Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
60 million bison on the Great Plains, now there are an estimated 60 million cattle on the
USA's 336 million hectares of grazing land.
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By contrast, in some parts of Africa, for example KwaZululand and communal areas of
Zimbabwe and Botswana, experts have been claiming for more than 50 years that land is
overstocked, while local pastoralists (who believe otherwise) have maintained stock levels,
without any apparent decline in carrying capacity. 'Why are there so many animals in the
communal areas of Zimbabwe?' asks agricultural ecologist Ian Scoones. Because commun-
al herders, unlike the farmers with fenced private ranches, can move their cattle to suit to
seasonal and climate conditions and 'exploit resource patches within a heterogeneous land-
far removed from the migrations of wildebeest and bison.
Range cattle, say the disciples of Voisin and Savory, need to be pulse grazed, much as
vast herds bison were pulse grazed by the Blackfoot Indians who shadowed them, playing
the same role as packs of lions in Africa. Dan Dagget's book
Gardeners of Eden
takes us on
a tour of ranches where cattle, or in some cases bison, have been employed to bring range-
land back from a state of parched exhaustion to one of floral abundance, pictured in glossy
Arcadian photographs of flower-strewn meadows and mist-shrouded pastures. Several of
his photographs borrow a device also used by Savory and beloved by advertisers of soap
powders: this side of the fence (brown and sparse) is undergrazed public land - the ranch
on the other side (green and lush) used holistic management.
On one of Dagget's farm visits, to the Goven Ranch in North Dakota, a State University
Scientist takes a spade and digs a hole in the pasture: '''See how easy that shovel cut into
the dirt” he said, “that shows us we've got dirt here instead of concrete. The organic con-
tent of this soil, the carbon, makes it easier to dig.”' Over the other side of the fence lies
Federal Conservation Reserve Program Land, where grazing has been restricted for fifteen
years. In the middle of a field the scientist pulls out his spade and starts digging: 'Bouncing
up and down on his shovel as if it were a pogo stick, he finally managed to jackhammer a
hole a few inches deep. He then showed us that the soil here was a light gray rather than
the rich black we had seen in the pasture. He also showed us that there were fewer roots in
what soil he could dig up.'
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Targeted intensive grazing also provides a way of dealing with the cheatgrass (
Bromus
tectorum
) mentioned by Edward Abbey. This European invader (an annual known as
drooping brome in the UK) has colonized between 17 and 25 million acres of formerly
biodiverse native grassland. Richard Manning in his book
Grassland
called it a 'natural
nutritious for cattle, it is now widely (though not universally) regarded as a scourge: 'It's
called cheatgrass because it cheats the farmer out of the water and nutrients on his land and
slowly converts the range area from a grazed land to barren land', says a BASF consultant
