Guest post by Dr. Tim Ball – a response to this WUWT post on Allan Savory
Dr Allan Savory proposes stopping desertification and controlling climate change. His focus is a large natural vegetation area called grasslands. His idea of raising cattle to maintain grasslands is founded on the grazing and fertilizing cycle provided by herbivores. Bermuda Grass is an example of a grassland plant species that thrives on being constantly cropped. It grows thick and dense the more it is cut, making it ideal for golf greens. Savory’s ideas all sound attractive and ‘green’ and not without some merit, but are riddled with problems. It is not clear, indeed unlikely, that his proposals would measurably alter natural climate change.
Watching his presentation I imagined all the ‘environmentalists’ recoiling at his suggestions. It is not long since radical environmentalists like Jeremy Rifkin were blaming cattle for most of the evils of western society in his 1992 book, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture. True, Savory showed sheep, but he should also have introduced the idea of restocking some areas with natural herds, such as bison in North America. These areas would become world funded preservation areas of natural species as George Perkins Marsh proposed in his 1864 book Man and Nature. Marsh was also among the first in modern times to idenitfy the relationship between removal of vegetation and desertification.
The major conflict is between domesticated and wild herbivores and the production of foodstuffs. This included growing grains to feed the cattle or overgrazing. Presumably, Savory is suggesting domesticated animals to also expand the food supply. The problem is expansion of the food supply usually creates an increase in the human population, which Savory says is at the heart of the world’s problems.
Savory’s Assumptions
He makes three major assumptions, all arguable. First is the claim the world is overpopulated. It is not! People, apparently including Savory, believe it is because of the neo-Malthusian claim underlying the alarmism of the Club of Rome in the 1970s. Claims of overpopulation primarily came from Paul Ehrlich’s work, but his predictions were so inaccurate it’s a wonder he retains any credibility. The reason the ideas remain is probably because supporters of his ideas are in positions of power today. For example, Ehrlich’s co-author of a truly frightening book Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment is President Obama’s Science Tsar, John Holdren. In addition, graduates of 1979s and 1980s environmental studies programs are now running the bureaucracies using those ideas.
The second error is his identification of land ‘suffering’ from desertification. Savory identifies five regions on a world map (Figure 1). He is using the term desertification as it evolved back in the 1970s, that is as an environmental problem caused by humans. The problem is almost all the regions he identifies are natural climatic regions of desert and grasslands. He says there is “no other cause” than humans for desertification, which is only true because of his definition. In a 2005 work, “The causes and progression of desertification,” Geist identified more than 100 definitions. Any region that loses vegetation becomes a desert, which happens all the time as climate changes. If you don’t know how much change is due to natural causes you can’t determine the human portion. It is the same as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) examining only human causes of climate change without knowing how much it changes naturally.
The third error he makes, is to assume climate change is new and caused by humans. It isn’t. The amount of change is well within natural variability, but the IPCC and its proponents persistently work to prove it is outside and therfore unnatural. Savory is apparently vulnerable to the “human cause” claim because he blames humans for desertification.
Basic Arid Zone Pattern
The trouble is it appears Savory lacks some basic understandings including;
• how deserts are formed and change with climate change,
• how or why the major hot deserts are generally located within 15 to 35° of latitude each side of the Equator and,
• how grasslands are a transitional area of slightly higher precipitation that surround the deserts and lie between the deserts and the forests. Grassland names differ from Steppe in Russia; Great Plains in the US and their northern extension the Prairies in Canada; Llanos in northern South America; Pampas in southern South America; to Savanna and Veldt in Africa.
Figure 1: Areas of desertificcation identified by Allan Savory
Source: Screen Capture from his presentation
The Sahel is just such a transitional region between the rainforest on the coast of west Africa and the true desert of the Sahara. Alarmist stories appeared about the expanding Sahara desert associated with the cyclical Sahelian drought that visited the region between 1968 and 1974. Famine accompanied the drought and overgrazing was blamed. It, and another drought in 1984-85, launched the environmental career of Bob Geldof.
A similar desertification situation was identified in the Thar desert on the Indian-Pakistan border in the 1970s, with claims the area wasn’t totally ‘natural’ but created by overgrazing, especially by the ubiquitous goat. University of Wisconsin climatologist Reid Bryson theorized that removal of vegetation cover increased surface temperatures, which caused increase convection and advection (wind). Resulting soil erosion and winds carried dust to altitude. Here it absorbed sunlight directly, raising upper air temperatures while reducing surface heating. Warm air over cold is an inversion, a very stable situation that prevents cloud formation, thus perpetuating the aridity. As I recall, much money was spent on bringing water into the region to plant grasses and stabilize the surface to break the cycle. The grass promoted was Marram, a well known sand dune stabilizer.
World Hot Deserts and Grasslands
It is impossible to get even crude estimates of the percentage of land surface that is grassland or desert. Land is 149 million km2 of the Earth’s total surface and hot deserts make-up an estimated 15 to 30 percent (Figure 2). The Sahara provides a scale because it is 9.1 million km2, almost identical to the land area of the US. The hot deserts of the world in order (millions of km2) are;
Sahara – 9.1
Central Asia – 4.5
Australian – 3.4
North American – 1.3
Patagonian – 0.7
Indian – 0.6
Kalahari – Namib 0.57
Atacama – 0.36
The word ‘hot’ is in bold because, as Koppen (Figures 4 and 5) recognized in his climate classification system, there are vast cold deserts. The North and South poles are among the driest places on Earth.
Figure 2. Major hot deserts generally straddling the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
In his system, Koppen identified “B” climates primarily as those with insufficient ‘effective’ precipitation to support trees (BS for Steppe climate) then grass (BW desert climate). He further divided BW climates into BWh (coldest month average above 0°C) and BWk (at least one month average below 0°C). When doing a Koppen classification you begin by eliminating the B climates. Savory lumps them together as shown in Figure 1.
Estimates for grassland are more variable than for deserts varying from 15 to 40 percent of the land surface, excluding Antarctica and Greenland. Savory showed, unknowingly, why defining grasslands is so difficult. He showed clumps of grass with bare ground in between, implying they were examples of desertification. The problem is such conditions are natural and exist over very large areas with grasses known as tussock.
The sun is directly overhead the equator twice a year and is never more than approximately 23.5° from the vertical. This results in maximum heat energy and therefore high year round temperatures. It creates what was known as the “heat equator”, which, because of land water differences is not coincident with the actual Equator. Belem on the Amazon in the interior of Brazil has a range of 1.6°C from the warmest to the coolest month.
High temperatures result in high evaporation and rising warm air. The vertical air currents mean very little horizontal surface wind, a problem in sailing days. English sailing ships recorded the conditions and from their records George Hadley, in 1753, figured out his circulation cell (Figure 3). Clouds develop daily and result in heavy rainfall almost daily. Duitenzorg, Java, averages 322 days a year with thunderstorms.
The warm air rises to the tropopause where it is now cold, dense and dry. Deflected away from the Equator it descends. As it descends increasing pressure creates adiabatic warming. By the time it reaches the surface it is hot and dry. The amount of moisture is the same but chances of condensation and cloud formation is virtually zero. Average relative humidity for the Sahara is approximately 19%. Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas and low levels in desert region mean the ground and air heat and cool very rapidly. Cloud cover in the Sahara varies from about 10% in winter to 4% in summer.
The highest shade temperatures in the world occur such as 58°C in Libya and 56.7°C in Death Valley, California. At In-Salah, Algeria, the temperature dropped from an afternoon high of 52.2°C to an overnight low of –3.3°C, a range of 55.5°C in about 12 hours. These conditions mean the air holds less water vapour, but the air temperature drops well below the dew point temeprature thus creating condensation.
Figure 3. Hadley Cell circulation has air rising at the equator and descending between 15 and 30° latitude. A similar cell exists for the Southern Hemisphere.
Heated air at the equator creates low pressure, the Equatorial Low, while descending air creates high pressure in the subtropics, the Subtropical Highs.
The pattern of high rainfall at the Equator and deserts in the Low Latitudes is disturbed by the land/water distribution and influence of ocean currents. The greatest disturbance occurs in eastern Africa and Asia so the desert zone extends through Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and western China. Low latitude landmass in the southern hemisphere is restricted but includes southern Africa, Australia and South America. In South America the Andes Mountains block the extension of the deserts across the entire continent. However, where they exist on the coast they are among the driest on earth.
Savory refers to the rock paintings of herd animals in the central Sahara. They occur there because of climate change when increased rainfall supported grasslands. During the last Ice Age the Polar climate zones expanded pushing the mid latitude temperate climates toward the Equator. Traditional climate referred to the wetter periods in the desert zones that were coincident with Glacials as Pluvials. When the Earth warmed to Interglacials, as now, the desert regions experience Interpluvials.
Swings between Pluvial and Interpluvial are macro climate changes, however smaller changes are occurring all the time. As a result, the pattern of climates shown in Figures 4 and 5 are averages and constantly changing.
Figure 4: Koppen classification The Americas.
Figure 5: Koppen classification Africa, Eurasia and Australia
The Sahel is shown as BSh or hot grassland right across Africa on the south side of the Sahara (BWh). In addition to the longer term climate changes, cyclical changes in precipitation cause drought cycles such as the one from 1968 to 1974. Australia is another large classic region of desert (BWh) surrounded by semi-arid grassland (BSh).
Importance of Condensation
Savory draws attention to the potential of condensation moisture in the semi arid areas. This is not new, as people for centuries have gathered condensation moisture. I grew up near the dry chalk lanscape of Salisbury Plain and learned early about “dew ponds”. Gilbert White, a renowned 18th century English naturalist, described the ecology around Selbourne. He described a dew pond near the village as “…only 3 feet deep and 30 feet in diameter, that contained some 15,000 gallons of water which supplied 300 sheep and cattle every day without fail.”
In many dry regions people put xerophytic plants close to large rocks, which provide sufficient overnight condensation to maintain the plant. On a larger scale, ancient Greeks built large pyramids of rock from which condensation trickled down to a network of clay collection pipes. Called air wells, they are a well known technique. There were 13 such pyramids up to 12 meters high near the ancient Greek city of Theodosia on the Black Sea.
Savory is correct, condensation is the forgotten moisture, as I described a few years ago and more recently repeated here. The issue was the difference between official predictions of poor yields and the actual average or better yields on the Canadian Prairies. “In the late summer of that 1980s year, daytime temperatures were high, generally 27-28°C, which meant it could hold lots of moisture. At night, temperatures dropped to record lows around 3-5°C and moisture deposition was heavy. In a three-week period this yields upward of 50 mm of precipitation equivalent. Farmers know that amount of moisture can be critical to “fill out” a crop. It has several advantages over normal precipitation. It occurs at night when heat stress on the plant is reduced. Evaporation is reduced. Distribution is more even and widely distributed than rainfall. Unfortunately, it is not moisture counted in the weather statistics used by all the experts. Ironically, it’s moisture farmers know about because, until it evaporates, it can delay harvesting.”
Savory’s method can take advantage of the moisture, but it will only produce grasses in the natural grassland regions he defines. To change true desert (BWh) to grassland requires much larger volumes of water than condensation provides.
It is not clear how his proposal will stop climate change. Presumably, he assumes changing the surface will change the albedo, which will change the energy balance. The problem is there is not much difference in albedo between desert, which ranges from 15 to 45, and grassy fields with ranges10 to 30. The desert range is wide because deserts are only partially sand dunes. The dune areas known as Erg are higher albedo, but are a small percentage of a desert. The much larger, lower albedo, area is the hamada or rock strewn areas that are 70 percent of the Sahara.
Savory’s comment about the importance of microclimates is more critical than he realizes. Most vegetation, and certainly the grasses, grow in the 1.25 m below the Stevenson Screen, the official weather station. The climate below that level is markedly different, as Geiger identified in his marvelous 1950 book, The Climate Near the Ground. Any attempt at planning or changing conditions in this portion of the Biosphere requires far more information than is currently available.
Change is the norm. Climate change is normal and current changes are well within natural variability. Allan Savory’s proposal to stabilize grassland areas has some merit, but requires much more understanding and context, especially about climate patterns and climate change mechanisms. Of course, as the world cools in the next few decades the colder climate zone will expand and the desert zone will shrink naturally. The grasslands will benefit from cooler wetter conditions as the natural cycles continue.
A.D. Everard says it better that I can. Gail Combs if I understood your post you are doing the same thing Savory advocates. You are using strip paddocks (30 ft X 300 ft) he is using much larger areas but allowing each to lay fallow for a relativity long period between use.
@Gail Combs
I wrote previously that I though Savory’s methods have been lifted from somewhere else. I suspect him of being a beneficial con-man. Do you know if he lifted his methods from someone else? Someone like medieval farmers or Texans? He gave credit to nobody for inventing this method.
The bigger question is, why are you posting off-topic?
I can’t help but feel that Dr. Ball’s article is more of a gut reaction to what he perceives as a warmist argument, rather than a good analysis of Savory’s work, work which to me at least does not seem to be based upon fear of global warming.
In the 10 minute or so TED talk, Savory did pay some homage to the climate change gods, but mainly he was focused on stopping what he perceived to be increased desertification due not to climate change, but to human intervention in the natural environment of an area.
If nearly all researchers believe, or believed, that grazing causes desertification, and removes animals from the land as a result of that belief, then Savory is just telling them that, based on his evidence, they are wrong. And in being wrong, they are doing the very damage they are trying to prevent.
He seems to make his case well, has proven it works in many areas, and doesn’t seem to be a climate change/global warming fanatic, although I suspect paying the theory some respect in his talks is the only way to get government funding nowadays, should he want it.
Some wheat ranchers wait for the dew to dry before harvesting & some don’t.
IMO work done by real climate scientists has shown that Subpluvials are associated with warmer conditions. The Neolithic Subpluvial coincided with the Holocene Climatic Optimum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Subpluvial
The Abbassia Pluvial (a longer period) was similarly associated with the Eemian Interglacial, the early part of which was warmer than our current Holocene, without benefit of a Neanderthal (Mousterian) Industrial Age.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbassia_Pluvial
However, driven by changes in Earth’s tilt, wet Saharas also occur during Glacials:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian_Pluvial
However, note that this pluvial ended before the Last Glacial Maximum, the coldest part of the Wisconsin/Wuerm glaciation.
These cyclic, natural climate changes lie behind the Sahara Pump Theory of species migration & spread or retreat.
Population & starvation projections made in the ’60s & ’70s, when I was a student of Ehrlich’s (regarded by undergrads as a daffy Marxist prophet of doom) have failed in large part due to demographic transition, the spread of free market economics & the much-maligned Green Revolution (new crop varieties). More CO2 doesn’t hurt, either. The observation had already been made at that time that people have fewer children when they’re richer, conditions of life less unpredictably hazardous & two kids become as liable to survive to adulthood as ten babies born earlier.
World population is liable to stabilize around 10 billion in this century (UN medium scenario), or even decline to six billion (low scenario), rather than continue on up to 16 billion, as in the UN’s IPCC-like, straight-line extrapolation (high scenario). The UN has three bases covered. With Europe & Japan essentially going out of the reproduction business, who can say?
Ehrlich was however right for one about a plague coming out of the tropics to be spread around the world by jet aircraft passengers. If you make enough Four Horsemen-like apocalyptic predictions–conquest, war (Nuclear Winter!), famine & death (pestilence not actually included in Revelation)–one might come to pass.
A colleague of his “taught” that sheep create deserts. Naturally.
higley7 says:
March 25, 2013 at 5:52 am
Savory’s ideas for de-desertifying lands are great but they have nothing to do with climate change.
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I don’t agree. Climate change is put forward as the cause of desertification caused by humans. Savory shows that humans are a cause of desertification, but not as a result of global warming. Rather, our simplistic land management practices are a major cause of desertification because we have removed the natural predators from the environment, which used to keep the herds tightly bunched. So, by using fencing to simulate predators and herding, we can restore the natural environment much better than if we were simply to remove the grazing species.
Yellowstone National Park is one of the classic examples of human mismanagement. Park managers removed the wolves that were a part of the natural environment and the health of the park quickly deteriorated. What Savory shows is that if you use cell grazing and rotation you can mimic the actions of the predators on the grazing species. This will cause the grasslands, which co-evolved with the grazing species and predators, to recover.
The message I got from all of this is that “common sense” solutions to natural problems often backfire due to the Law of Unintended Consequences. We think we are so smart, that we know everything, and don’t stop to consider that nature may not be quite as straight forward as we think it is. This sort of arrogance is seen daily in the discussions of global warming and over population. Underlying these discussions is the assumption that nature is simple and humans are much smarter and know better. What nature shows us time and time again is that nature is much more complex than we assume and the results of change, natural or human are very hard to predict.
The lie in the Precautionary Principle is the assumption that we can reliably predict the effects of precaution. As a precaution against street crime one might stay at home. Only to be killed by a stray bullet from a drive by shooting. Or one might stay at home only to slip and fall in the bath, and die by drowning. (baths being one of the most lethal devices ever invented).
Several commenters seem fixated by the ‘reclaiming the desert’ meme and suggest that Savory is deluded, since real desert is simply too dry.
Perhaps these commenters should consider the word “reclaiming” – it clearly cannot be used to apply to any land that has been desert for some time – it can only be used to apply to land which is now desert-like but was not within a relatively short timeframe.
If Savory has demonstrated a method that appears to help to recover such lost productive land, what possible motive have the nay-sayers got in trying to put him down?
As Willis is so fond of saying, quote exactly what you think Savory has got wrong, and explain why, instead of attacking strawmen.
Kasuha says:
March 25, 2013 at 6:57 am
Overpopulation is a generally undesirable condition where an organism’s numbers exceed the current carrying capacity of its habitat (wikipedia). There are clearly regions on the Earth where this definition is met with the “carrying capacity” being the food supply.
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wikipedia’s over simplistic analysis ignores the reality of human populations. Human’s are not limited by food supply, but rather by energy supply. The greater the amount of energy available to a human population the greater the population density that can be supported. This is because human beings are able to make use of technology to convert energy into food. For example, one modern farmer today can farm an area that would have taken thousands of peasants to farm in the past. This allows this single farmer to grow enough food to feed thousands of high density city dwelers.
The limiting factor for raising livestock in mostly arid regions is surface water for drinking. The presence of non-natural surface water during dry spells always leads to overgrazing and then the killing of the capstone grass species. A drive west of Fort Worth will show these effects. Mesquite has taken over once lush grazing lands and further West along the Caprock, much of the region is devoid of the once 1M tall grasslands. Many ranches are almost stripped bare. A return to light stocking rates and periodic fire will return the grass over time AND greatly help the water table.
I do think that grass has an effect on rainfall at certain times of the year. I have personally been on healthy range land in May when the sun comes up and felt a huge increase in warmth and moisture from respirating grass. A simple calculation of the amount of water vapor transported by deep grass to air is enough to saturate the lower 100M of air over the grass during the day. This increase in moisture has to have an effect on thunderstorm formation during peak heating. Of course the water has to be transported there during storms, but the grass can create its own climate during times when the soil is partly or totally saturated.
fhhaynie says:
March 25, 2013 at 7:09 am
I think trees would be more effective than grass….
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That is the same feeling I came away with from all my readings. Some where (I think on WUWT) I read trees actually ‘make rain’ by releasing aerosols that act as nuclei for rain formation. (Hop I got that correct)
Gail Combs says:
March 25, 2013 at 4:28 am
The key to Haemonchus is the life cycle. The life cycle (egg to mature adult) is 17 to 21 days. THAT IS WHY YOU ROTATE!
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Very informative and shows that nature is much more complex than is accounted for in “common sense” knee-jerk solutions. The animals have co-evolved with the parasites and by driving the herds from one area to the next, the predators were increasing their own food supply by reducing the number of animals lost to parasites. Also, by killing the weak, the predators were likely removing those animals that were infected, further reducing parasite transmission and increasing the number of animals available to the predators.
In other words, the actions of the predators were increasing the health of the grasslands and the heath of the prey species, making more food available to the predators. Rather than decreasing the prey species in numbers, the predators were increasing the numbers of prey, in effect creating their own food supply by their actions. Which makes sense. Evolution favors those animals whose actions increase their food supply.
Although in French, quite an analysis about it:
http://ddata.over-blog.com/xxxyyy/2/32/25/79/Leroux-La-dynamique-de-la-grande-secheresse-sahelienne.pdf
John Tillman says:March 25, 2013 at 7:44 am
[…]
A colleague of his “taught” that sheep create deserts. Naturally.
I haven’t raised sheep, but had next-door neighbors who did. My understanding was a problem with sheep is when they graze, they eat the grass down to the dirt, killing a lot of it. Cows and horses seem to bite it off ~1/2 to the ground.
JDN says:
March 25, 2013 at 7:38 am
@Gail Combs
I wrote previously that I though Savory’s methods have been lifted from somewhere else….
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The ideas of strip grazing and the planting of trees to stop deserts has been around for decades. E.M. Smith mentions an article from back in the ’70s by a guy in India who took a marginal rainfall area, overgrazed by goats and turned it around. He penned the goats and had the kids bring food to the goats instead of herding them, placed the manure from the pen into an anaerobic digester where it fermented to produce methane for cooking and fertilizer for a garden and planted Leucaena leucocephala a nitrogen fixing tree that shaded the ground and allowed grass to grow. The same plot of land using simple but effective management tools built out of the local clay now supported the family. link
The tree has lacy leaves BTW. Leucaena leucocephala photos
It has some digestibility problems but goats can eat it if introduced slowly so the gut adapts. (You NEVER change foods fast on livestock. Since they can not vomit they colic or bloat and die.) If prepared right it can be used as human food.
To continue…
check sources and methods Willis. Way better data is out there.
“The Global AEZ results presented are based on a half-degree latitude/longitude world climate data set (Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia), 5′ soils data derived from the digital version of the FAO Soil Map of the World, the 30 arc-seconds latitude/longitude Global Land Cover Characteristics Database (USGS Eros Data Center), and a 30 arc-second digital elevation data set GTOPO30. While representing the most recent global data compilations, the quality and reliability of these data sets is known to be uneven across regions. Especially the quality of the world soil map is reason for concern. It is based on a 1:5,000,000 scale map and it is generally accepted that its reliability may vary considerably between different areas. At present substantial improvements to the soil information is in progress, as for example the recent SOTER updates for;
South America and the Caribbean (FAO Land and Water Digital Media Series #5)
North and Central Eurasia (FAO Land and Water Digital Media Series #7)
Northeast Africa (FAO Land and Water Digital Media Series #2)
Eastern Europe (FAO Land and Water Digital Media Series #9)
Another issue is that the current status of land degradation cannot be inferred from the FAO Soil Map of the World. The only study available with global coverage, the Global Assessment of Soil Degradation (GLASOD) compiled by ISRIC and UNEP, indicates that state and rate of various types of degradation might very well affect land productivity. However, the GLASOD study itself offers insufficient detail and quantification for useful application within Global AEZ.
Also the agronomic data, such as the data on environmental requirements for some crops, contain generalizations necessary for global applications. In particular assumptions on occurrence and severity of some agro-climate related constraints to crop production would, no doubt, benefit from additional verification and data.
Socioeconomic needs of rapidly increasing and wealthier populations are the main driving force in the allocation of land resources to various kinds of uses, with food production as the primary land use. For rational planning of sustainable agricultural development socioeconomic considerations are indeed crucial. So far, in Global AEZ the use of socioeconomic information is limited to the definition of modes of production and the quantification of ‘input-output packages’. They are referred to as the land utilization types, taking, to some extent, into account the socioeconomic context of production decisions and conditions.
For the above reasons, the results obtained from this Global AEZ study should be treated in a conservative manner at appropriate aggregation levels, which are commensurate with the resolution of basic data and the scale of the study.
While various modes have been pursued for ‘ground-truthing’ and verifying results of the Global AEZ suitability analysis, there is a need for further validation of results and underlying databases.”
ferd berple says:
March 25, 2013 at 8:14 am
…… shows that nature is much more complex than is accounted for in “common sense” knee-jerk solutions. The animals have co-evolved with the parasites and by driving the herds from one area to the next, the predators were increasing their own food supply by reducing the number of animals lost to parasites. Also, by killing the weak, the predators were likely removing those animals that were infected, further reducing parasite transmission and increasing the number of animals available to the predators…..
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This is one of the reasons I have a major problem with Animal Rights Activists. Here in my county in North Carolina they passed a law requiring a minimum of a three sided shed for horses. A Shed? In North Carolina? For a Horse? You have to be kidding. A THREE sided shed with a bunch of horses with no means of escape from the Alpha mare means broken legs and a kicked out wall – (experience talking)
I insisted my horse whose mother died of heaves (asthma) in a dusty barn, be left outside all winter in New Hampshire. She never developed heaves liker her sibs did and was still going strong at 27 when I sold her as a school master.
Insisting farm animals be treated by a vet as you would a lap dog or as happened in one case near me, arresting a guy just because his sheep died in the pasture (HC probably) is idiotic. We have enough ‘fragile’ livestock from the show and commercial people as it is. A study by Purdue University found there is now a problem with commercial chickens due to the restricted genetics.
To put it bluntly we NEED the third world peasants with their half stared animals and the hobby farmers who are preserving the old breeds for the hardy gene pools they represent.
My husband has been talking via e-mail to this guy in Siberia. link But his photos taken as he was transporting them show animals that would get you arrested in the USA or UK. You could count the ribs through all that fur in the photos yet the animals survive outside in Siberia. Photo They are 13 to 14 hands (135 cm) and autumn weigh is 450 kgs and survive on grass alone. Nice strong chunky ponies… I WANT ONE!
Some quick aspergian comments I don’t have time to linearize:
Man has been stealing land from the grips of desert since the neolithic revolution 13000 years ago.
When farmers can’t farm, their farms revert to desert.
Marxist and their buddies have been promoting war in Africa since the 50’s.
Farmers can’t farm very well in a war zone.
Not even getting into grain shipments undercutting the local markets that farmers need in order to sell their produce.
Got to go big code review! YAY
Steven Mosher says:
March 25, 2013 at 9:00 am
Thanks, Steven. You accompany that statement with a discussion of the known limitations of the GAEZ dataset … but you don’t suggest what dataset is “way better”. Every dataset has limitations, so it’s no surprise to myself or any serious student that the GAEZ dataset has limitations.
Given that, your claim would be more believable if you actually, you know, linked to the “way better data” that you say is out there. I’ve given the GAEZ numbers for grassland and hot and cold desert, and you claim there’s more accurate data out there … somewhere … but gosh, Steven, where are your much better numbers?
Because as it stands, your comment is like far too many of your postings—it hints at greatness unseen, but it provides us with nothing of substance. I’m not saying there isn’t better data out there, you’re a smart man, you may well be right.
But with the paucity of information contained in your post, there’s no way to know.
w.
I cannot compete with the information shown by all the contributors above but I do know a man who works in all different parts of Africa and who returns to the UK between contracts and he tells me that although the world’s total population may be of not major consequence, the population of parts of Africa is devastating to the natural growth of trees in particular and other vegetation and backward methods of farming effectively caused desertification. A most interesting autobiography by Lewis Hastings, uncle of Max Hastings who was farming in Africa before the first world war as well as in the 1920s and 30s and he claimed that the deserts of East Africa had been caused by bad farming methods.
Steve Keohane says:
March 25, 2013 at 8:31 am
….My understanding was a problem with sheep is when they graze, they eat the grass down to the dirt, killing a lot of it. Cows and horses seem to bite it off ~1/2 to the ground.
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You are almost correct. Horse bite the grass and normally do not graze too close unless forced to but they do have a taste for that tender young grass. Goats and especially sheep graze much closer. (they make good lawn mowers) goats rather eat weeds than grass since they are browsers like deer. Cows are interesting because they wrap the tongue around the grass and tear it. Because of this method they can not eat grass under 3 inches where as a horse with two sets of front teeth or a goat or sheep with an upper set of front teeth and a hard palate can.
I’m with A.D.Everard on this one.
Considering the audience Savoury was addressing I thought his presentation was high art.
He should be in sales.
I feel most of Dr Ball’s points are addressing the sales pitch nonsense, rather than the main point,
that point, that we might do better on the lands that evolved with migrating grazing herds by mimicking those herds, is simple and testable.
The idea can be carried out at local levels, there is no need for UN intervention and it either works or it does not.
Savoury offerred before and after pictures, are any WUWT visitors in a position to provide a status report on those lands today?
How is the practise of this theory holding up over time?
How do the test lands compare to the “normal” lands around them?
John Moore says:
March 25, 2013 at 9:52 am
I cannot compete with the information shown by all the contributors above but I do know a man who works in all different parts of Africa and who returns to the UK between contracts and he tells me that although the world’s total population may be of not major consequence, the population of parts of Africa is devastating to the natural growth of trees in particular and other vegetation and backward methods of farming effectively caused desertification…..
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I am not surprised at all surprised. The Dust Bowl years of the 1930’s show how bad farming methods combined with a drought cause major problems. (Great photos at the site)
The law and explanation
Contour plowing, crop rotation, tree rows and grass filter strips along with the newer no-till planting methods and planting of cover crops like white clover to protect the soil and add nutrients over the winter are well know methods but they cost money, time, effort and education. Tenant farmers, farmers of rented land or starving peasants are not going to follow those methods. It has been three generations since we figured out how to protect the soil and the USA and UN has thrown trillions in aid into Africa. Yet we are not even seeing those methods used consistently here in the USA.
I hate driving along in the winter and seeing bare plowed ground left for months without cover. A good rain storm and you lose a couple of inches of top soil. It is not the fault of the farmer but of the system that concentrates the $$$ in the hands of the middle man.
Conservation only happens when you as an individual or as a country can afford to pay for it and that is the whole problem in a nutshell.
Dr. Ball,
Thank you for all of information, you presented it very well; however, let me disagree with you about what the central thesis of Mr. Savory’s TED presentation actually was. I don’t think that most of your criticisms really addressed the central thesis, but focused on what in my opinion were side issues or red herrings. I believe that Mr. Savory’s central thesis, as I will describe below, can stand or fall without any reference to either over-population or climate change. This itself could be a criticism of Savory, why is he bringing these side issues into the discussion in the first place?
As best I can retell it from the TED talk, Mr. Savory’s central thesis is that for the areas that have traditionally been grasslands and are currently under threat from the process of desertification, the only way to restore them to productive capacity is to use large ungulate livestock herds “mimicking nature”, and that animal husbandry is the “only” way to feed the people is from these grassland areas. These are Savory’s most important ideas – the nub of his argument if you will – and the one’s the results of his work seem to support best. Along with thesis of this goes the idea that recent livestock and wildlife management practices have only contributed to the problem of desertification – thus the tragedy of the 40k dead elephants.
If you want to refute that thesis then you must either show that the greening that occurred in Savory’s “after” pictures either did not occur, or that it occurred for some reason other than Savory’s novel livestock management methods.
Mr. Savory may be wrong and his practices ineffective, so far as I can tell from your article, as informative and well written as it was, you never really took on this issue directly. Any regular reader of this blog – people who are paying attention – will recall reports such as Philipp Mueller’s report for the GWPF “The Sahel is Greening”, or Matt Ridley’s own TED talk on how “Fossil Fuels are Greening the Earth” [to name two]; it could be that there is some other underlying process blowing at Savoy’s back that is putting wind in the sails of his theory. I just don’t think you have shown that to be the case. You wrote:
What I took away from Mr. Savory’s presentation, and you did not, is that his novel method of livestock management – for reasons he may not be able to fully explain – specifically address this issue of microclimate at the ground level. If Savory’s method turns out to have credibility, and it may not, the only plausible mechanism for its success, as far as I can see, is that “large livestock herds mimicking nature” changes the grassland microclimate at ground level in a favorable way. What else could it possibly be?
Everything Savory said about ‘climate change’ and ‘over population’ I just let go right out the other ear, it isn’t strictly related to his central thesis, at least above the local and regional scale, and seems to be more his opinion than his science. I do think there is very good reason to believe that rehabilitating a grassland area will affect the local and regional climate and directly impact the ability of the local population to feed themselves – both favorably.
What effect would any of this have on global climate? who knows. Continental interiors are still continental interiors, it’s still hot at the equator and cold at the poles, you are absolutely right about this. I just think in your zeal to disprove Savory you’ve missed his main point and fixated on areas where Savory himself overstretched his own thesis and expertise namely global climate and population. This isn’t helping the issue because we won’t learn if there is anything of merit in Savory’s methods this way. I just wish he had elaborated a little more about his methods rather than spend time with ‘climate change’.
As an aside, what would be the effect of having vast ungulate herds “mimicking nature” wandering around in the vicinity of a technologically advanced and developed society? hard to know. Not sure if Savory has thought much about the consequences of that.
I also have to strongly disagree with you when criticize Savory for being a neo-malthusian when you commit what I call the ‘Deep Green Error’ yourself when you say:
The polarity between expanding food supply and expanding population [the thesis of Daniel Quinn’s book “Ishmael”] is of course completely broken by modernity, we all should know this [even Savory]. When people become fully modern, and we see this everywhere we look, birth rates plummet to replacement [or less than replacement] sometimes within a single generation as we have seen recently in places like Brazil. Yes, in places like Africa where fertility rates are still very high due to lack of development, populations will continue to increase until they as individuals feel secure enough in their economy to make the rational decision to have fewer children themselves.
The questions I would like to see answered are: will Savory’s methods repair the world’s damaged grasslands and will this feed the people? If the answer to these two questions is ‘no’, then Savory’s theories and methods should be relegated to the ‘elephant grave yard’ of all unfit ideas. I just don’t think this has been show to be the case.
Thanks for you article.
W^3
Gail Combs says: March 25, 2013 at 9:39 am
……in North Carolina they passed a law requiring a minimum of a three sided shed for horses.
…..I insisted my horse whose mother died of heaves (asthma) in a dusty barn, be left outside all winter in New Hampshire….
……arresting a guy just because his sheep died in the pasture (HC probably) is idiotic.
We have enough ‘fragile’ livestock from the show and commercial people as it is. A study by Purdue University found there is now a problem with commercial chickens due to the restricted genetics.
To put it bluntly we NEED the third world peasants with their half stared animals and the hobby farmers who are preserving the old breeds for the hardy gene pools they represent.
Yes, the world is going crazy now … in Australia it is now illegal to leave a horse tied up and not be in constant attendance … (yeah, police called and all that) … a good horse tied up by a bridle rein would peacefully stand there (all day and all night if need be!) and 99.9% of the time there is no problem; If he does shy at something the rein will break and he’s in the same situation as if you’d let him loose. … And what about the old military horse lines? Hundreds of horses tied to a common line all night..
I talked to police who came to inspect a neighbor’s downer cow one day … she’d just calved two days before, had calving paralysis, the guy was watering her and feeding her and moving her and treating her. I explained that 90% of those get up OK in few days, and I’d seen them get up after 3 weeks too. They were very suspicious but went away satisfied. (Damned the way things go, that particular one didn’t get up, got sicker and had to be put down). But, that is the way of life … and death.
Very true too about the genetic lines …. oh so valuable and so necessary to keep.
Allan Savory map of deserts presents an area in South America going from the well known dry region of Piauí in northeast Brazil down to Patagonia (a tundralike area) ignoring that in bewtween there is Mato Grosso Pantanal -one of largest swamp areas in the world- and the extremely fertile Pampas in Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina where we find cattle and agriculture interacting closely. Sheep is raised in Patagonia and there is no way to deal with constant winds of 80-140 km/h the whole year.
Savory’s area in South America includes the western dry coast (north of Chile to southern Peru) where there is not a chance to modify it due to geographic climatic coonditions. Savory made a little misleading map of deserts.