HOLISTIC COWBOYS AND CARBON FARMERS - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 230

in a way that makes livestock production a secondary output and environmental ser-
vices a primary one. 13
This echoes the 'spare not share' agenda which is advocated throughout Livestock's
Long Shadow , and by the GOOFs - intensification of arable agriculture and withdrawal
from biomass-based natural processes - though the FAO pick their words carefully. It de-
rives from a widespread view that extensive grazing lands have been overgrazed. This per-
ception has already led to a halving of cattle numbers on public rangeland in the US, and
in the UK it is reflected in recent policy to reduce livestock populations, particularly sheep,
through withdrawal of subsidies, and through stewardship agreements that impose a max-
imum stocking rate. Yet there is no conclusive evidence that reducing or eliminating graz-
ing on pasture land sequesters carbon; indeed there are some studies showing the reverse,
that both heavy and moderate grazing can increase carbon sequestration. 14
Faced with this level of uncertainty amongst the scientific community, hundreds of sci-
entific papers showing often conflicting results, and the widespread view that only a frac-
tion of our total CO 2 emissions can be sequestered with any degree of confidence, my in-
stinct is to dump the whole vexed issue of soil sequestration into a parenthetical box or
footnote, and forget about it until the scientists come up with as much consensus about soil
carbon as they have about fossil fuel carbon. However I am dissuaded from that course be-
cause the heretical viewpoint - as disseminated in the UK by Graham Harvey - represents
a permaculture approach to livestock management which is attracting some interest, and
which, though it yet has to prove itself, deserves an airing in this topic.
Amazing Grazing
Graham Harvey speaks for a different breed of carbon farmers who see livestock as a
pro-active way of improving carbon sequestration. For these farmers, a herd of grazing an-
imals is not a voracious destroyer of soil and landscape, but an indispensable element of an
integrated semi-natural environment. Enhancement of the carbon carrying-capacity of the
soil is inseparable from the enhancement of both the plant and the animal carrying-capacity
of the land. Insofar as these elements are all seen as symbiotic, livestock carbon farming
represents one possible permaculture approach to carbon sequestration.
This movement can be traced back to a single book, written in the 1950s with the un-
prepossessing title Grass Productivity. Though ostensibly dry and scientific, this is no text-
book. 15 The author, André Voisin, was a French biochemist and small farmer, who, the
blurb tells us, 'was known to spend hours watching the cows graze on his farm in Nor-
mandy. It was then that he realized that simple observation of the cow at grass could teach
more about ecological relationships than the most sophisticated research of the time.' One