Too Many Animal Numbers Cause Overgrazing is a Myth

Too Many Animal Numbers Causes Overgrazing is a Myth

I’m KayDee Gilkey with today’s Open Range.

Allan Savory, one of the founders of the Savory Institute and who 40 plus years ago began healing the land with holistic planned grazing, spoke at the Washington Cattlemen’s Convention earlier this week and said the conventional wisdom has been resting the world’s ground to death.

Savory urges ranchers to realize that they hold the key to saving mankind and the environment with their livestock and their livestock’s hooves. It is the disturbance of the ground with those livestock’s hooves that actually help to heal the land.

Savory: “In actual fact, if you look at some of the wilderness areas in the United States they are deteriorating as badly as anything in Africa. And they have had no livestock on them or large animals for probably close to 100 years now. So it is over resting the land that is the big problem and overgrazing was discovered more than 60 years ago to have nothing to do with numbers of animals but everything to do with the movement of animals and the time of exposure and re-exposure of plants. So the world, government policies, our educational system and everything 60 years later is still operating on deeply held beliefs or myths but the science is solid that overgrazing is not due to animal numbers and nothing shows this better than the degradation of land under seasonal rainfall where there are no animals -- it is as bad as Africa.”