Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
to seasonal fluctuations in grass growth - but the diagram more likely demonstrates that
scientific experiments cannot adapt to them. Voisin is adamant that the time spent in pad-
docks must be varied according to the rate of grass growth, and emphasises in bold letters
that: 'Flexibility in management is essential … It is not a case of rigidly obeying figures:
one must follow the grass … Figures are only guides: in the end it is the eye of the grazier
that decides.' One wonders how many of these scientific experiments have been managed
by someone with the eye of a grazier.
Nonetheless the results of all these studies are depressing for anyone who (like me)
finds Voisin's and Savory's theories inspiring. The dispute is similar to that which persists
between enthusiasts of herbal and homeopathic treatments and members of the medical
profession who only place confidence in 'evidence-based medicine' and dismiss everything
else as 'anecdotal'. In this respect at least, the holistic cowboy Dan Dagget finds himself
on the same side of the fence as cow-hater Edward Abbey, who assured his Montana audi-
ence: 'I'm not going to bombard you with graphs and statistics, which don't make much
of an impression on intelligent people anyway. Anyone who goes beyond the city limits …
can see for himself.'
A BENIGN Sink for All Carbon?
While this battle is being waged out west, André Voisin's theories of rational grazing
have also been spreading amongst farmers in the more temperate zones of North America,
Australia and New Zealand. Increasing numbers of ecologically concerned livestock rear-
ers are feeding their cattle or sheep entirely on grass, with little or no fattening on corn
or soyabeans. Many of them consciously call themselves 'grass farmers' rather than live-
stock farmers. The movement has been spearheaded in the USA by the magazine
Stockman
Grass Farmer
, edited by Allan Nation, who described Voisin's
Grass Productivity
as 'the
real McCoy, the topic that started the worldwide revolution in grassland management'. The
revolution's extent can be seen on the website
Eatwild.com
, which includes a directory of
grass farms across the USA, listing 61 in the state of Pennsylvania alone.
Stockrearers are drawn to grass-farming for a host of reasons: because, in their view, it is
ecologically benign, because it has low overheads, because the food tastes better, because
it uses less fossil fuel. Many, if not most, will be aware of Voisin's theories and a consider-
able number of them follow his prescriptions about rotation. Joel Salatin, whose Polyface
Farm is a star feature of Michael Pollan's book
The Omnivore's Dilemma,
describes his
'mob and move' system in language borrowed from both Voisin and Savory:
What we're trying to do here is mimic on a domestic scale what herbivore pop-
ulations do all over the world. Whether it is wildebeests on the Serengeti, caribou in
