[SeaGypsy]

....We have a large block of voters in this country that sees the EPA as an oppressive arm of the Democratic party and an enemy of economic growth.

These ideas, no matter how promising, all become pie-in-the-sky because the rubber never meets the road. Experimental proofs of concept are worthless if they never scale up.

What a paradox- The fenced and portioned first world desertified whilst lawless outback Africa and central Asia returning to a nomadic foraging abundance???

I noted in the presentation Allan circles most of Australia including our very wet rainforests in north Queensland and our mostly pristine savanna in the 'top end'; nitpicking though as it was just a quick sketch. Also much of the central deserts have been the way they are (green once every decade or so) for thousands of years. We do have a very different land tenure system in the arid zone in Australia, which could allow such a practice to easily be brought into being- also a history of cattle stations in co-operation with local Aboriginal people on the same land. Most of the outback is held as lease, so could handle a political reset.

The other point re. general climate change, ignores the vital importance of microclimate, which Allan touches on. Having lived all over the outback and visiting friends who have reduced the general temperature by 8-10 degrees Celsius around their homes by clever planting and micro-irrigation systems, I have felt and seen the difference, it is really stunning to drive up someone;s yard and find their yard 28 C while the ambient average is 38 C.

[Keith_McClary]

microclimate

In Saskatchewan and Manitoba you see nothing but flat fields for miles, with just a few clumps of trees here and there. Took me a while to realise, those are the windbreaks around farmers homes.

[Pops]

Sigmoid curve? haha. Maybe this guy invented intensive grazing I don't know. I really like TED talks but this one is kinda misleading and more than a little self serving.

Intensive grazing, in a nutshell, is forcing so many animals into a given area they don't have the luxury to eat only the good stuff. Then move them off and let the good stuff recover. Because of the uniform grazing the most palatable fodder is promoted instead of the least.

Think about it, you are a cow, or bull if you prefer. You and 10 of your closest pals are turned into a 40ac pasture. Cool, you nose around and eat the choice morsels then go find a nice shady spot and chew some cud. Next day, same drill, and on and on until eventually you've suppressed all the best fodder, so you start on the not so good. Repeat until all that's left is scrub and your once fine heifer behind is as thin as a rail. It is basically natural selection, but instead of choosing for the Best, most nutritious fodder, the animals EAT the best first so what becomes dominate is the worst, poorest, most unpalatable scrub.

The before shots he took were of long term overgrazed areas. Come on, he circled the sahara and implied if you ran a heard of 10 billion zebu across it, it would magically look like my back pasture. Slight overreach.

Management Intensive Grazing on the same 40ac I mentioned entails dividing up the pasture into 15 or 20 paddocks, rotating the 10 head among them. Maybe in the spring they spend a day in each paddock before they are moved, so 1 day of grazing and 29 days of growth, summertime maybe 2 or 3 days and 60-90 days of regrowth, depending on what kind of grasses you can grow.

But like the questioner asked at the end, there must be something there to graze to begin with, or at least there must have been at some point. And like Lore said, the climate must be able to support grass to begin with. That's where the photo examples are misleading. Running a heard through a desert doesn't make grass magically appear. I think the presenter was trying a bit too hard.

MSU has a great Grazing Manual but you gotta buy it, this one from Purdue looks pretty similar
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http ... ay-328.pdf

Just in case someone gets the idea I'm a denier just because I'm not gushing, I use intensive grazing on my own place and have been a booster for years:
post208117.html

[Pops]

Missouri is very big on MIG. The NRCS likes it because it stops erosion and pays bucks to convert traditional pasture to MIG. It takes an investment in hot-wire and piping and troughs. So this has backing at least right now.

Like any businessman the beef stocker/backgrounder, cow/calf operator and even dairyman see a benefit because rotational grazing increases the amount of fodder from a piece of ground and with increasing grain prices it just doesn't pay to keep hauling in grain. It doesn't matter how much grain-driven milk a cow gives, all that matters is how much profit.

So in this case it is profitable to be sustainable.

Lots of New Zealanders have moved here to start grazing dairies:
http://www.hpj.com/archives/2006/aug06/ ... homesi.cfm

[dohboi]

Thanks for the great, balanced, insights, as usual, Pops.

I am really wondering what is going to happen to the hardest hit parts of the Great Plains in the next few years. Perhaps these kinds of practices, especially if the grasses are native, drought resistant varieties, may be the best hope of at least slowing the probably inevitable desertification. Planting wind breaks of trees has been another strategy, but they will have to be drought resistant trees, too.

Unfortunately, from what I hear, things are mostly going the other direction--with high crop prices, farmers are using whatever marginal land they can plow, including areas that had been set aside for prairie restoration, to cash in quick. And the disappearance of small farms also generally means the disappearance of the wind-blocking tree rows that used to surround and stretch away from each farmhouse.

But perhaps someone who lives on the plains and has first-hand experience of current conditions can throw some light on the subject?

[Pops]

Corn ground is going for $10k/ac now. That won't be grazed until every bit of the feed lot and ethanol business is dead - or it blows away. Feedlots and corn are just too efficient, those guys couldn't even pay the taxes trying to graze on good ground. Pasture is just above CRP land as far as value.

Think about those farmers with millions in land value and millions more in equipment and infrastructure designed to grow corn/beans/wheat - and 40 years experience doing it. Those guys aren't just going to start grazing beeves overnight. Look at the Great Depression, those people ate dirt while their farms blew away hoping to hit just one more crop of wheat.


I've harped about this over and over, today's monoculture isn't just planting a big field with a single crop because it is a good location for that crop. Globalized Monoculture means entire regions specialize in a single crop because the climate and soil are perfect. But then these areas become the dominant producer for The Entire World because they create infrastructure geared for that one specific crop! Economies of scale dictate that these areas become ever more efficient, driving previously competitive but slightly less well suited and infrastructure poor areas in other parts of the world out of the business entirely.

This is the end state of specialization. This is how food production becomes hyper-efficient and completely non-resilient.

[dohboi]

Wonderfully articulate statement of our monoculture predicament!

How many people inside this juggernaut actually understand this but are stuck in the daily imperatives that drive it and them forward, I wonder.

[Keith_McClary]

Wonderfully articulate statement of our monoculture predicament!

How many people inside this juggernaut actually understand this but are stuck in the daily imperatives that drive it and them forward, I wonder.

The same principle applies to other spheres besides agriculture. You wouldn't put a corn farm in
Guangdong or a gizmo factory in Kansas.

[Lore]

Why are

herds of cattle, little methane bombs

but not their bison relatives?

There are over 30/m beef cattle now in the US and 9/m dairy. There is still about 200/k American bison left in the US. You have to consider the consequences of dramatically expanding those numbers and overloading the ecosystem. We already have a pretty good record of failures when it comes to rearranging living species.

Another thing I would add to Pop's rather cogent response is that Americans would find the taste of free range beef on a par with shoe leather.

[Graeme]

I've also posted on this topic in the geoengineering thread. Those posts indicate that "holistic management" is a viable technique for sequestering carbon in soil regardless of rainfall. A limiting factor mentioned in Alan Savory's report in same thread is the number of cattle required. I've just seen another report which suggests that the jury is still out on this type of ecology and animal management.

Can cattle be part of the climate change solution?

Jim Howell, a lifelong rancher and the CEO of a company called Grasslands LLC, says this conventional wisdom is ill-informed and misleading. More important, he has set out to disprove it. Grasslands owns four cattle ranches in South Dakota and Montana, where the company is monitoring the environmental impacts of its unconventional approach to ranching —- called holistic management — and forging relationships with nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy and the Natural Resources Defense Council, hoping to turn them into allies. Last month, Howell’s partner, mentor and friend, Allan Savory, who is a Zimbabwean farmer, politician and environmentalist, delivered a TED talk called "How to Green the World’s Deserts and Reverse Climate Change" that rapidly attracted about half a million views. Their argument, in brief, is that traditional ranching methods can degrade land and threaten biodiversity but that, when managed well, cows can actually be restorative.

What’s most interesting (to me, anyway) is that Howell, Savory and their investor-partners in Grasslands believe that they can use markets to drive their unorthodox ideas about ranching to a much, much larger scale. They argue that holistic management is better for business, better for the land, better for the climate and, not incidentally, a way to raise more cattle on less land than conventional methods and thus help feed a hungry, growing planet.


In practical terms, the debate revolves around how much acreage is needed per cow, how they should be herded and how often they should be moved from pasture to pasture. As Howell explained it to me (and, be patient, I’m a city kid), problems can arise both when lands are overgrazed by cows that eat young plants before they mature or recover from previous grazing, and also when lands are not grazed enough, which leads to an overburden of decadent plant material, impeding the ability of plants to capture sunlight and grow new leaves. When the grazing events are correctly timed — meaning plants have a chance to fully recover between grazing periods — grass plants become more vigorous and productive. Put simply, ranchers need to learn to manage the ecology of the ranch and not just the cows.


Louisa Willcox of the NRDC, a Montana-based wildlife expert with a forestry degree from Yale, visited a Grasslands ranch near Broadus, Mont., as well as the J-L Ranch in the Centennial Valley west of Yellowstone Park, which uses holistic methods to raise Yellowstone grass-fed beef. She came away hopeful.
“I thought they were really exemplary in what they were trying to do,” she says. ”There’s a whole generation of younger ranchers coming up who realize that the way their grandfathers did things may not make sense anymore, and that there are new markets that may be explored.”

Others at NRDC are skeptical, I’m told. There’s more to say about this, and I hope to return to the topic again, and give some space to the dissenters — who, as always, are encouraged to comment below. What the debate over grazing tells me is that we need a better framework to measure the impacts of ranching, as well as the rest of the food system.

greenbiz

[kiwichick]

it's called rotational grazing

confine cattle/ sheep/goats to one area while the rest of the available area (Farm/Ranch ) is recovering

see New Zealand farming

[Keith_McClary]

Why are

herds of cattle, little methane bombs

but not their bison relatives?

There are over 30/m beef cattle now in the US and 9/m dairy. There is still about 200/k American bison left in the US. You have to consider the consequences of dramatically expanding those numbers and overloading the ecosystem. We already have a pretty good record of failures when it comes to rearranging living species.

Another thing I would add to Pop's rather cogent response is that Americans would find the taste of free range beef on a par with shoe leather.

My point was, are cattle somehow worse methane producers than bison? I was not suggesting expanding the numbers, just hypothetically supposing we replaced cattle with bison, would the methane production be different.

We buy bison burger locally, it's very lean (haven't tried steaks or roasts so can't comment on "shoe leather"), we see them grazing on ranchlands - I guess that is "free range".

[Lore]

My point was, are cattle somehow worse methane producers than bison? I was not suggesting expanding the numbers, just hypothetically supposing we replaced cattle with bison, would the methane production be different.

We buy bison burger locally, it's very lean (haven't tried steaks or roasts so can't comment on "shoe leather"), we see them grazing on ranchlands - I guess that is "free range".

You're talking two very different types of animals here. The American bison and the domesticated cow. One has been bred for meat and milk the other is more like trying to keep a Bengal tiger as your house pet. Economically and practically you get a greater return on cattle then you would with a lean wild animal that has an attitude and requires a ten foot fence to stop them from running all over the place.

I have no idea which one emits more methane other then to suggest that it's probably more a factor of diet. Even the bison you buy today has been fattened prior to market. What you're eating at McDonalds are young feeder cattle that were just mature enough to be taken to feed lots and fattened up prior to slaughter.

[dohboi]

I hope the mods will indulge me to open a new thread on desertification, separate from the 'drought' thread. 'Drought" implies a temporary situation that, while potentially devastating while it lasts, is assumed to be a non-permanent condition--something that will be alleviated by a return to average rain falls for whatever area we are discussing.

With climate change, over-grazing and other insults, though, we can expect--and are already seeing--areas that are permanently shifting to a much drier condition than they exhibited over the last century, or much longer. In the American Southwest and perhaps a few other places, one could perhaps argue that this is a reversion to a longer-term norm (though that makes it no less devastating for the populations now residing there).

But for many areas, this is a shift to a new condition--a permanent drying of the area not seen in those areas at least during the Holocene. Both kinds of drying are important and valid to keep track of here. And even the term 'desertification' does not do justice to some of these processes, since some of these areas were already technically desert or semi-desert eco-systems to start with (hence the co-title--permanent drying out).

So to kick it off, let's look at these shifts in what will soon become the most populated nation on the planet : India.
http://www.trust.org/item/2014061808114 ... OtherNews2

A quarter of India's land is turning into desert

About a quarter of India's land is turning to desert and degradation of agricultural areas is becoming a severe problem, the environment minister said, potentially threatening food security in the world's second most populous country.

India occupies just 2 percent of the world's territory but is home to 17 percent of its population, leading to over-use of land and excessive grazing. Along with changing rainfall patterns, these are the main causes of desertification.

"Land is becoming barren, degradation is happening," said Prakash Javadekar, minister for environment, forests and climate change. "A lot of areas are on the verge of becoming deserts but it can be stopped."

Here, as nearly always, the causes are multiple, not just gw. But the consequences are severe, and likely to be the leading cause of the approaching great die off.

For a global perspective:



(Note that this is quite old--1997. I suspect now much larger areas of, for example, northern China would be considered under threat.)

[dohboi]

"if we built some nuclear power plants we'd be able to suck"

Yeah, that would suck pretty bad!

How is your lawn looking these days, by the way? Are people starting to turn to xeriscaping in your area yet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping

It looks like all of mid to northern CA will soon be at the highest level of drought, and the rest of the state is already desert.

[dohboi]

Thanks for the local update.

"Perhaps that's because there are so few humans who live here?"

Interesting idea. I'm sure the resilience of the local soils, etc, are largely a result of how little damage has been done to them by human stupidity. Most robust ecosystems should be able to handle short-term swings in rainfall patterns, I would think. I've heard that high levels of ground-level ozone can really reduce the resilience of most trees to such disruptions.

By fall, you should probably be back to normal rainfall patterns. South of you, they may get more of the deluge-style drought relief.

[PrestonSturges]

If dessertification in India is the result of the monsoons failing to arrive, all plant life will die because of temperatures of 115 degrees and up when the rains don't appear. If the plant life dies from human activity and the monsoons arrive, the landscape will become eroded baked mud, like Haiti only hotter.

[dolanbaker]

That map appears to be a bit over-dramatic as it shows the South East of England as at moderate risk, I grew up in that area and can assure that it is wet enough to prevent any form of desertification. Flooding is a greater risk than drought for most people living there.