Peak Soil and Sustainable Cheeseburgers

I read an article this morning from The Grist (full article here) called Peak Soil. The story centers around how our globe is losing its precious skin of healthy topsoil at alarming rates. They mention how Ethiopia loses nearly 2 billion tons of topsoil every year to erosion, and how the plowing and institution of industrial agriculture has ruined lands and people's lives for nearly one hundred years.

The brown color is made by the soil washing away downriver

The angle I found most interesting in this article was when the author turned the focus from loss of topsoil to herd-animal grazing. The author points out that there are very large herds of cattle, goats, sheep, and other grazers all over the world, and makes the claim that grazing those animals on our lands is destroying them. The article lists all kinds of statistics about how many sheep there are in China, etc... To those claims, I beg the question; 'why wasn't the globe facing mass desertification problems when there were herds of billions of large herbivores roaming the plains and savannas before man instituted practices of mass-extinction of wild herbivores and the domestication of what was left?'  Before the advent of agricultural management of herd animals, the hoards of herbivores that criss-crossed our lands vastly outnumber the pastured herds we now manage. Why, then, were these much larger herds not creating the same kind of devastation we see today? The answer is in the method.

When a large herd of grazers are penned up on a large parcel of land, each individual will actively seek out, in a lazy way, their favorite grasses, leaves, and plants. Usually there is enough land per animal (often around 2 acres per cow in the case of cattle) that the grazers can spread out and casually browse from the salad-bar selection. This means, first of all, that they don't eat the plants that aren't their favorite, which often leads to proliferation of troublesome weeds in pastures, and secondly, that the plants they do like aren't given the proper amount of time to recover between each visit from an herbivore, so they weaken and eventually die. When the plants die, there is less to hold together the soil, and come the next rainfall, away it goes.

Naturally, as you may have seen in NOVA documentaries or in the Planet Earth movie, given their natural habitat, large herds of grazers move in tight packs over large areas of land. In these dense clusters, they are constantly on the move (think of the baby caribou that is keeping pace with the whole herd only minutes after being born) because they are always being followed by predators. What this means for the ground they cover is that every plant gets nibbled down, the top layer of earth is churned up from all the hoofing and trampling, and the whole area is fertilized and irrigated by the herbivores. The plants then have ample time to recover before they are bitten again.

A suffering ranch in Zimbabwe, 2004

This natural pattern of grazing was the inspiration to Allan Savory (www.SavoryInstitute.com), a South African pioneer in regenerative agriculture practices. He asked himself, 'why can't we mimic the natural movements of grazers in our own pastures?' This question led to the development of what is know as Holistic Planned Grazing techniques, which replicate the effects of large herds moving in their natural pattern.

2005 - One nasty drought, one year of Holistic Grazing

He has tried and trued his practice over many years, and this one ranch in Zimbabwe is only one example. Simply by changing the way that we manage our herd animals, we can actually increase the health of soils, increase the living ground cover (plants), and drastically reduce the erosion rates. These images, taken over 4 years, clearly show what kind of impact the appropriate management of herd animals can have. The site where the photos were taken transformed from a near-desert into a lush grassland, with no input other than cows.

2006 - after a decent rainy season

2007 - after a major drought

 It is clear in the pictures how profoundly this land changes, even during years that experienced severe droughts, this ranch continued to improve its soil, cover the bare earth, produce healthier, happier, heavier cows, and mitigate whatever erosion might have been occurring down to nearly nothing.

It seems only fair that articles like this one from Grist would point the finger at herd-animals for committing these atrocities. On the surface of the issue, it seems that the animals are indeed overgrazing, and thereby destroying our precious lands. However, once we look a little closer, we can see that the animals are only doing what they do best, and actually, the methodology employed by the people who graze them is what is truly detrimental to our planet.

We can stop erosion and still feed the world! There are answers out there!

Nature had it all figured out. A planet in ecological balance for thousands of years... then we came along and thought we could do better... (hubris much?) We have dealt with the consequences of that choice for long enough, and now we are able to see the ways in which Nature really did have the right idea. We can emulate those natural patterns to our gain! We could swim upriver against Nature as much as we want, but we certainly won't cover as much ground if we work with the flow of the water...

May we all get the opportunity to eat meat that helped to halt desertification, erosion, climate change, and pollution!

Cheeseburgers that heal the world!!