Holistic Grazing (split from Cliven Bundy thread)

[catsmate]

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/...nd_the_benefits_of_holistic_grazing_have.html

Excellent, thanks for that. McWilliams is always a good debunker of food/enviro woo.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/04/allan_savory_s_ted_talk_is_wrong_and_the_benefits_of_holistic_grazing_have.html

OK Great! Nice post Scrut. This is a good time to teach you how to use critical thinking skills to pick apart a biased propaganda blog.

(To put that claim in perspective, note that the Earth’s oceans and plants currently absorb only half of the 7 billion metric tons of carbon that human activities release into the atmosphere each year.)

False statement. Actually, the estimated total absorption by vegetation alone is ~ 123 PgC/yr. They substituted a net value where gross values should have been used. Very common propaganda technique. Sets up a scale in the subconscious that makes the problem appear larger than it is. It is already a huge problem to begin with. But doing that makes it appear impossibly large.

...“Eat MORE meat?” ... The takeaway was clear: If you’re interested in saving the planet, sharpen your steak knives.

No, Not necessarily more meat animals. Simply a change in the way they are raised. What it really means is closing down the environmentally destructive industrial CAFO system and exchanging it with a pasture based system instead. Not necessarily more, just raised and fed differently.

The most systematic research trial supporting Savory’s claims, the Charter Grazing Trials, was undertaken in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe today) between 1969 and 1975.

Completely false. Those trials were the earliest developmental phase of his system, long before his idea of adding the science of holism to that land management. They don't have much at all to to with Holistic management because Holistic management wasn't even developed yet. Savory as a scientist back then was still experimenting with and working out the biophysical reactions of rangeland to animal impact. Holistic management came decades later. The same fallacy of claiming short duration and holistic management are the same are also found in the Holechek articles the blog references.

“Savory’s method won’t scale.”

Oh, you mean it doesn't really fit the current industrial model that has caused such huge destruction to the environment? Gee. Even if that were true that it can't scale, (it isn't) and what? We are discussing land management that is good for the environment, not necessarily what may or may not be good for large scale industrialists in the food industry.

Cows live up to 20 years of age, but in most grass-fed systems, they are removed when they reach slaughter weight at 15 months. Cheating the nutrient cycle at the heart of land regeneration by removing the manure-makers and grass hedgers when only 10 percent of their ecological “value” has been exploited undermines the entire idea of efficiency that Savory spent his TED talk promoting.

Extreme example of ignorance. The amount of biomass consumed by cattle, and thus the nutrient cycling caused by their grazing is orders of magnitude larger than the weight of a cow. First off the conversion rate of biomass to meat varies from 5:1 to 20:1. In pastured livestock, that means instead of the irrelevant 10% claimed in the blog, nutrient cycling is actually as high as 2000% the weight of the animal, not including the mother cow that bore the meat animal which does usually live 20 years or more. But there is more. Holistic managed grazing never takes more than approx 40% of the above ground biomass, laying much on the ground as mulch. That is recycled by other organisms in the processes of decay. But there is more. There is a much larger underground community in the Rhizosphere that dwarfs what is happening above ground. Even the insect community hugely outweighs the livestock. This so called "concern" is actually trivial and easily outweighed by natural nutrient cycling. Just a red herring.

In many desert ecosystems, desert grasses evolved not alongside large animals but in concert with desert tortoises, mice, rats, rabbits, and reptiles.

No. Not grassland. Grassland co-evolved with large herbivores. Some deserts may have evolved without grasslands and with different herbivores, but grasslands/savannas and large herbivores co-evolved together. That's working backwards and thinking that the current state with large herbivores removed due to human impact is the state they were when the ecosystem was evolving. Big fallacy.

In 1990, Savory admitted that attempts to reproduce his methods had led to “15 years of frustrating and eratic [sic] results.” But he refused to accept the possibility that his hypothesis was flawed. Instead, Savory said those erratic results “were not attributable to the basic concept being wrong but were always due to management.”

Correct. That's the developmental phase discussed earlier. You think Edison developed the light bulb on his first try? So why would this blog use Charter Grazing Trials done between 1969 and 1975 as proof it doesn't work, when that was early developmental stages and experiments?

...we have long known: There’s no such thing as a beef-eating environmentalist.

And there is the clincher. Finally the blogger lets their guard down and exposes their real agenda. The elimination of beef eating. Discovering an environmental technique that includes beef goes contrary to their preconceived ideas, their whole world view.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

tl;dr

 

[tsig]

OK Great! Nice post Scrut. This is a good time to teach you how to use critical thinking skills to pick apart a biased propaganda blog.



False statement. Actually, the estimated total absorption by vegetation alone is ~ 123 PgC/yr. They substituted a net value where gross values should have been used.



No, Not necessarily more meat animals. Simply a change in the way they are raised. What it really means is closing down the environmentally destructive industrial CAFO system and exchanging it with a pasture based system instead. Not necessarily more, just raised and fed differently.



Completely false. Those trials were the earliest developmental phase of his system, long before his idea of adding the science of holism to that land management. They don't have much at all to to with Holistic management because Holistic management wasn't even developed yet. Savory as a scientist back then was still experimenting with and working out the biophysical reactions of rangeland to animal impact. Holistic management came decades later. The same fallacy of claiming short duration and holistic management are the same are also found in the Holechek articles the blog references.



Oh, you mean it doesn't really fit the current industrial model that has caused such huge destruction to the environment? Gee. Even if that were true that it can't scale, (it isn't) and what? We are discussing land management that is good for the environment, not necessarily what may or may not be good for large scale industrialists in the food industry.

Extreme example of ignorance. The amount of biomass consumed by cattle, and thus the nutrient cycling caused by their grazing is orders of magnitude larger than the weight of a cow. First off the conversion rate of biomass to meat varies from 5:1 to 20:1. In pastured livestock, that means instead of the irrelevant 10% claimed in the blog, nutrient cycling is actually as high as 2000% the weight of the animal, not including the mother cow that bore the meat animal which does usually live 20 years or more. But there is more. Holistic managed grazing never takes more than approx 40% of the above ground biomass, laying much on the ground as mulch. That is recycled by other organisms in the processes of decay. But there is more. There is a much larger underground community in the Rhizosphere that dwarfs what is happening above ground. Even the insect community hugely outweighs the livestock. This so called "concern" is actually trivial and easily outweighed by natural nutrient cycling. Just a red herring.

No. Not grassland. Grassland co-evolved with large herbivores. Some deserts may have evolved without grasslands and with different herbivores, but grasslands/savannas and large herbivores co-evolved together.



Correct. That's the developmental phase discussed earlier. You think Edison developed the light bulb on his first try? So why would this blog use Charter Grazing Trials done between 1969 and 1975 as proof it doesn't work, when that was early developmental stages and experiments?

And there is the clincher. Finally the blogger lets their guard down and exposes their real agenda. The elimination of beef eating. Discovering an environmental technique that includes beef goes contrary to their preconceived ideas, their whole world view.

Maybe you could outline just what you are talking about when you say holistic management?

You seemed to base it a lot the Charter Grazing Trials now you say they were preliminary trials so what is the plan?

From the link:

Instead, there were problems during the Charter Grazing Trials, ones not mentioned in Savory’s dramatic talk. Cattle that grazed according to Savory’s method needed expensive supplemental feed, became stressed and fatigued, and lost enough weight to compromise the profitability of their meat. And even though Savory’s Grazing Trials took place during a period of freakishly high rainfall, with rates exceeding the average by 24 percent overall, the authors contend that Savory’s method “failed to produce the marked improvement in grass cover claimed from its application.”

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Maybe you could outline just what you are talking about when you say holistic management?

Holistic management

 

[Red Baron Farms]

tl;dr

Typical! And you call yourself a critical thinker? Now you are back to dismissing something away with a hand wave, but instead of dismissing it due to the connotation evoked by the equivocation fallacy of its name, this time you are dismissing it due to what? The post is too long? Can't be bothered to even read it? Really? And you called yourself a critical thinker in post #33?

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Those of us who are critical thinkers know that anything with the word "holistic" attached is most likely nonsense.

Excellent, thanks for that. McWilliams is always a good debunker of food/enviro woo.

Yep, I think we can now safely add "holistic grazing" to the list.

 

[halleyscomet]

Reading that re-reminded me of the fact that RBF also had a difficult (more like impossible) time understanding that the purpose of the BLM'S management is/was not sustainable grazing, but the maintenance of a bio-system-that being a health desert environment, not a grasslands-which the rainfall in that environment would never support anyway
..

I can envision the response now...

But!
But!

Holistic Grazing is MAGICAL and can TURN dessert into fertile land just by having cattle eat the vegetation in the right way.

It HAS to be the right way, or you're doing it wrong. Anytime it fails it's because the rancher is having their cattle doing it wrong!!!!

 

[rwguinn]

I can envision the response now...

Nope :crickets:

It's a blind spot ignored by the homeopathic holistic grazers

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Reading that re-reminded me of the fact that RBF also had a difficult (more like impossible) time understanding that the purpose of the BLM'S management is/was not sustainable grazing, but the maintenance of a bio-system-that being a health desert environment, not a grasslands-which the rainfall in that environment would never support anyway
..

I can envision the response now...

Nope :crickets:

It's a blind spot ignored .....

Actually I did respond. I just didn't think I needed to repeat it for you. I even added a bit in edit for clarification because your post was made while I was responding to Scrut and his posting of a propaganda blog.

No. Not grassland. Grassland co-evolved with large herbivores. Some deserts may have evolved without grasslands and with different herbivores, but grasslands/savannas and large herbivores co-evolved together. That's working backwards and thinking that the current state with large herbivores removed due to human impact is the state they were when the ecosystem was evolving. Big fallacy.

Now, for even more clarification so that it is in specific terms instead of general terms. That land was a Joshua tree Savanna. You are looking at the currently degraded state and assuming that even resembles at all the state of the land before human impact. It doesn't. The average 5 inches of rainfall combined with low humidity and migrating wild herds is most certainly enough to possibly be restored. But without the migrating herds, or livestock to mimic that impact? Then the best you can hope for is desert scrub-land subject to catastrophic fires every few years.

AND....all that was posted on the other thread too btw. Not ignored and you know it.

 

[rwguinn]

Amazingly, a Google search for
Herbivores "Joshua Tree" savanna
Yields one mention of anything bigger than an iguana with all 3 terms in it
. That reference is RBF's post above
...

 

[GlennB]

And elsewhere on JREF it's being vigorously argued that adopting a vegan lifstyle is the way to lower atmospheric CO2 and, hence, the global warming trend.

 

[The Shrike]

From the section on "Framework" in the Wikipedia article above:

"One of the best examples of an early indicator of a poorly functioning environment is patches of bare ground."

On a golf course, yes. Otherwise, I disagree. Bare ground is a vital component of rangeland condition. Blanket statements like the above without any reference to scale make it difficult to discuss HM without the possibility of proclaiming that it works wherever it works and they "they did it wrong" wherever it doesn't.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

And elsewhere on JREF it's being vigorously argued that adopting a vegan lifstyle is the way to lower atmospheric CO2 and, hence, the global warming trend.

I think the only people who could possibly argue against the claim that a vegan diet requires less fossil fuel use would be people who are deeply, deeply irrational. It's just a fact about the world.

In the big picture it's horrendously inefficient to grow grain or hay, feed it to an animal and eat the animal. You could just have grown some grain/legume/vegetable/whatever that humans eat and then eaten the whatever.

There are going to be individual cases where it's easier to raise cattle for meat. If you happen to be a nomad on grassland, or own a very rocky paddock which is impractical to plow, or you live on a mountain, then quite possibly in those cases cows, sheep, goats or whatever will be a way of converting plant matter that humans just cannot eat into meat that we can eat (and milk, leather etc.) for a net energy gain.

Modern industrialised farming with its major inputs of hay and grain, however, is very far indeed from such a case. It's a luxury industry producing highly palatable food products people like, but it is an enormous energy sink, it's arguably an ethical evil, and it's a simple matter of fact that it does not produce anything people need.

It might not be THE way to lower carbon emissions, but it's A way and a potentially very effective way. At the very least if people substantially reduced the amount of meat in their diet it would enable us to substantially reduce our carbon emissions.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I think the only people who could possibly argue against the claim that a vegan diet requires less fossil fuel use would be people who are deeply, deeply irrational. It's just a fact about the world.

Aren't you exaggerating? Ignorant of those specific facts would suit better.

Anyway, as you said, no substantial reduction of greenhouse gas emissions come from a "veganization" of the diet. In a typical "energy starving" country, each person needs some 2,000 kcal a day in food but spends some 200,000. Of course, a meat rich diet may use some 30,000 kcal in producing, transporting, conserving and cooking such food, while a vegan who buys local may use 8,000. However, a great deal of that energy is from renewable sources, photosynthesis for instance, unlike what that person uses to transport him or herself.

Back to the HM thing, the problem from the very beginning was RBF disembarking in forum.randi.org's sandy beaches with the good news of HM being kind of an all-purpose cure, and arguing in a pretty innumerate way about that. I remember the most important questions I asked him then, which went this way: show us how we can recover our soils, curb global warming and feed mankind at the same time.

His replies were isolated claims, number poor, about some carbon capture here, some soil quality reached there, thru papers only partially related to the claims, in the most asystemic possible way. Their figure poverty is an attempt on management. Their systematic lack of systemic view about the whole subject is an attempt on holism.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

And elsewhere on JREF it's being vigorously argued that adopting a vegan lifstyle is the way to lower atmospheric CO2 and, hence, the global warming trend.

AHA Not entirely false. See the current industrial model for meat production is in fact a major contributor to all sorts of ecological harm including global warming. Even primitive subsistence methods can be destructive as well.

A Vegan would take a direct approach and say eliminate it. Just eliminate all livestock world wide. Problem solved.

Savory would say change the production model of that livestock and use them to restore the environment instead of destroy it. Problem solved.

If it turns out that Holistic management really is too difficult a concept for society to understand, I'd go for the Vegan approach before I'd continue on the destructive path with the industrial model we are on now.

The status quo really is unacceptable. I'll agree with the Vegans there.

ETA FYI And no, I am not a vegetarian or vegan.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

From the section on "Framework" in the Wikipedia article above:

"One of the best examples of an early indicator of a poorly functioning environment is patches of bare ground."

On a golf course, yes. Otherwise, I disagree. Bare ground is a vital component of rangeland condition. Blanket statements like the above without any reference to scale make it difficult to discuss HM without the possibility of proclaiming that it works wherever it works and they "they did it wrong" wherever it doesn't.

Actually that's a framework and you are drawing specific conclusions from a non specific example. Actually at the learning center, they do leave patches bare on purpose. How? Simply keeping the livestock off those areas. Savory discusses it here: Excerpted from Allan Savory's presentation on January 25, 2013 at Tufts University's Fletcher School

What we are doing is preserving some bare ground for wildlife, because we want to increase the whole biodiversity and these bare areas are terribly critical.......

So yes Shrike you are correct, and Savory would agree just as emphatically.

 

[The Shrike]

^But what I shared was a direct quote from the link you provided to show what it's all about.

I think one of my issues with it is the No True Scotsman fallacy. When a question about some tenet is raised the response is very often some form of "well that's not what it is" or "what you're talking about is very much in line with HM".

It's all so vague that proponents have remarkable latitude to promote the alleged merits and deflect criticisms willy-nilly.

 

[rwguinn]

What RBF thinks is a savanna

compared to what a "Joshua Tree Savanna" actually looks like...

And BTW---the historic range maps for North American herbivores do not include any significant parts of the Mojave desert, Nevada particularly.
Bison avoided it, as did even the Pronghorns... So no herbivorse of any significance--and no grasses...

 

[tsig]

^But what I shared was a direct quote from the link you provided to show what it's all about.

I think one of my issues with it is the No True Scotsman fallacy. When a question about some tenet is raised the response is very often some form of "well that's not what it is" or "what you're talking about is very much in line with HM".

It's all so vague that proponents have remarkable latitude to promote the alleged merits and deflect criticisms willy-nilly.

^^This^^

I see lots of vague feel good words but how they translate into actions is unclear.

Nature functions as a holistic community with a mutualistic relationship between people, animals and the land. If you remove or change the behavior of any keystone species like the large grazing herds, you have an unexpected and wide ranging negative impact on other areas of the environment.


The bottom line is rain, if you have it fine, if you don't chanting "holistic" will not help.

As has been pointed out many areas never had any large grazing herds so how can any kind of grazing help the land?

Holistic management would seem to involve keeping cattle in pens and moving them around a lot.