Holistic Grazing (split from Cliven Bundy thread)

[Red Baron Farms]

You are referring to BASIC HYDROLOGY as woo?! You're completely out to lunch here--you have abandoned even the pretense of a scientific approach at this point.

Have you studied ANY geology? At all? Ever? This isn't tricky stuff here, and nothing I said is in the slightest controversial in any fields studying hydrology or soils. To call what I said "woo" is the equivalent of calling the study of gravity or germ theory woo.

Also, I find it extremely telling that you have no explanations of your own. You'll bite whenever I dangle a potential one in front of you, but you appear incapable of providing a coherent explanation yourself.

That's irrelevant. The fact that you used that term at all demonstrates that you know nothing about paleontology, and therefore cannot have any opinions on what is typical with us. If you had any interaction with paleontologists, you'd know that the overwhelming majority of us study invertebrates. It's also a personal attack intended to avoid the fact that you can't address the ecological concerns I'm raising.

No, I do not--and the fact that you don't realize there are costs to altering the hydrology demonstrates yet again that you are not even trying to approach this from a scientific standpoint. You are preventing water from going from Reservoir A to Reservoir B; this has ecological impacts. Not all of them are going to be good, from ANY perspective. At best, the good will outweigh the bad--but that will necessarily be something that has to be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Lie. You specifically equated accpetence of holistic grazing with competance in your previous post.

You're living in a fantasy world and demanding we join you. If we did that, we'd all starve to death, simple as that. Until you do the basic research necessary to understand hydrology, there's no point in any further discussion between us on this topic--you're too ignorant of the topic to contribute meaningfully.

See now you are getting nasty. OK nasty is fine. But it is you that are ignoring basic hydrology, not me. You simply refuse to accept that the hydrology in the soil is largely controlled by biological systems. You take the opposite view that hydrology primarily controls biological systems. Both are part correct. If there is no water at all, then there is no biology. And the amount of available water does limit to a certain degree the biology. But biology has evolved to control hydrology quite effectively. Especially the biology that evolved in dryer areas. So good land management in those areas can't ignore the effects that things like waxy coatings, decaying biomass coverings, cell walls, and humus have on creating reservoirs of water. One of those effects is holding more water when it rains (mostly all in 1 month in this particular case) and releasing it slowly later. (the other 11 months in this particular case)

 

[rwguinn]

.
...

I'll just ignore this woo [bold] science and continue with even more on the fly woo [/bold]. I am sure you'll be embarrassed you wrote it when you stop to think.

...

edited to prevent major reality distortion. ..

 

[rwguinn]

Looks to me as though a monoculture is the bestest way of all. We should teraform our deserts and such so we can grow cows

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Looks to me as though a monoculture is the bestest way of all. We should teraform our deserts and such so we can grow cows

This look like a monoculture to you?

 

[Reality Check]

But it is you that are ignoring basic hydrology, not me. You simply refuse to accept that the hydrology in the soil is largely controlled by biological systems.

Red Baron Farms, you seem to be missing Dinwar's point entirely and going on magical mind-reading derails .
The basic hydrology that you are ignoring is that the total amount of water available to an ecosystem is roughly constant and not controlled by biological systems. I say "roughly" because there is a little thing called global warming and of course the amount of water varies annually.

What biological systems can do is control some of the distribution of water between reservoirs. For example, forests act as sponges and so are reservoirs in their own right, deserts encourage runoff into actual reservoirs like ponds and streams, grasslands are in-between.

Changing "water from going from Reservoir A to Reservoir B" will have an ecological effect. That effect could be good. That effect could be bad. An example of a bad effect would be a grassland that absorbs so much water that it becomes a swamp and drowns all of the cattle .
To be more serious: "Retaining water in an ecological system that suffers from lack of water is a benefit" is trivially obvious. Of course if an ecological system has a deficit of X and that deficit is causing problems for the ecosystem then adding X will help the ecological system !
Grasslands in general though do not have a deficit of anything. Like any undisturbed ecosystem they have adapted to the resources that are available. This includes the deserts that Savory seems to concentrate on.
Farmed grasslands though may have deficits that concern farmers since they reduce profits. That is why farmers use grassland management programs.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

What you say is true, except that a dry grassland will turn to desert if the herds of herbivores are removed. Bring them back and you can bring back the grassland/savanna. Since in many cases that is impossible with wild herds, as their numbers are often too low or even sometimes extinct, or the predators are gone too, or their migration lanes are fenced or otherwise blocked, ... then the option to bring back grassland from desertified land with livestock exists. Whether Asia, North America, South America, Africa, even Australia, when the herds were removed, or in some cases still there but with different behavior due to predators being removed, the deserts grew. In dry brittle grassland it is a universal observation.

 

[Reality Check]

What you say is true, except that a dry grassland will turn to desert if the herds of herbivores are removed

What I said is true and nothing to do with an unsupported assertion that dry grassland will turn to desert if the herds of herbivores are removed, Red Baron Farms.
Or for that matter that adding herbivores to desert creates dry grasslands (or even that "dry" grasslands even exist - just how dry is dry?).

Probably a misconception but isn't the expansion of the Sahara partially blamed on the addition of herbivores (the need for cattle grazing)? That would be a bit of a problem for your assertion.
Maybe your assertion really is "removing the herbivores that cause a dry grassland will turn to desert will cause a dry grassland will turn to desert and adding them back will reverse the process"!

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

What you say is true, except that a dry grassland will turn to desert if the herds of herbivores are removed.

OMGWUT????

 

[Red Baron Farms]

What I said is true and nothing to do with an unsupported assertion that dry grassland will turn to desert if the herds of herbivores are removed, Red Baron Farms.
Or for that matter that adding herbivores to desert creates dry grasslands (or even that "dry" grasslands even exist - just how dry is dry?).

Probably a misconception but isn't the expansion of the Sahara partially blamed on the addition of herbivores (the need for cattle grazing)? That would be a bit of a problem for your assertion.
Maybe your assertion really is "removing the herbivores that cause a dry grassland will turn to desert will cause a dry grassland will turn to desert and adding them back will reverse the process"!

I have discussed the brittleness scale and linked it many times. If you can't be bothered to read it or remember it, or understand the dynamic, that's on you. I have also discussed the difference between desert and desertified land. Again, if you can't be bothered to remember or understand the distinction, that's on you.

You seem to forget, Savory is not some rancher trying to justify his cattle operation with woo. He was a Game Officer, and later a research officer in the Game Department. He used the flawed science of the day to attempt to save the newly made wildlife parks. He drove off the people, the cattle, culled the remaining wild herds, everything that "consensus" says you should do. He saw first hand how instead of restoring the ecosystems, removing the herbivores actually caused a chain reaction that caused desertification. Only after the dismal failure of the "consensus", did he dedicate his life to finding something that did actually work. And he has. It is not some unsupported assertion. I have linked over and over examples supporting this. You simply refuse to accept it.

Whatever man. Believe it or not as you wish. But the actual evidence is most certainly not on your side.

 

[Reality Check]

I have discussed the brittleness scale and linked it many times.
...snipped Savory rant....

That is not evidence for your assertion, Red Baron Farms.
It is a fairly useless scale that Savory made up: "The scale is subjective; there is no formula for its calculation." !

Compare that with aridity index which can actually be calculated fairly objectively.

If you can't be bothered to read your assertions or remember them , or understand the dynamic, that's on you. But your assertion was:

What you say is true, except that a dry grassland will turn to desert if the herds of herbivores are removed. Bring them back and you can bring back the grassland/savanna.

This has no mention of Savory.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

OMGWUT????

Yeah that's right.

The cause of the widespread extinction has provoked much debate, with climate change being one theory.

However, scientists studied dung samples from 130,000 and 41,000 years ago, when humans arrived, and concluded hunting and fire were the cause.

The extinction in turn caused major ecological changes to the landscape.

The scientists looked at pollen and charcoal from Lynch's Crater, a sediment-filled volcanic crater in Queensland that was surrounded by tropical rainforest until European settlement.

They found Sporormiella spores, which grow in herbivore dung, virtually disappeared around 41,000 years ago, a time when no known climate transformation was taking place.

At the same time, the incidence of fire increased, as shown by a steep rise in charcoal fragments.

It appears that humans, who arrived in Australia around this time, hunted the megafauna to extinction, the scientists said. link

Notice what came first? We hunted the herbivores, then came fires and major ecological changes, and that desertification caused the low from hunting populations to go extinct, and even other species that were not hunted too.

You can ridicule the concept all you want, but it is science. Science that Savory has taken advantage of in the opposite way to restore damaged ecosystems.

 

[Reality Check]

Yeah that's right.

Yeah well, that's wrong. Notice what actually happened, Red Baron Farms:
Humans killed off Australia's giant beasts
1. Humans killed off Australia's giant beasts in a specific region.
2. There were human-lit fires that would have happened even with the mega fauna there.
3. There were major ecological changes that may have happened even with the mega fauna there.
4. Mixed rainforest ((not a dry grassland )) was replaced by leathery-leaved, scrubby vegetation called sclerophyll (not really a desert).

We do not ridicule the concept of desertification for the simple reason that desertification happens!
We do ridicule an unsupported assertion about removal of herbivores doing this, especially when your "evidence" is so bad.

FYI, Red Baron Farms: The crater in question (Lynch's Crater) lies on the Atherton Tableland

The Atherton Tableland is a fertile plateau which is part of the Great Dividing Range in Queensland, Australia. It is located west to south-south-west inland from Cairns, well into the tropics, but its elevated position provides a climate suitable for dairy farming. It has an area of around 32,000 km² with an altitude ranging between 500 and 1,280 m (1,640 and 4,200 ft).[1] The fertility of the soils in the region can be attributed to the volcanic origins of the land.

That does not sound like a desert!

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Reality Check,
The aridity index is not useful when you are purposely managing the land in a way that changes the evapotranspiration present. That's why he had to make a new brittleness scale which is adaptive. It is more flexible and therefor more useful.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

It's what gives you the timeline. The pattern. The australian megafauna decreased, in brittle areas that ecological change resulted in desert, but in areas that were not brittle, change still happened, but didn't result in desertification.

 

[Reality Check]

Reality Check,
The aridity index is not useful when you are purposely managing the land in a way that changes the evapotranspiration present.

Red Baron Farms, the aridity index is an actual useful index because it can be calculated. The UNEP index of aridity includes the (potential) evapotranspiration.
The brittleness index is a useless index because it is subjective. It is not an index - it is a guess. It ignores the evapotranspiration present.

 

[Reality Check]

"dry grassland will turn to desert if the herds of herbivores are removed"

It's what gives you the timeline. ...

This is what exposes the continued error about a "brittle area" turning into a desert, Red Baron Farms !

Yeah well, that's wrong. Notice what actually happened, Red Baron Farms:
Humans killed off Australia's giant beasts
1. Humans killed off Australia's giant beasts in a specific region.
2. There were human-lit fires that would have happened even with the mega fauna there.
3. There were major ecological changes that may have happened even with the mega fauna there.
4. Mixed rainforest ((not a dry grassland )) was replaced by leathery-leaved, scrubby vegetation called sclerophyll (not really a desert).
...
FYI, Red Baron Farms: The crater in question (Lynch's Crater) lies on the Atherton Tableland

There is no "dry" grassland as in your still unsupported assertion.
There is not resulting desert as in your still unsupported assertion.
There is no removal of herbivores as in your still unsupported assertion. There is removal of mega fauna (including some large herbivores) leaving other herbivores happily munching away. And what you are still ignoring: human-lit fires.
P.S. "three-metre tall giant kangaroos and marsupial lions, as well as giant birds and reptiles" are not cattle ! Specifically they do not have hooves to do Savory's magical trick of churning up the top soil. In this case

"Big animals have big impacts on plants. It follows that removing big animals should produce significant changes in vegetation."

The removal of large herbivores altered the structure and composition of vegetation, making it more dense and uniform, he said.

More dense and uniform vegetation is not a desert. It looks like an environment that would be more impacted by human-lit fires and lead to the demise of most of a rainforest.

 

[Reality Check]

"... in brittle areas that ecological change resulted in desert..."

So now we have another vague, unsupported assertion from you, Red Baron Farms:

The australian megafauna decreased, in brittle areas that ecological change resulted in desert, but in areas that were not brittle, change still happened, but didn't result in desertification.

Some easy questions for you to answer then:
* What does "brittle" mean, Red Baron Farms?
I hope that it is not the ridiculous, circular "take away herbivores and desert forms" .
* Can you give a map of the "brittleness" of Australia before the megafauna decreased, Red Baron Farms?
* Can you match that map with the formation of deserts, Red Baron Farms?

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Actually all your assertions are without evidence. Funny how you try to twist it backwards.

The evidence is clear, it is the causation that is under vigorous debate. Here is a good example of part of that debate:

"Most of Australia’s largest mammals became extinct 50,000 to 45,000 years
ago, shortly after humans colonized the continent. Without exceptional climate
change at that time, a human cause is inferred, but a mechanism remains elusive. A 140,000-year record of dietary d13C documents a permanent
reduction in food sources available to the Australian emu, beginning about the
time of human colonization; a change replicated at three widely separated
sites and in the marsupial wombat. We speculate that human firing of landscapes
rapidly converted a drought-adapted mosaic of trees, shrubs, and nutritious
grasslands to the modern fire-adapted desert scrub. Animals that
could adapt survived; those that could not, became extinct."-
Ecosystem Collapse in Pleistocene Australia and a Human Role in Megafaunal Extinction
Gifford H. Miller et al

That is the desertification of Australia. That it happened is not in dispute. While Savory may not be able to prove 100% the causation, he has documented and observed with repeated modern evidence the effects of over rest. Flush of growth, followed by fire, followed by ecosystem change to desert scrub. Further, once he finally realised what was the cause, he was able to reverse the ecosystem changes back to drought-adapted mosaic of trees, shrubs, and nutritious grasslands. The species may vary, but the pattern is there for anyone to see, and it doesn't matter if it is Australia or North America. Since you can't see the pattern, it would be impossible for you to see the solution. Oh well. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Oh and by the way, what makes land brittle or not is if there is or isn't enough moisture to accomplish biological decay as apposed to oxidation. The soil bacteria and fungus need to eat in order to live, and they need a range of temp, moisture, food supply to do that. If they can, the result is nutrient recycling called mineralization which in turn feeds the plants. If they can't, desertification. In brittle areas they need help from the large herbivores.

 

[ComfySlippers]

Can I order two bags of Brittle please.

 

[Reality Check]

Actually all your assertions are without evidence.
...snipped more ranting about Savory claims...

Actually your reading comprehension remains bad since the news article and paper was and remains about deforestation, not desertification, and so remains not evidence for your claim Red Baron Farms.

Funny how you still cannot understand that a rain forest is not a grassland !
Funny how you still cannot understand that a fertile volcanic plateau (with rivers, lakes and dairy farms!) is not a desert !

The facts are clear: a rain forest diminished a great deal after the extinction of Australian megafauna and the event of human clause fires. The cause of the collapse of these rainforest ecosystems is still unsure:
Ecosystem Collapse in Pleistocene Australia and a Human Role in Megafaunal Extinction

Giant vertebrates dominated many Pleistocene ecosystems. Many were herbivores, and their sudden extinction in prehistory could have had large ecological impacts. We used a high-resolution 130,000-year environmental record to help resolve the cause and reconstruct the ecological consequences of extinction of Australia’s megafauna. Our results suggest that human arrival rather than climate caused megafaunal extinction, which then triggered replacement of mixed rainforest by sclerophyll vegetation through a combination of direct effects on vegetation of relaxed herbivore pressure and increased fire in the landscape. This ecosystem shift was as large as any effect of climate change over the last glacial cycle, and indicates the magnitude of changes that may have followed megafaunal extinction elsewhere in the world.

Emphasis added in the vague hope that you will try to understand what you cite, Red Baron Farms .

This is the deforestation of Australia. That it happened is not in dispute.

Red Baron Farms: Evidence for the "The australian megafauna decreased, in brittle areas that ecological change resulted in desert, but in areas that were not brittle, change still happened, but didn't result in desertification" claim?

P.S. implying that "brittle" grasslands is the ridiculous, circular "take away herbivores and desert forms" is not good! You need to give examples of grasslands that were scientifically judged to be "brittle" before desertification.