians and environmentalists wish to do and neither can nature be “fought” but we can adapt to the former and adapt with the latter. There will be a war of course as the logical and practical combat the feel good know nothings of the environmental lobby.
In answer to Elanor @ur momisugly 1:15 the animals were not grazed on the bare paddocks but they were locked in for the night. They would bring with them a load of grass that they would chew the cud on and extract moisture from. During the night and in the morning they would dump the lot prior to being let out to graze. After several nights the paddock was locked up and another paddock used for a night paddock. On our farm the night paddocks were rotated into growing paddocks and were always very productive.
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.
As an environmental scientist formerly involved in land management and land rehabilitation I once attended a lecture by an American scientist (sorry can’t remember his name) He demonstrated that if you had 1 horse in a 1 acre paddock for 1 year that paddock would be a permanent dustpan or mud patch depending on the season. However if you subjected that same 1 acre paddock to the same grazing pressure by putting 365 horses for 1 day that in 1 years time the grass would be 6 foot tall and lush. Rotational grazing works but it does require management. New Zealand sheep farmers are masters of the process.
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.
i was under the impression that the Sahal, the grassland bordering the Sahara, was moving north gradually. At least NASA data shows that it is happening.
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
“95% of that land can only feed people from animals”
That’s not part of the consensus, there’s a group of people who won’t like that.
“Peter Ward says:
March 9, 2013 at 3:36 am”
Maybe we should just ban Africa? /sarc off
But seriously, intersting read.
http://www.weather.com/outlook/weather-news/news/articles/hurricanes-where-do-they-come-from_2011-07-22?page=2
Says enough that I started watching the video thinking that Anthony must have had an overnight visit from the pod people and ended up grabbing the full length version.
An Interesting, practical and positive win-win solution to a real problem. The eco-loons will hate it. Just watch the opposition from ‘big green’ should he ever get the funding to prove the method on a large scale.
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.
I’m a sceptic. In fact, when it comes to Man trying to “put nature right” I’m a downright cynic. So I started to watch this with all sorts of pre-hatched thoughts about “great, but what will the unintended consequences be?”
Having watched the short version through, all I can say is common sense 1 – cynicism 0. If (sorry, the cynic still needs the qualifying “if”) the results really are as good as he showed there, that really is a breathtakingly simple approach to so many problems!
Certainly “a bridge in the climate debate”. Hopefully Dr Savory will find out his lecture is a sticky on WUWT and reads the comments. Could have far-reaching effects. Sounds as if the Brit skeptics grind their teeth at Prince Charles’ contribution to the debate, but Charles has endorsed Savory’s work. The Savory Institute seems to be locked into “Hockey-stick climate change” alarmism. Maybe take the comment “I’m no expert on carbon” as an invitation.
As others have mentioned, the repeated genuflection to CO2 as the real reason for warming was a little bit annoying but perhaps that is the only way that anyone can get a hearing in the current climate (sic). There are unfortunately, many areas where ‘experts’ have thrown out the old ways of doing things, made money and reputations, and been totally and completely wrong. At least Allan Savory accepted that he had been wrong and changed the way the land managers worked. He can now show empirical and visual validation that his methods emulating the movements of herds actually work.
Perhaps, Jens Raunsø Jensen says: March 9, 2013 at 2:24 am who criticizes the Savory methodology can show similar empirical and visual validation that the ideas from the ‘international developing agencies’ for which he has worked for 30 years, have had the same success – I doubt it.
Remarkable. But when you think about it, it is really just the sort of common sense our ancestors have employed for centuries.
Rotating cattle to allow grass to reestablish, natural fertilisation, crop rotation, leaving fields fallow for every year in four.
We were doing all this in the middle ages. So why has modern man forgotten it?
There are a couple of papers here that make similar points about deforestation.
Not only does it destroy soils and their ability to store water, they can also impact climate on a regional basis by reducing rainfall.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/deforestation-makes-droughts-worse/
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.
Fantastic. Wow. I wont say more than this because it still has to sink in.
Anyway, we where discussing this here and noticed that our sheep… Sheperd acquaintance refutes to allow a few sheep for a long time in the same land. We thought it was the right thing to do. He just said no, and keeps taking the entire herd from one pasture to another for short stays. He’s unable or unwilling to say why. We’re wondering if life taught him something we plainly missed.
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.
In the early 1970’s I was interested in motorcycle riding. There was an article in a magazine about individuals riding on arid land in Southern California. Naturally there was a group of people who objected to the motorcycles “tearing up the desert” and they wanted it stopped.
The land was hard packed dirt that pooled water on the surface when it rained, and the water either evaporated or became run off. The motorcycles cress-crossing the desert would break through the top layer of soil and allow rain water to enter the ground. In just a couple of years, the plant growth in the desert was so thick it ended the motorcycle riding.
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.
I’m impressed, but not completely convinced.
I was not aware that the world is faced by a desertification crisis. I believe that NASA data shows an increased greening over the last decade. Is there a good source of data that shows global desertification?
His presentation was spoiled by the constant climate change nonsense. Mankind has always prospered during the warm periods and many great civilisations failed during the cold periods, usually due to drought.
To be fair, he did state that CO2 might not be the greatest problem. But surely he must be aware of the fertilisation effect of increased CO2?
It’s a bit odd to claim these problems are linked to climate change while claiming they can be solved by changes in farming practices.
Those comparison photographs are impressive. But I hope they were taken in the same season.
He deserves a lot of respect as he had the integrity to admit he made a catastrophic mistake. If only climate scientists had the same integrity….
Chris