Allan Savory on Cows and Grasslands

Cows to the Rescue:

Spring 2013 I drove through a dust storm in Pueblo blowing in from the eastern plains.  In an instant it went from daylight to a darkness greater than night.  How do we heal a land laid barren by sod-busting, over-grazing, gas and oil pads, and dirt roads.  Allan Savory offers one solution:


So the failure of earlier attempts combined with his estimation that two-thirds of Earth is now desertifying inspired Savory to search for a new approach to protecting and restoring grasslands. And he found it by thinking naturally and looking backward, not forward.

It makes no sense that land that once supported untold millions of grazing animals on massive migrations should be destroyed by the overgrazing of fewer or comparable numbers of livestock in more recent years. And there were areas of the U.S. where cattle had been removed for decades, but the grasslands were still desertifying.

Allan Savory says the key to restoring grasslands is to manage livestock to mimic the role once played by vast migrating herds.  “Clearly we have never understood desertification,” he said. “What we had failed to understand was that these areas developed with huge numbers of grazing animals [pursued by lots of huge carnivores]. Movement kept them from overgrazing.” This way of the past could also hold the key to the future. “The only option left,” according to Savory, is “to use livestock on the move to mimic the ancient herds.” Keeping cattle more densely packed on smaller plots of land and moving them frequently keeps them from exhausting the supply of living plants, turns scattered droppings into a full blanket of high-quality fertilizer, and keeps the repeated trod of untold tons from packing down the dirt. He’s done it for decades, and the results  are impressive.

“Holistic grazing” keeps more plants alive, adds nutrients to the soil, and creates soil conditions that hold and use water instead of letting it evaporate or run off. It is now practiced by thousands on five continents, and is the focus of the work of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe, as well as the Savory Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Allan Savory pointed out a critical part of this story beyond preserving complex grassland ecosystems to sustain livestock, agriculture, and wildlife. The amount of plant life lost through desertification over decades has severely compromised Earth’s ability to take carbon dioxide out of the air. Just as we have increased the amount we’re putting into the atmosphere, we’re reducing the amount we take out.

There is a remarkable upside to this however. With all of the difficulties of maintaining a productive economy while reducing our carbon output, and mitigating the effects of a warming climate, if we can implement holistic grazing on half of the Earth’s grasslands, according to Allan, “we can take us back to pre-industrial [CO2] levels… and feed people.”

It would be wrong to think of changing the way we herd cattle as a silver bullet that will solve all of Earth and humanity’s challenges, but as a key step in promoting the kind of long-term, holistic view that Allan Savory has taken, it could go a long way towards repairing the land and our relationship to it.