Savory's singular insight is that grasslands and herbivores evolved in lockstep with one another. This means that to be healthy, grasses need to be grazed. Animals eat plants and stimulate their growth; they cycle dead plants back to the surface, which allows sunlight to reach the low-growing parts; their waste provides fertilizer. When a predator—say, a lion—comes into this bucolic scene, the animals bunch together and flee as a herd, their hooves breaking up and aerating the soil. Then, on a new patch of land, the process starts again. This way all plants get nibbled, but none are overgrazed. And none are overrested, which leads to accumulated dead plant material that blocks sunlight and hinders new growth.
To Savory, the conventional wisdom that grazing degrades the land is an oversimplification; what matters is how livestock are applied. He readily acknowledges that the confined animal feeding operations usually associated with large-scale cattle ranching are problematic, and he opposes cramming cattle into lots on industrial farms. But he contends that this degradation by overgrazing is a matter of time rather than numbers; he's fond of saying that one cow continually foraging in one spot will do damage where a hundred moving from place to place will not. Where feedlots will harm the land, he claims, herds of well-managed grazing animals, nibbling on native grasses and roaming from spot to spot to elude predators and seek fresh pasture—managed in a way that mimics their behavior in the wild—will restore the land's natural dynamics.
For years, many in the academic and ranching establishment dismissed Savory as a gadfly, someone outside the agricultural and scholarly mainstream who did his research in the open air and presented his counterintuitive conclusions in unscientific language. Undeterred, Savory continued to refine his framework and expand his training programs, and today his successes have become hard to ignore. Farmers, ranchers, and other land stewards who have attended his training programs have brought land back from the brink across Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. In 2010, his Zimbabwe nonprofit, the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, received a $4.8 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to expand its work in Africa. More recently, Savory won the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize, a prestigious award that supports a proposal with "significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems."
I am becoming convinced that "Pasture" will be the centre of the real new food system. It was of course the centre of the really old one - the one that we destroyed.
In America in 1850, there were 60 million bison, grazing the mid west. About the mass meat as we have in cows in feedlots today. Cows that depend on oil and corn to have miserable sick lives.
As this article points out healthy grassland needs healthy grazers. Healthy grazers need healthy predators. It's a system!
It is our non systemic approach that destroys nature's bounty.
We can learn from her - mimic her and have her as our partner.
