Desertification Part 3

Desertification Part 3. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

The idea that using herds of animals to revitalize land goes against all traditional thinking but according to Zimbabwean biologist and farmer, Allan Savory:

SAVORY: Clearly, we have never understood what is causing desertification, which has destroyed many civilizations and now threatens us globally. We have never understood it.

Bare ground causes cooler temperatures at night and hotter daytime temps, multiplied by millions of acres and we see climate changes.

SAVORY: There is only one option, I'll repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for former herds and predators, and mimic nature. There is no other alternative left to mankind.

He says they have demonstrated over and over how successful this radical thinking has been.

SAVORY: We are already doing so on about 15 million hectares on five continents, and people who understand far more about carbon than I do calculate that, for illustrative purposes, if we do what I am showing you here, we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years, and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands that I've shown you, we can take us back to pre-industrial levels, while feeding people.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.