Allan Savory – EXTRACTS – Keeping Cattle: cause or cure for climate crisis? from Feasta on Vimeo.

Some thoughts and observations on it….

Improving our pastures could be a very fast, energy intensive, and expensive proposition, or we could take the gradual, improvement of management approach. Being fundamentally frugal when having to deal with a decent-sized acreage, we’ve gone the gradual approach. In our tenure here, we’ve seen a large increase in the presence of “good” forage grasses, along with vetch and subclover (soil building legumes), with a decline in the weedy annuals that dominated the pastures when we got here.

Marks & Spencer (a high-end UK retailer) spent £200million to take 100,000 cars off the road…in order to reach that level of effect, a 12acre grass fire burning for 15mins will offset all of those cars and money (1.5 acre fire puts out more pollutants than 4000 cars per second). Our seasonally dry climate evolved to burn every few years, and I’d like to include fire in our management at some point, but notwithstanding the conflagration danger, the pollution that it will spew, along with the volatilization of so much of our soil nutrients, makes me think that it’ll be something that we’ll have to pass on.

For the folks who really want to geek out on Holistic Management from the mouth of the prophet, click here for the hour long lecture. It’s a bit dry at the start, but totally worth the time.

(via)

The effect of livestock on greenhouse gas emissions are often overrated, if not entirely exaggerated

Pasture is part of the solution to the carbon issue

Some farms are doing it right

And the systems exist to fix the problem

OK, seriously, I need to post more often.