#124 In Practice, MAR/APR 2009

healthy land. sustainable future.

MARCH / APRIL 2009

25

NUMBER 124

Years Ago!

WWW.HOLISTICMANAGEMENT.ORG

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Center for Holistic Resource Management Becomes a Reality

KEYLINE

Editor’s Note: As part of our 25th Anniversary, we are sharing parts of articles from previous newsletters published in 1984. We hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane with HMI (through all our various name changes) as we celebrate 25 years of working for a sustainable future. Look for a full list of donors since 1996 in our next issue. The following excerpt is taken from the July 1984 Savory Letter.

I

am pleased to let you know that the Center for Holistic Resource Management is now a legal entity. The doors will be opened officially on August 1, 1984.

The Center provides a neutral umbrella under which people from all walks of life can become involved in a highly action-oriented organization aimed at the application, training, and dissemination of knowledge of Holistic Resource Management. Although based in New Mexico, the Center will serve and work with any country in the world and all international agencies faced with the tremendous problems of desertification.

All of the activities and functions of the Center for Holistic Resource Management will be aimed at achieving the following long-term goals: 1. Produce stable environments with sound watersheds.

2. Restore profitability to the livestock ranching industry and/or restore high productivity where profit is not the goal.

3. Increase wildlife species, numbers within species, and stability of populations.

4. Improve water resources of cities, industry, and agriculture.

5. Re-establish seriously-damaged riverine areas.

6. Prevent waste of financial resources by governments and international agencies as well as private individuals on faulty resource management.

7. Increase citizen participation and concern in sound resource management.

The Center represents no particular point of view but provides a neutral organization to which we can all belong and work together applying

Holistic Resource Management to achieve the goals that we share.

Holistic Resource Management is a successful technology that has been developed over the last 30 years to provide an economically and ecologically sound means of achieving all of the outlined goals above. The biggest need now is for the rapid but thorough expansion of training and application by all resource managers, educators, policy makers, politicians and people actively involved in managing our environment. It is to provide this expansion that this non-profit Center has been formed.

The integration of Keyline land development and planned grazing has the potential of growing six new inches of top soil a year. This valley dam has been created by using the natural watershed of this gully.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT KEYLINE, TURN TO PAGE 12.

FEATURE STORIES A Holistic Approach to Economic Crisis TONY MALMBERG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2

Of Mule Deer & Paradigms CHRIS GILL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Support for Change MARK GARDNER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

LAND and LIVESTOCK On Waikaia Plains Station— Developing a Cuisine of Stewardship JIM HOWELL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8

A Keyline Primer—Building Soils, Harvesting Rainwater, Storing Carbon ABE COLLINS & DARREN J. DOHERTY . . . . . . . .12

NEWS and NETWORK From the Board Chair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 The Data Mine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 Certified Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 Marketplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20

healthy land. sustainable future.

A Holistic Approach to Economic Crisis

by Tony Malmberg

Holistic Management International works to reverse the degradation of private and communal land used for agriculture and conservation, restore its health and productivity, and help create sustainable and viable livelihoods for the people who depend on it.

FOUNDERS Allan Savory

Jody Butterfield

STAFF Peter Holter, Chief Executive Officer Tracy Favre, Senior Director/ Contract Services Jutta von Gontard, Senior Director / Philanthropy Kelly Bee, Chief Financial Officer Ann Adams, Managing Editor, IN PRACTICE and Director of Educational Products and Outreach Maryann West, Manager of Administration and Executive Support Donna Torrez, Customer Service Manager Mary Girsch-Bock, Educational Products & Outreach Assistant Valerie Gonzales, Administrative Assistant

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Ben Bartlett, Chair Ron Chapman, Past Chair Roby Wallace, Vice-Chair Gail Hammack, Secretary Christopher Peck, Treasurer Ivan Aguirre Sallie Calhoun Mark Gardner Daniela Howell Andrea Malmberg Jim McMullan Ian Mitchell Innes Jim Parker Sue Probart Jim Shelton Dennis Wobeser

ADVISORY COUNCIL Robert Anderson, Corrales, NM Michael Bowman,Wray, CO Sam Brown, Austin, TX Lee Dueringer, Scottsdale, AZ Gretel Ehrlich, Gaviota, CA Dr. Cynthia O. Harris, Albuquerque, NM Leo O. Harris, Albuquerque, NM Edward Jackson, San Carlos, CA Clint Josey, Dallas, TX Doug McDaniel, Lostine, OR Guillermo Osuna, Coahuila, Mexico Soren Peters, Santa Fe, NM York Schueller, Ventura, CA Africa Centre for Holistic Management Tel: (263) (11) 404 979 • hmatanga@mweb.co.zw Huggins Matanga, Director The David West Station for Holistic Management Tel: 325/392-2292 • Cel: 325/226-3042 westgift@hughes.net Joe & Peggy Maddox, Ranch Managers HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE (ISSN: 1098-8157) is published six times a year by Holistic Management International, 1010 Tijeras NW, Albuquerque, NM 87102, 505/842-5252, fax: 505/843-7900; email: hmi@holisticmanagement.org.; website: www.holisticmanagement.org Copyright © 2009

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IN PRACTICE

T

he sun rose to a different economic world in 2009. A stock market meltdown and bond markets crumbling has spread economic chaos across the entire world. Who would have thought that all of the world’s equity markets could have shrunk by a third simultaneously?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 40 percent, with no reason to believe it has achieved its lows. Wheat down 60 percent, cattle down 30 percent, and oil down 70 percent, all scream of instability. The financial industry has seen equity vanish into thin air. Prices have gone from unsustainable highs to unsustainable lows.

When someone borrows money, the money supply grows. If the borrower defaults, the money supply shrinks. In fact, the money supply has shrunk by nearly 20 percent . This is a mere drop in the bucket if anticipated foreclosures come to fruition. The Dow Jones Industrial Average saw a third of equity vanish, and the money supply will match or exceed this amount as additional foreclosures shrink money supplies further.

The newly spawned derivatives market, supposedly hatched to hedge risk, magnified losses by the power of 10, by foolishly hedging ten times more than the equity underlying these instruments. Not only does this not make sense, it clearly demonstrates the lack of clear decisionmaking. People at many levels began making decisions simply to accumulate money without considering social, economic, or environmental sustainability.

The new year also greets a new president in the United States. Barack Hussein Obama, our 44th president, calls to a nation in words that echo Allan Savory’s call to Holistic Management practitioners around the world. “One cannot be lazy. There are questions to be asked, actions to be monitored, to address hard issues enabling a thoughtful response.” It sounds like a call to practice Holistic Management decision making. As Allan Savory says, “It’s simple, but it’s not easy.”

On the other side of the coin, nations’ treasuries are frantically pumping money back into the system. Bailouts flail to stabilize companies threatening to drag entire segments of our economy down. These companies, with drastically reduced markets, threaten to drown the

March / April 2009

taxpayers like a panicked swimmer drowning his lifeguard. At some point there will be a bounce and the recoil will reflect the velocity and duration of the downward plunge in another upward spike.

Deflation will reverse to inflation.

So is it the end of the world? No, but I’m sure some players in the thick of the matter think they can see the end of the world from where they stand.

What goes up usually comes down. When we breathe in, we must eventually breathe out. The longer we go without breathing in, the more desperate the gasp and the longer the sucking will be.

Sloppy Decision Making Panicking will continue until somebody gets a grip on reality. With wild and extreme markets the only certainty is uncertainty. In uncertainty we have no chance of stability. From where I stand, it appears the root cause of the problem is sloppy decision-making.

Situations like this usually arise from sloppy decision-making. The best way to begin cleaning up the mess will be to acknowledge that our decision-making could be better. As a first step toward improving decisions, let’s ask, “What depicts bad decision making?”

In the book, Decision Traps, by J. Edward Russo and Paul J.H. Shoemaker published in 1989, the authors say poor decision making is highlighted by: • Plunge without identifying the crux of the decision • Frame Blindness—we don’t see the real problem

• Overconfidence causes us to ignore the facts • Shortcuts result in using convenient supporting info • Winging It—rather than use a systematic approach • Feedback Ignored—due to ego or irrelevant hindsight • Not Keeping Track—assuming lesson learned • Failure to Audit Decisions The financial industry probably became a little overconfident. With the longest economic expansion in post-war, everyone became bulletproof. The derivatives market became an effort to prop up yields when the economy began winding down and was a shortcut. The decision to leverage hedges ten times appears to be a gasp, and an effort at winging it. If underlying assets would have been tested toward future sustainability, it most surely would have been smoked out as phony. The financial industry failed to acknowledge the futility of propping up yields to ever higher returns into infinity.

Enter the government bailout guys. I can’t think of a term that defines their behavior any better than plunging! Plunging will usually be prevented if we don’t have frame blindness.

Obviously the problem is unsustainable debt. The world’s governments have succumbed to one of the basic fundamental rules of Holistic Management: Don’t make the problem the goal!

Rather than attacking the problem by buying toxic assets or giving the mega-banks loans, we should step back and ask, “What would we like to have as a sustainable economy?”

Having a holisticgoal, testing decisions towards our holisticgoal, monitoring for early warning indicators and using the feedback loop will deal with all of these decision making shortcomings.

Russo and Shoemaker’s bottom line kicker is that one must take a systematic approach to making good decisions. That’s what Holistic Management does.

Economic Germination The financial world requires a healthy tension between lender and borrower if it is to remain resilient. As assets and wealth accumulated to the few and the rich, the entire system became unbalanced. New found wealth was gained from trading paper and transferring risk rather than building wealth with raw resources and people.

When you have most of the wealth purchasing hedges to insure more risk for higher yields, it’s a house of cards. Economic activity requires money in many diverse hands. Our rangelands could not have remained resilient with only wolves or only herbivores, but the tension between the two created a vibrant biological community. The same is true for this economic crisis.

A healthy economy comes with one loan at a time. Mass bailouts send money to the unworthy, just as tighter lending practices strangle the needy.

Over the long term, the world GDP grows about 2-1/2 percent. When the financial industry comes up with gimmicks to grow faster and regulators look the other way so it can grow faster, there will be consequences. If we push the limitations, we have consequences in the world of life. We cannot grow more forage than rainfall will sustain, our mineral cycle will feed, or space we have to grow plants. We need to acknowledge the limitations within sustainable growth and work with them.

Financial managers may find they too are strangling the potential of the economic-system.

We strive for diversity and complexity on our rangelands. This provides more pathways to harvest solar energy, utilize the soil’s minerals, and hold and use water. If our government policies unwittingly block the flow of credit to small business, human creativity is cut off, local economies shrink because of the loss of multiplier effects, and the fruit of labor stalls. The seeds of this economic desert were planted by moving factories and industry to less developed countries.

Local entrepreneurs lost touch with decision makers as banks became larger through consolidation and only clerks remained in local communities. The branch banks became a place to collect deposits and make consumer loans and no longer nurtured initiative for human creativity to strive toward dreams. The few decision makers, isolated from the depositors, invested in

hedge funds to insure risks against a weakened economy. But the core of the economy could not be nurtured with paper. As a brittle landscape dies from rest, human creativity out on the ground oxidized, and the generation of wealth withered.

Land managers surveying a desert will choose the tool of animal impact to create disturbance.

The hooves churn germination sites in the soil surface. One thousand head of cattle, with four thousand hooves generate more than seven million germination sites per day, (assuming each animal travels 4 miles in their grazing and traveling.) View each animal as a loan officer and each hoof print a small business loan.

As germination sites spawn new growth, value is added to the local scene. As one plant benefits another, and another, a synergism creates a multiplier effect. The sum of the parts becomes greater than the whole.

The financial industry has the tools of deposits, loans, securities, borrowing, etc. Our government regulators have the tools of taxes, rebates, borrowing, stimulus, federal reserve policy, etc. But like us, the financial industry and government policy makers need to remember that tools are neither good nor bad. The recent economic meltdown has provided the disturbance. Now it’s up to policy makers to use the tools necessary to create and nurture germinations sites.

Buying toxic assets and bailing out banks on the brink of failure is focusing on the problem and not the goal. Getting money into the hands of local banks for loans to add value to human creativity, labor, and equity of the many local citizens, rather than the few will have a better marginal reaction for the American taxpayer.

A Holistic Economic Stimulus Let’s write a generic holisticgoal for the United States. For the moment, let’s not make the current global economic meltdown problem a focus. If we had undesirable weeds where our goal is a diverse community of perennial grass, forb and shrub, we would not include “killing weeds” in our holisticgoal.

Statement of Purpose To build a diverse and complex community of sustainable cultures, healthy resource base, and sustainable economy.

Proposed Policy To achieve this we propose sending the proposed bailout money to local community banks as partners of the taxpayers. They will distribute these monies in loans to local CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

Number 124

IN PRACTICE

3

Of Mule Deers & Paradigms

by Chris Gill

R

ecently the Mule Deer Working Group published a new book, Habitat Guidelines for Mule Deer. As owners of Circle Ranch near Van Horn, Texas and avid sportsmen, my family has spent considerable time trying to improve wildlife habitat on our working ranch. So I read this publication hoping to learn more ideas on how to improve the health of the ranch.

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IN PRACTICE

1) an analysis of the scientific “proof” that planned grazing harms plants and infiltration; 2) an explanation of planned grazing; and 3) a discussion of paradigms, because in my opinion that is the sympathetic understanding of what otherwise must be severely criticized as deliberate mischaracterization, bad science, and sloppy scholarship.

Why I Care I consider myself a businessman, not a rancher. Ranching and wildlife/habitat restoration are avocations. I married into a land-owning family 38 years ago. At one time or another and to varying degrees I have been responsible for the management of ranches in Uruguay; near Austin, Texas; in the Texas Hill Country; two in West Texas; and even a 3,600-acre (1,440 ha) riverdelta/marsh ranch on the Texas Coast.

I never had even a poor understanding of what I was doing, and wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars. Until I met Allan Savory I was anti-cattle and thought desert grasslands could best be restored by de-stocking. He got me thinking about time frames, symbiosis, and rest/recovery/animal impact. He showed me that plants need animals as much as animals need plants, which if you think about it in terms of 20 million years of co-evolution, only makes sense.

Our coast and desert ranches are run

March / April 2009

Circle Ranch Forage Production

What I discovered was that this book states that specific scientific studies “disprove” planned grazing, and advises readers against using planned grazing in their range management.

This conclusion perplexed me greatly, because we’ve been using holistic planned grazing on the Circle Ranch for eight years now and have increased the productivity (and wildlife habitat) measured by forage production, by more than 35 percent per year.

So I read and analyzed 20 primary studies relied on by the authors of this book. I found that planned grazing had been defined by the authors as a short-duration grazing (SDG) wagon-wheel system, with shared water, no fewer than eight paddocks, five days or less grazing and four weeks or more non-use: about 10 full cycles a year.

Further, this definition or something similar, had been accepted by the range scientists on whom the authors relied. No planned grazier thinks or acts as if there are 10 recoveries per year in the southwestern deserts where in a good rain year there is only a 75-day growing season! Yet, the authors and their 24 sponsoring organizations would have the public believe this.

Allan Savory, who developed holistic planned grazing to enable managers to deal with the great complexity that grazing rotations and systems could not handle, has been up against thinking like this for 50 years. As he says, “I have in the past tried at every opportunity to correct the constant efforts by members of the range science profession and society to disprove planned grazing by proving that when they drop the planning process and test it as a grazing system it always fails. The distinct difference has been explained verbally at Society for Range Management (SRM) gatherings, in writing to SRM, and in published articles by me in their magazine as well as in our textbook.”

In particular, I was shocked that Savory’s 1983 SRM paper, which includes a lengthy explanation that unplanned SDG “wagon wheels” invariably fail because their recovery periods are too short, was cited as proving the conclusion that planned grazing equals unplanned wagon-wheel SDG’s! The scientific conclusions were correct: these systems don’t work, as any planned grazier will tell you.

So I wrote a paper in response. It is

according to planned grazing protocols.

Three of my family completed HMI’s Ranch and Rangeland course. HMI-trained range consultants have helped us with our grazing plans and strategic planning, for eight years.

I am a pragmatist with no professional agenda: I advocate planned grazing because it works for us as quantified in my paper and the details of our strategic plan. If it didn’t work I would say so and look for something better. I am pro-habitat and pro-wildlife. While I respect the ranching life very much, the sad fact is that cattle ranching is a marginal business looked at alone. But cattle and other domestics are essential tools to help wildlife and habitat.

Faulty Science The key statement I took issue with in the Mule Deer publication was on page 11: “[Allan] Savory [founder of Holistic Management International] claimed that by grazing pastures intensively and moving stock frequently the range could actually be improved while simultaneously increasing the stocking rate.

On some ranches it was even claimed that stocking rate could be doubled or tripled with improvements to range and livestock productivity.

Researchers during the last few decades have shown these claims to be invalid.”

To the contrary, we have experienced huge gains in stocking rate and range productivity through planned grazing. After eight years under planned grazing at our 32,000-acre (12,800-ha), high-desert mountain Circle Ranch in Hudspeth County, far-West Texas, we take almost triple the animal days of grazing (AD’s) possible from conventional stocking rates recommended by NRCS and Texas Parks & Wildlife.

Conventional practice dictates a herd of 250 head for 365 days: 250 X 365 = 91,800 AD’s.

These shots of the increased animal impact near a water hole due to increased stock density shows the dramatic response from the land given proper management. Note the shift from bare ground and shrubs to forbs and grasses.

This is a significant distance from the actual water hole and is not due to sub-irrigation from the water hole.

This year we are running 1,000 head for 240 days: 1000 X 240 = 240,000 AD’s; plus, 50 head for 180 days: 50 X 180 = 9,000. This totals 249,000 AD’s, which is 270 percent more than conventional results—virtually the very result that these scientists have “proved” invalid. Records of grazing results over eight years demonstrate we are experiencing consistent improvements in habitat, which we measure by changes in forage production. This year we will graze about half the ranch, moderately, as the rest recovers from last year’s grazing.

We consider AD’s to be the most appropriate benchmark by which to measure production.

With respect to stocking rate alone, we are at about 400 percent of the recommended level, and really about 800 percent given we are grazing only half the ranch.

Our animals will be in about 20 paddocks for about 14 days each: most ranchers and range scientists would consider two weeks grazing every-other-year to be “short-duration.” But we are not running a short-duration grazing system at the Circle. Short-duration grazing usually results in insufficient recovery periods which negatively affect soil health. We are planning our grazing, which results in increased soil health, plant productivity, and water infiltration. By equating Savory or holistic planned grazing with unplanned SDG’s, conventional range science has for 40 years averted its eyes from the obvious. Its faulty science and bad prescriptions continue to do vast damage to desert grasslands and wildlife.

What is Planned Grazing?

Holistic Planned Grazing is all about getting animals to the right place at the right time for the right reason. The right reason is to use animals to

improve desert grassland ecology by concentrating cattle herds, rather than dispersing these as is the norm in conventional desert range management.

This intense grazing must always be followed by long-enough periods without grazing to allow complete plant and soil life recovery. This highconcentration-long-recovery is better for plants since it mimics the natural behavior of large herds of wild herbivores in the presence of their predators. These herds are known to have existed in our deserts until humans arrived about 10,000 years ago. Whereas conventional practice focuses on over-grazing alone, planned grazing focuses on over-grazing, over-rest, and recovery, as well as wildlife needs, livestock needs, economic and social factors and unreliability of weather.

Conventional range practice is obsessed with overuse resulting from too many animals.

This leads conventional range science to focus on animal numbers. It generally assumes yearround stocking. That assumption is so imbedded that its calculations normally rely on only two variables: area and animal numbers.

Planned grazing always thinks in terms of three variables: area, animal numbers, and days. This three-variable thinking follows from the observation that in undisturbed wild states, whether the Great Plains of North America or the savannas of East Africa, wild bison or wildebeest, among many other species, were seen in large numbers for short times and were constantly moving. They were not found in small numbers and present year-round.

Planned grazing is not a ten-step list of “how to do it.” This is impossible. Every owner’s objectives, every ranch, and every place on the planet is different to some degree large or small.

Instead, it states principles. Execution of these

must by definition involve trial and error. That is one reason for monitoring: planned graziers assume they are probably doing something wrong which must be identified and corrected as soon as possible. Short-duration grazing is best understood as an application that failed because practices are disconnected from planning. There is nothing inherently wrong with paddocks arranged in a circular pattern around shared water (what is known as a Savory Grazing Cell), but the management of that area will determine its success or failure. Planned grazing is much more than the layout of the paddocks, water, fencing, and handling facilities. It rests on a dynamic planning process that avoids overgrazing and over-rest, which allows for adequate recoveries, and which generally embraces the complexity of desert grasslands. Using the holistic grazing planning process and chart to keep all this straight, our annual grazing planning takes us three days to complete. This is extra work, but worth it—we get two free ranches, and huge habitat/wildlife improvements as a result.

Paradigms What we have here is a case of divergent paradigms. Thomas Kuhn noted in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that “paradigm” describes the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on, shared by the members of a given (scientific) community. As Kuhn explains, paradigms are necessary to a scientist as conceptual toolbox. He further notes: “The source of the resistance (to new science) is the assurance that the older paradigm will ultimately solve all its problems (and) that nature can be shoved into the box the paradigm provides.”

CONTINUED ON PAGE 6

Number 124

IN PRACTICE

5

Of Mule Deers & Paradigms

Photo on left shows the amount of forage taken from an area by the Circle Ranch’s herd of 1000 cows.

Photo at bottom right, shows what the area looks like one year later. This growth represents a 600 percent increase in forage production since 2001.

continued from page five When a paradigm changes, the questions scientists ask together with the kinds of answers they deem acceptable are subtly reformulated.

Conventional range and wildlife science and practices are crippled in at least three ways by conventional paradigms.

1. We study natural histories over time frames too brief to form a correct impression of how these natural systems evolved and were functioning when humans arrived, nor, how humans changed the systems.

2. We do not think holistically.

3. Deeply-held beliefs regularly override science and objectivity.

What would you say if your investment trustee told you that he had studied, and learned, all he needed to know concerning the entire history of American financial markets since 1776, by reviewing the last three hours of the last day on which the markets were open, and then would invest for you based on that? Would you consider that sufficient? Statistically that is what our experts do when they say they have learned all we need to know about our ecological systems by looking at the last 120 years.

Our paradigm must be holistic and realistic.

In this case, fix mule deer habitat and nature will fill it with mule deer. How best to restore habitat? Shall we keep fighting nature with lowdensity set-stocking, and reduction of wild species, and then try to repair the damage with the tools of fire, poisons, bulldozers and further animal reductions? That approach has always failed.

Instead, why not incorporate these tools and animals into protocols that mimic nature?

Exotics are bad? Including humans? The deeply-held conventional belief that exotics are undesirable is unsupportable when re-considered in the context of longer time frames and recognition that plants cannot be restored without a diverse animal community, from which, in the Desert Southwest, 90 percent of large native species are extinct or missing due to 10,000 years of human impact. And humans, the exotic keystone species responsible, must manage this restoration. This diverse animal population will include some other exotics. Our best tool for restoration is an exotic—cattle.

My grandfather was born before the Civil War. When he was a young man in 1870, there were no hand-washing or surgical instrument sterilization stations in American hospitals. Doctors weren’t ignorant: thousands of years of medical arts had taught them to 6

IN PRACTICE

The Circle Ranch has almost tripled its forage produced in a five-year period by using holistic planned grazing. diagnose and treat. Anatomy, chemistry and the technology of instruments was well advanced.

Yet surgical patients routinely died of postoperative infection and the most dangerous place to be if you were sick or giving birth was a hospital. In 1870, the role of microorganisms in disease transmission, including post-surgical infection, was not understood. Infection was blamed on “miasmas”: atmospheric vapors.

But about then a British surgeon began building on the discoveries of Louis Pasteur. He began practicing what would today be considered rudimentary sanitary procedures. His innovations were fiercely resisted. The idea that tiny invisible organisms could make people sick was contrary to everything that was “known” and was ridiculed by his colleagues. Nevertheless, he persisted, with dramatic results, and the history of modern medicine begins then.

The foregoing is analogous to where we are today with range science. Conventional practitioners have great knowledge. Habitat Guidelines for Mule Deer and its incorporated studies are full of useful ideas and correct conclusions. But many basic prescriptions do vast harm to habitats and animals. The organizing insights on over-rest and sufficient recovery periods

are lacking, which are to range science what the infection insights were to the medical arts.

Livestock & Restoration There is a scientific principle which says: “All things being equal, the simplest explanation is the most likely.” The theory governing planned grazing is simple, and scientifically elegant. It organizes all observed phenomena in a way that explains most observed events and accurately predicts the outcomes of contemplated acts.

My mind is open to better protocols if these are out there. I would greatly appreciate any scientific studies people are aware of that can shed new light on this subject. If you think planned grazing has been “disproved,” please read my paper’s analysis on this subject first.

You are probably relying on the same studies that are mistakenly cited over and over as “disproving” planned grazing.

Planned graziers around the world have proved that animals are the most effective, cheapest, and ecologically sustainable means at hand to restore perennial desert grasslands.

Working together with the thousands of us doing this on tens of millions of acres world-wide, we can figure out how to do it better.

Chris Gill lives in San Antonio, Texas and can be reached at: lngres@sbcglobal.net.

Habitat Guidelines for Mule Deer can be found at: http://www.wildlife.state.nm.us/ conservation/habitat_handbook/documents/ SWMDHabitatGuidelines_3.pdf . To read the full paper Chris wrote, go to: www.holisticmanagement.org/n7/Info_07/MuleDeerPaper.pdf

March / April 2009

Support for Change

A

common criticism we face as Holistic Management Educators is the lack of “support” that we provide to follow up our programs and to help people through the change process.

In 2007 we commenced a large scale program to try and address this shortfall by surveying a number of people who had completed Holistic Management training, to get a better handle on their needs. This survey showed a clear need for a strategically focused local support group which would help families make changes (either to their land, finances or the way in which they worked together), to reinforce the key principles and to continue their learning process.

One key finding from this survey was that all families are different; while some were keen to make changes to their grazing management, others wanted to improve their financial position or simplify their operations. Others were very focused on improving their lifestyle and work: life balance.

A Project Approach The big challenge we faced is how to create a support program that would manage this variability and meet the needs of all?

To help us work this challenge through, we established a reference group of families.

We discussed a range of approaches, but eventually came up with the idea that each family would design their own specific “project” that it could work on over the year. This project was to be specific and relevant to them, address a major blockage, move them towards their holisticgoal or a long term goal and be based in land, people or financial origins. The group would help them to make gains in their project through the input of ideas, options and experience. In effect, they were providing a spring board for ideas and support for change.

This “project” approach was a big breakthrough, and it allowed us to manage the variation that existed between families. It also provided us with a mechanism to be able to look back at the end of the year and monitor and evaluate the value of the group to each member, by determining change (where were we at the start of the year in our project, where are we at now?). This approach also helped focus families on the “big things” that were holding them

by Mark Gardner

back from progress towards their holisticgoal.

To help frame projects, we developed a simple one-page project planner and a one-page action planner (two pages in total), both of which draw heavily from the Holistic Management® Decision Making Framework.

Armed with our project approach, we were able to form five groups across the state through contacting a range of people, who had completed Holistic Management® Programs with us. In some locations we invited additional members, in order to create a viable sized group. Not all invited members had completed training in Holistic Management.

There were great discussions as the Holistic Management graduates outlined their learning to other farmers!

Each group met four times per year, as this seemed to be the level of commitment most people were happy with. Each meeting was for a full day. The mornings were filled with a guest presenter on a land, people or profitability topic (determined the previous meeting), and in the afternoon each family presented to their peers their progress in their projects since the last meeting, and asked for ideas and options into problem areas. This was an excellent accountability mechanism.

All meetings were evaluated, and generally very positive outcomes were documented, along with suggestions for improvement.

At the end of the year a final evaluation was completed. Each group had the opportunity to have input and discuss the future of their group, offer suggestions for improvements and to recommit to the group.

As at early December 2008, we have not formally lost a group member! That’s some 45 families that have recommitted to the process for 2009. Some groups have decided to invite new members.

Through this process we have learned a lot.

It has been a big challenge as well as a most rewarding time to be involved with these families. We look forward to a bigger and better year in 2009, as we seek to refine and develop our approach.

Mark Gardner is a Certified Educator who lives in Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia. He can be reached at: mark.gardner@vbs.net.au.

What We’ve Learned Take time to form the group up front: Talk about issues such as purpose of the group, shared values and confidentiality. Talk about hopes, expectations and fears. Develop trust early.

One or two hours of this up front can really make the group focused and work well together. Go slow to go fast later!

Don’t fear a small amount of “warm and fuzzy” discussion; its important.

Facilitate don’t tell: In the project time, most people just need a few guiding questions and someone to bring them back on track on occasion. Very little educator role was needed. People mostly learned from each other.

Facilitation is the key skill here.

Good guest speakers are important: They keep people stimulated, create discussion and also maintain a learning focus.

Focus on Ideas and options: The afternoon sessions on the individual projects were consistently ranked highly in the evaluations. People loved to help others with practical ideas and options as well as to receive comments from others.

Focussing on “ideas and options” to help you, not “you should do . . . ,” let each family weigh up the ideas and make their own decisions. This approach created better “support” than having people telling others what to do and how to do it.

Have a project focus: This approach forced each family to work out what their efforts would be focused on for the year. For the holistic managers it helped them use the tools they had learned; identification of log jams, blockages and the weak link. It forced people to focus on high marginal reaction activities, document steps and actions to dress these and enabled real gains to be made. People could look back and evaluate real progress in some big issues.

Monitor and evaluate: Ask people how the group can improve, both formally and informally. Be open to suggestions for improvements (swallow your ego!). This approach creates a sense of ownership and working together.

—Mark Gardner

Number 124

IN PRACTICE

7

& On Waikaia Plains Station—

Developing a Cuisine of Stewardship

by Jim Howell Author’s Note: Daniela and I and our daughters have recently embarked on a new adventure at the bottom of New Zealand. This article is part one of a series of future articles that will describe the learnings and insights gleaned from our work here, which began in conjunction with Certified Educator Bruce Ward in March of 2008.

I now believe that, for all its virtues, the New Zealand model is seriously flawed.

I

just finished reading Michael Pollan’s newest book, In Defense of Food. By “food,” Pollan refers to sources of nutrition your grandmother would recognize as actual food (or, depending on your age, your great grandmother)—that is, whole foods that still look like actual plants and animals (or pieces thereof).

This article’s core story will eventually center around cattle and grass, but Pollan’s message is so perfectly aligned with where I’m headed that I couldn’t pass up drawing the parallel. The book’s theme is thoroughly holistic: if we consume complete, whole foods (raised on healthy, biologically active soils), the way nature designed them and the way our bodies expect to experience them, then we don’t need to worry about being healthy, because we’ve got the model right. Health will follow as a natural consequence.

But the modern day science of nutrition has taken the standard reductionist approach and attempted to isolate the parts, studying nutrition from the perspective of individual nutrients. Because nutrition is effectively an incredibly complex natural science, the reductionist research approach has proven wholly inadequate. Isolating sugars, or proteins, or vitamins, or fats, and studying them in intimate detail, tells us essentially nothing about how those various nutrients interact with each other (not to mention the thousands of other complex organic compounds found in all foods) in the context of a whole food, or a whole diet, or a long-evolved, culturally adapted cuisine.

The consequence of nutritional science is our modern day Western diet—dominated by just a few plant parts (mostly starchy and fatty seeds) which are heavily processed, and grown in depleted soils. It is rich in calories, but deficient in nearly everything else, and has resulted in the world’s first large scale experiment in overfeeding and undernourishing.

The result is an epidemic in obesity, type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, 8

and cancer. Reducing nutrition to its parts has, without exaggeration, proven disastrous.

To those of us already thinking along holistic lines, Pollan’s argument makes eminently good sense. Just as the “natural whole” of a grassland or prairie or savanna represents an incomprehensible level of complexity, the “natural whole” of the human body and its nutritional environment is likewise more complex than we’ll ever understand. But, we don’t need to understand the intimate details. In the management of grasslands, if we do our best to mimic the natural movement and grazing patterns of native herbivores, things will tend to come right from all angles. That isn’t easy or simple to do by any means, just as the deep local knowledge which permeates every facet of our culturally unique cuisines is, at the end of the day, highly evolved and difficult to learn. So, to clarify the parallel I’m drawing with Pollan: in the worlds of grazing and natural resource management, we need to develop our equivalents of “locally adapted cuisines”— balanced and appropriate cultures of stewardship which are unique to our specific resource base, modeled after nature. Again, that’s not easy, but if we can stick with it and get the model right, we can rest assured that the details will take care of themselves.

Land & Livestock

March / April 2009

Talking Grass, Kiwi-style I will expand on this parallel shortly, but a little more background is still necessary. As I write this article, I’m sitting amidst one of the most productive grass-growing regions in the world—northern Southland, at the bottom end of New Zealand’s South Island. The Kiwis are renowned as global leaders in grass and grazing management. And there is no doubt that, on average, the Kiwi farmer is much more attuned to his or her grass than just about any other nationality. These folks talk a language that goes right over the heads of most of us—kilograms of dry matter production per hectare, cost of production and revenue per kilogram of dry matter produced, pasture wedges, megajoules of metabolizable energy, etc., etc.

I’ve heard their grass obsession described as “treating grass like a crop,” and this characterization is typically thrown out as a compliment.

Indeed, in terms of focusing on maximum growth and harvest, they do in fact treat their grass like a crop, with huge fertilizer inputs and very precise methods of harvest, not only through state-of-the-art forage conservation technology, but via direct, time-controlled grazing (made possible by the world’s most advanced electric fencing technology).

Most other countries are fairly proficient at making hay and putting up silage, but when it comes to putting the pasture sward directly through the animal, the Kiwis pretty well have us all beat.

I was recently reading an article bemoaning the drastic drop-off in milk prices in North America. At US$14.00/cwt. of milk (that’s $14.00 per hundred lbs. of liquid milk, which is where the price of milk is headed), the North American confinement dairy model loses money.

Just this morning I was talking to a Kiwi dairy farmer who claims his breakeven point is NZ$2.60/kg of milk solids (which is how the Kiwis get paid for their milk), which, coincidentally, works out to US$2.60/cwt. of liquid milk (at the current exchange rate)! The average Kiwi breakeven is closer to US$4.50/cwt. of liquid milk, but that’s still a long ways from $14/cwt. This is all possible due to a production model which is centered around growing lots of low cost grass (low cost, at least, relative to growing alfalfa, soybeans, cottonseed, cereal grains, and corn silage, like we do in North America), letting the cow harvest the grass, matching the cow’s lactation curve to the growth curve of the pasture, and then drying cows off for three months through the winter.

Moreover, the Kiwi dairy farmers are masters at pasture allocation.

After every milking, their cows walk out onto a pre-grazing pasture mass of about 2,200 pounds of dry matter/acre (2,500 kg/ha), and graze it to a residual of about 1,300 lbs/acre (1,500 kg/ha) over the course of 12 hours. As the growing season progresses, and their pre-grazing pasture mass builds up over 2,200 lbs/acre (2,500 kg/ha), they begin to drop out paddocks from their “rotation” to make hay or silage. As growth rates slow down, these paddocks are added back in.

In 1991, I spent my senior year of university education at Lincoln University, on the Canterbury Plain of New Zealand’s South Island, studying pasture science within the New Zealand paradigm. My first serious job after this experience was managing a grass-based dairy in east Texas, modeled after the Kiwis. I bought in hard to the New Zealand dairy model. There is no denying it’s a far more resilient model, in basically every sense, than conventional confinement dairying (the model under which 90 percent of the world’s milk is produced). But, as my appreciation for holism and complexity has matured, my paradigm has shifted. I now believe that, for all its virtues, the New Zealand model is seriously flawed.

Industrial Pastoralism So, here I am, back in New Zealand, with 18 more years under my belt, professing that the Kiwi model has room for improvement.

And, thanks to a fantastic and fate-riddled confluence of factors, my family and I are now temporarily living in New Zealand, helping to manage one of the greatest farms I’ve been to in the world, Waikaia Plains Station. We’re in the process of developing a new “cuisine of stewardship” on the Southland plains.

And, since I’ve been here, it’s dawned on me that the Kiwi pastoral model is just as rooted in reductionist science as the rest of our industrial based agricultural systems—from confinement hog production to monoculture cropping. I don’t mean to knock reductionist science.

There is no doubt that, if we ask the right questions, this classical approach to research can help us arrive at lots of answers. But, growing and harvesting grass per the New Zealand model (again, for all its strengths) is still, fundamentally, an industrial model with lots of unintended consequences to the whole.

Soil fertility is almost universally measured in terms of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium. Soil structure, soil organic matter, soil aeration, trace element profile, soil biological activity, etc., are seldom

In the Technosystem infrastructure design, permanent lane fences are created with hitensile wire and fiberglass "node" posts, the exact positions of which are determined by GPS coordinates.

When these lanes are crossed by portable polywires, nearly unlimited, equal-sized paddocks can be created.

considered when making soil amendment or forage production decisions.

Species diversity is discouraged, and restriction of pasture mixes to a few of the proven high production species and cultivars (which are dependent on high loads of the big three macroelements) is the norm.

In terms of animal nutrition, the primary focus, especially within the dairy industry, is on metabolizable energy (ME). If the ME is where it’s supposed to be, everything is assumed to be okay. To maintain this high level of metabolizable energy (the key measure of pasture “quality,” according to the Kiwis), pastures are maintained in a vegetative condition at all times. A primary problem with this approach is that with the dominant pasture mix of perennial ryegrass and white clover, high ME is correlated with super high digestible protein—or an excess of protein (Nitrogen) relative to energy. The cow must deal with this excess by de-aminizing the protein molecules, effectively converting the protein into an energy source. This creates lots of free ammonia, which is hard on the kidneys and liver, and results in manure with the consistency of green splatter. As one dairy farmer put it to me, his “cows could poop through the eye of a needle.” Both milk quality and cow longevity inevitably suffer.

This isn’t natural from the plants’ point of view, which appreciate the chance to go reproductive and make seed once in a while. This constant vegetative state also requires the continual input of all this fertilizer, because by keeping plants continually vegetative, they are effectively overgrazed (I heard one New Zealand grazing consultant describe it as “controlled overgrazing”) and have to be propped up by huge quantities of imported soluble nutrients. On top of that, short, vegetative plants never develop deep, vigorous root systems. The plants are therefore unable to access nutrients that deep root systems could otherwise tap, and much of the fertilizer that is added leaches out of the soil, contaminating ground and surface water.

Also, because of shallow, poorly developed root systems, susceptibility to dry spells, let alone bad drought conditions, is much higher than it should be. On New Zealand’s hilly terrain (which is most of it), the consequences of inadequate root systems, a lack of biodiversity, and a paucity of litter (because plants seldom have the chance to head out and CONTINUED ON PAGE 10

Number 124

Land & Livestock

9

Waikaia Plains Station

continued from page nine

develop a source of soil-protecting stemmy material) create highly unstable soils, as evidenced by widespread “slipping” and many, many cases of horrific erosion.

With this restricted, linear, single-minded focus on just one thing— ME—all of these negative side effects are created. But, as is human nature, when we become extremely proficient at, and highly invested in, the implementation of a certain model, most of us become blind to its unintended consequences, and go to great lengths to defend and perpetuate it. This isn’t meant as criticism. It’s simply one more example of the danger of attempting to manage a natural, complex, dynamic, selforganizing whole with linear, reductionist decision making. At the end of the day, it just doesn’t work. The state of human health in the United States stands as testimony, as does the state of industrial agriculture, including the New Zealand pastoral model.

Waikaia Plains History So, back to Waikaia Plains Station. This farm is owned by the Bowmar Family. Oldest son Andrew, 37, and wife Felicia (plus their two young children, Henry and Caroline) are the current managing owners.

Andrew’s mother, Cea, also sits at the decision making table, but spends most of her time at her home in the picturesque town of Wanaka, nestled within the Southern Alps of the South Island. The farm’s 2,300 acres (900 hectares) lie on the northern edge of Southland, the southernmost province of New Zealand, at a latitude of nearly 46 degrees (think Montana). However, the ocean is never more than 100 miles away, so the climate is temperate but maritime, free of the continental extremes of places like Montana.

Yes, it snows, but a typical winter should require little to no hay feeding due to snow cover. A typical storm might drop six inches, which will be gone within a few days. On most winter days, the temperature climbs significantly above zero, and many nights in the dead of winter don’t even experience frosts. The grass actually continues to grow, albeit very slowly, through June and July (December and January up north).

Rainfall is evenly spread, and totals 35-40 inches (875 mm to 1000 mm).

Maximum summer temperatures rarely climb over 86F (30 C), and there aren’t many of those days.

As I write, we’re in the “dead” of summer on January 20 (equivalent of July 20 north of the equator), and we’ve had a few days that I would call warm, but it most definitely has not even come close to being hot. Since the beginning of the month, we’ve measured 4.25 inches (108 mm) of rain, and the average daytime high has been in the low 70s F (low 20s C)—perfect for cool-season grasses. Relative to most of the rest of the temperate world, Southland doesn’t have to worry about a summer slump.

This combination of climatic factors results in one of the very best perennial cool-season grass-growing environments in the world. When Europeans arrived, this area was a mix of native tussock grassland and shrubs. The Scots and English brought their British grasses with them (plus a few sheep) and re-created their homeland in this most isolated corner of the globe. Now, it is a patchwork of dairy, sheep, and deer farms, with a few beef cattle, and quite a bit of cropping on the flat lowlands.

There are also quite a few patches of forest, mostly imported pines, fir, and eucalyptus, but some native beech as well, and there are creeks and rivers everywhere. Waikaia Plains Station itself lies right at the southeastern edge of the breathtakingly rugged Southern Alps, where the Mataura River (one of the world’s greatest brown trout fisheries) spills out of the mountains and the terrain transitions into the fertile flats and gentle hills of Southland. I reckon it’s about as close to paradise as is earthly possible.

Historically, Waikaia Plains has been a sheep outfit, formerly carrying 10,000 ewes. In the ‘80s, the farm transitioned into deer farming as well, primarily on 500 acres (200 ha) of the hill block, with the sheep primarily relegated to the (mostly flat) remainder of the farm (where cereal grains were formerly grown as well). The farm is still holding onto 1,000 ewes.

Over the years, the Bowmars have experimented with numerous breeds, and now have a “Waikaia Plains blend” of Romney, Coopworth, Texel, and East Friesian, with the Dorper breed making significant contributions over the past six years. They are big, growthy sheep, bred for meat, and the Dorper influence results in self-shedding (of the wool) in many of the ewes. Sheep have been good to the Bowmars, and provided their bread and butter for many years.

But sheep and deer are a lot of work, and they don’t always generate sufficient revenue to keep one adequately motivated. In the early part of this decade, Waikaia Plains was hosting a farm technical tour one day, and participants within the group commented that the farm’s mostly flat, easy topography lent itself to “bull finishing,” which is a uniquely New Zealand enterprise made possible by abundant male Friesian dairy calves (or, they were abundant—a high percentage of New Zealand dairy cows are now Jerseys or Jersey crossbreds, and those little Jersey bulls don’t grow out and finish like a Friesian, and they tend to be dangerously cantankerous).

The Technosystem

This Technosystem is comprised of fourteen lanes. Each herd is allocated two lanes, and each two lane combination is called a "racetrack". At moving time, all seven herds are moved simultaneously. When they get to the end of their lanes, each herd jumps sideways into the adjacent lane, and start heading back in the other direction.

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March / April 2009

To gain to their potential, bulls need to be kept in small groups—ideally no more than 40 head.

At 40 head or under, bulls are able to work out their pecking order and cease fighting all the time.

If they’re not fighting, the only other thing to do is eat, and if only concerned with eating, they can really gain. At times during the height of the growing season, when allocated all the high quality grass they can put away, well-framed bulls can gain 6.6 lbs/day (3 kg/day). In the winter, when grass is scarce, they can be restricted down to a daily forage intake of

one percent of bodyweight and still maintain their weight, then pack on compensatory gain once the grass starts to get away again in spring. Most bulls are grown out to a liveweight of about 1,300 lbs (600 kg) at two years of age, and enter the international ground beef trade.

Obviously, if you’re going to be in the bull beef finishing business in a big way, and if you need to keep mob size to 40 head or under, you need a lot of paddocks. Well, there is a guy from Bulls, in the North Island, named Harry Weir.

Kiwis are renowned for their inventive streak, and are constantly devising creative new solutions to technical problems and challenges and glitches. Well, Harry Weir is among New Zealand’s most creative, dedicated innovators, and has developed his own line of electric fencing gear (which he actually manufactures himself, in his own plant), and worked out a solution to the efficient management of small mobs, known as the Technosystem. Harry has been a student of Andre Voisin since his teen years, and his innovations have been driven by his passion for improving grazing management.

I wrote an article describing the Technosystem back in 2001 (“Bull Beef Finishing in New Zealand,” IN PRACTICE #79), but briefly, the Technosystem is comprised of long narrow lanes, delineated by permanent hi-tensile fences. The posts on these fences are referred to as “nodes,” and the exact spacing of each node post is determined by GPS coordinates. After the exact perimeter coordinates of the area to be “technoed” are established (also by GPS), a computer program then generates a layout of lanes within this area. This layout results in exactly the same area (called a cell) being contained between every four node posts all throughout the entire Technosystem—that is, between the area formed between two node posts on one side of the lane, and two node posts on the other side. If the area being developed is a perfect rectangle, then each of these “cells” has the same exact dimensions. But, if the area under development is imperfectly shaped, the computer program generates the GPS coordinates of each node post so that the area of each little cell still remains exactly the same, albeit with different dimensions.

Then, if you can imagine portable polywires running perpendicular to the lanes (across the node posts on adjacent lanes), you suddenly have the potential for huge numbers of paddocks. At Waikaia Plains, we have Technosystems containing ten to 18 lanes. So, if you run two polywires parallel to each other, all the way across the technosystem, you immediately have ten to 18 equal sized paddocks, with the size of each paddock depending on how far apart the polywires are spaced. For example, imagine a Technosystem containing 14 lanes with a total area of 210 acres (84 ha)—we’ve got a couple of these. Along the length of these lanes there are 120 node posts, so if we wanted to use one node post-spacings for our portable wires, these 14 lane technosystems could be split up into 1,680 divisions (120 x 18). Each division would contain .125 acres (.05 ha).

And what about water? Every other lane fence has a water line running under it, and at every fourth node post, there is a little drinker (about a foot in diameter) called a microtrough (again, all developed by Weir), which allows one animal to drink at a time (more if sheep or little calves). There is a float mechanism which the animal pushes down with its muzzle, and the water then runs into the microtrough as fast as the animal can drink it.

With all these divisions of land, it’s of course very practical to reduce bull mob sizes down to 40 head or less. Since 2002, Andrew has been transitioning out of sheep and into bulls, last year (2007 through early 2008) running close to 2,400 bulls and 2,500 ewes. In the early years of

The Kiwi pastoral model assumes that pasture quality is synonymous with short, leafy plants. At Waikaia Plains, we are bucking this trend, and managing at much higher pre- and post-grazing pasture masses, as seen by these yearling heifers grazing belly high forage. the Technosystem design and management, he was even running ewes within the technos. By doing so, he was able to keep the sheep mob sizes down to 60 ewes, which meant that he could continue moving the sheep onto fresh grass all through lambing (mis-mothering of lambs ceases to be a problem at this small mob size), as opposed to the set stocking typically practiced through lambing in most of New Zealand. To control the sheep, all the technos were built with three hi-tensile wires on each lane, and the portable fences also consisted of three wires. Andrew and crew became very proficient at stringing out these portable wires, and developed the vehicles and automatic spooling devices to get it all done in a relative flash of time. Still, with thousands of ewes and bulls split up into little mobs of 40 to 60, it was a lot of work.

In future articles I’ll talk a lot more about the Technosystem design and management details, but here in Part 1 I’ll conclude with a return to our main theme—our evolving “cuisine of stewardship” here at Waikaia Plains. This Technosystem set-up is pretty slick, but it’s just a tool, and like any tool, its success and effectiveness is wholly dependent on the skill, thinking, planning, creativity, and monitoring that goes into its application.

We’re still working on the right combination, but guided by a holisticgoal that is centered on creating resilience and balance throughout all of the elements of our whole—soils, plants, animals, finances, and people. This means we have to look for alternatives to the industrial New Zealand pastoral model, which is currently profitable but ultimately unsustainable.

This is the path the Bowmars have been traveling for a long time.

They enlisted Bruce Ward and myself as co-collaborators in the process, and now Daniela and I are here on-site, helping to work through the details, day-to-day. Our course to date has been fascinating and rewarding, and progress has been great. We’ve made a big jump and transitioned out of bulls and into “dairy support” grazing, which includes the growing out of replacement dairy heifers (from weaning at three months to an in-calf, springing heifer at 23 months) and custom grazing of dry dairy cows in the winter. Next time, I’ll explain how we arrived at this decision. I’ll also start to delve into the approach we’re taking, and the results we’re starting to achieve, with our grazing and soil fertility management, which flies in the face of the high ME, high nutrient input, leafy/vegetative paradigm of the Kiwis. So, stay tuned—there is a lot more to come.

Number 124

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A Keyline Primer—

Building Soils, Harvesting Rainwater, Storing Carbon

by Abe Collins & Darren J. Doherty

K

eyline Design was first developed by P.A. Yeomans, in the late 1940s and 50s initially as a practical response to the unpredictable rainfall regime he found on his new property, “Nevallan,” to the west of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Yeomans went on to devote the rest of his life to the promotion, research and development of Keyline Design.

Abe and I have been busy experimenting with combining the techniques and processes of Permaculture, Keyline, and Holistic Management to develop ever better ways of building soils, harvesting rainwater, and storing carbon.

We call our synthesis, Keyline Design Mark IV. We believe it is the best way forward toward a regenerative agriculture.

Yeomans & Keyline Influenced by the likes of prominent organic agriculture figures in Andre Voison, Friend Sykes, Newman Turner and Louis Bromfield, among many others, Yeomans has been attributed with being the first person to accelerate soil formation through the stacking of methods, overturning the myth that it took 1,000 years to create an inch of topsoil. Yeomans proclaimed that “…the landman’s job is not so much to conserve soil as it is to develop soil, to improve his soil his soil and to make it more fertile than it ever was…”

Yeomans brought to bear his vast experience as a mine overseer and earthmover to capture and store rainwater in large ponds across broadacre landscapes which were so lush and green all year round, they would be virtually fireproof’ and droughtproof. Similar climate regions across the world suffer similarly and clearly the adoption of Keyline methods would be a primary form of solid-state risk management for both rural and urban landscapes alike.

Keyline Planning is based on permanence, beginning with the two most permanent features of the landscape: 1. Climate, which has molded and created the topography. Of the dominant climatic factors, temperature, wind, annual distribution of humidity, rainfall, water is the easiest to work with (“control”) and gain benefit from.

2. Existing Land Shape and Form (Topography), including underlying geology According to Yeomans the inseparable trinity of landscape design was climate, land shape and water supply, with roads, trees, buildings, fencing and soils being the “more negotiable remainder of the hierarchy.” Yeomans labeled this prioritization the Keyline Scale of Permanence as a foundation to the process involved with planning permanent landscapes

The Keyline Plan Abe describes a Keyline Plan as “A comprehensive design strategy for agricultural and urban development based on fundamental, repeating land shapes that have been created by water.” The key components are: • Rapid development of biologically active, fertile soil within a systematically designed landscape. During an average three-year conversion phase, four to six inches of new topsoil are typically formed each year. This new topsoil stores large quantities of water in the landscape.

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Land & Livestock

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The Keyline Scale of Permanence 1. Climate 2. Land Shape 3. Water 4. Roads 5. Trees 6. Buildings 7. Subdivision 8. Soil

• Design for the harvest, storage, and distribution of water on the landscape forms the foundation of the Keyline Plan.

• Run-off water is stored in dams. This water is later released for rapid, gravity-powered flood-irrigation.

• Roads, forests, buildings and fencing follow primary water layout and fit together within the lay of the land.

• The Keyline landscape is a permanent landscape in which every infrastructure component helps ensure the maintenance and renewal of the topsoil within it.

What’s the outcome? Ken Yeomans describes a typical property this way: “The hallmarks on the properties of successful Keyline farmers are lakes with water birds, contour and ridge line roads and contoured strip forests, dark fertile soil, luxuriant healthy green crops and feed.”

Quick Formation of Top Soil The factors that determine soil fertility are: • The mineralogical and structural framework • The prevailing climate • The soil’s biotic associations Soil has a life and environment of its own. The biotic association can be modified through modification of the soil microclimate.

Soil life responds dramatically to ideal air, moisture, food and temperature conditions. These conditions are simple to create with grazing, subsoiling and dependable rainfall or irrigation. Life begets life. Plants, their roots and attendant exudates are the solar harvesters and the raw food of soil life. Grazing animals are “biological accelerators.” They are the most effective tool we can use to speed mineral cycling, and graziers affect enough land to make a large impact. We believe graziers can build topsoil more quickly than anyone else on earth!

Using a keyline plow or cultivator, lower in a primary valley, cultivation is parallel and below a contour guideline. On primary ridges, cultivation is parallel and upwards from any contour guideline. Photo

by Lisa J. Heenan.

Land Planning & Keyline Planning Abe has been working on combining Holistic Management® Land Planning with Keyline Planning. The key steps are: 1. Form a holisticgoal, including detailed land/ecosystem process description in the Future Resource Base.

2. Get topographical maps. Analyze landscape using Keyline insights.

Identify Keypoints, Keylines, ideal water storage areas, water diversion lines, possible irrigable areas, road layouts, tree lines, etc.

3. Gather all pertinent information, study and prepare maps and overlays.

Take a year or two.

4. Brainstorm many possible layouts for the planned developments.

5. Create the ideal plan based on the best ideas.

6. Develop the plan gradually through Holistic Management® Financial Planning so that each investment makes rather than costs money.

Holistic Management® Planned Grazing and Keyline Soilbuilding go hand in hand. The growing season grazing plan gives you a structured, holistic framework to plan the use of tools (grazing animal impact, subsoiler plow) in the soilbuilding project.

Water Control Water and rainfall determine land development. We have to get water right to get everything else right—design follows water. New, “artificial” water lines—diversions, dam walls, channels—become permanent land features. Other infrastructure components follow.

Direct rainfall and irrigation water are spread evenly on the land by a unique cultivation pattern, which is an artificial water line—Keyline Cultivation.

Water flowing over land has a pattern of flow and predictable path lines of movement. These include: • The contour line—the edge of a lake is a true contour line. Flow is perpendicular to the contour, forming shallow S-curves from the ridge to the valley.

• Water drainage lines—streams • Water divide lines—“watersheds” and main ridge crests Artificial water lines include: • Human earthworks that influence flow of water and store water.

• Diversions, irrigation channels, dams, Keyline Cultivation pattern, swales. (Also, drainage ditches, which are not central to Keyline.)

Artificial water lines in Keyline are designed for the most efficient water resource development. Proper design of farms and cities must fit with the existing design in the natural landscape.

Water Lines & Land Shapes There are three water lines, three land shapes, and one special pattern that constitute the geography of landscape. The three water lines are: 1. The Contour Water Line—The shore of a lake; a level line running across the landscape; a set vertical distance from the next contour line. Water will always run perpendicular to the contour.

2. The Water Drainage Line—The center of watercourses: streams, rivers, drainage lines of the land. Dendritic (branching) patterns.

3. The Water Divide Line or The Crests of Main & Primary Ridges— Vegetation slows the movement of water over and through the land.

Vegetation, its variety and/or its absence, and soil organisms stabilize soil and land shapes.

In a stabilized landscape, there are three land shapes we consider in relation to Keyline development: 1. The main ridge 2. The primary valley 3. The primary ridge

Every primary valley has a keypoint. Identifying the Keypoint, and attendant Keyline, is the starting point for Keyline design.

The main ridge is the first land shape. It begins at the convergence of two water drainage lines. Look around—it is the horizon. The crest of a ridge is synonymous with a water divide line. The crest of a ridge is usually less steep than the sides of the ridge. Main ridges are a reverse image of the dendritic branching of water drainage lines (streams/rivers). You could follow main ridges around the world, except where they go in circles around lakes. The interplay of main ridges and water drainage lines are the anatomy of the landscape.

Primary valleys form in (erode into) the sides of main ridges. Primary valleys are divided by primary ridges. A primary valley has a primary ridge on either side, so there is always one more primary ridge than primary valleys in a main ridge system. Primary valleys are the first place water flows in a rainstorm.

Primary valleys are the smallest of the three land shapes. They are the only true “valley” shapes in the landscape. (Big valleys are actually watersheds.) The centerline of a primary valley is usually less steep than the sides of the valley. Where a primary valley intrudes far into a main ridge, you have a saddle. Roads usually cross over main ridge crests across saddles.

Next to a saddle is a hill.

Lakes and ponds are located in depressions in the landscape. Walk up from the end of a main ridge, (above the confluence of two streams), and it eventually runs into another ridge—you can go left or right on a main ridge. This pattern repeats endlessly. It almost seems designed to shed water. It is primarily the result of the underlying geological skeleton, the urge of water to get back to the sea (water flows downhill) and the moderating influence of vegetation and soil life. There are fragments between tidal areas and flood plains.

The Keypoint Every primary valley has a Keypoint. It is the point at which the primary valley gets suddenly steeper. The steepest slopes in the landscape usually occur in the center of the valley above the Keypoint—between the Keypoint and the top of the main ridge.

The Keyline is a contour line carried in both directions from the Keypoint, in the valley shape, but not extending out onto the ridges. Below the Keyline, the accompanying (next-door) primary ridge center is steeper than the primary valley center. Above the Keyline, the primary valley center is steeper than the primary ridge center.

Cultivate parallel to the Keyline both above and below the keypoint in the CONTINUED ON PAGE 14

Number 124

Land & Livestock

13

Keyline Primer

continued from page thirteen

valleys. Cultivate parallel and upward from any selected contour line on the ridges. When there is no Keyline to work from (lower in the valleys, or on ridges) use contour guidelines to cultivate parallel to (upward from on ridges, downward from in valleys.) This is Keyline pattern cultivation. Water will drift from the valley shapes toward the ridges.

The Main Ridge Main ridges occupy the most land in the landscape. They are not level, but slope. This creates a rising relationship in the Keypoints of adjacent primary valleys. Contour maps are basic to understanding Keyline.

Contour maps show the above land features clearly. Contours are level lines, a set vertical distance from each other. Close lines indicate steep land; more widely spaced lines indicate less steep land.

With a good contour map and the farmer providing details, we can design a landscape which will include: • Water diversion, storage, irrigation channels, irrigable land and water control structures • Catchment size • Slope indices • Size of dam walls • Areas to leave, plant, cut trees • Sites for farm buildings • Location of subdivision fences, stock watering points, and paddock layout Contour maps from government sources, especially of rural landscapes, only provide contour intervals of 10-20 yards (10-20+m). Surveyor-produced contour maps are more expensive but are very accurate and provide contour intervals of between four inches (100mm)—very flat landscapes—and one to two yards (1-2m) for more undulating or steep landscapes.

Overlaying contours onto an aerial photo provides an advanced base to design a landscape with. Using Geographic Information System (GIS) and Computer Aided Design (CAD) software can really enhance the design and development potential of a landscape and form a base from which to easily create a “Bill of Quantities” for all aspects of the landscape and its development.

Available Water There are four sources of water: • Absorbed rainfall—high quality, low price. Good soil holds great quantities of water. Developing topsoil is probably the most cost-effective way to enhance the water cycle and store water on the farm.

• Run off from rain falling on the farm. Rainfall has exceeded the field capacity of the soil, and runs off. Poor design will accelerate this.

• External sources of surface water. Water flowing onto the farm.

• Ground Water—Pumped or spring fed.

Designing For the Environment By understanding the basic land shapes and designing in accordance with enhancement of the water cycle, you can slow the movement of water over the land. Start as high as possible, by increasing the fertility and water holding capacity of the primary valleys and ridges. Maintain or develop productive or revegetation forests along the ridges and creek lines for landscape protection and to optimize nutrient or energy cycling, flows and utilization.

Introduce artificial water lines: the diversion channel, the dam wall, the irrigation channel. Again incorporate productive or revegetation forest strips and plantings with these features.

14

Land & Livestock

March / April 2009

Contour strip forests generally follow the patterns of water harvesting/ distribution channels, as well as the roads. Photo by Benjamin Falloon.

Contours / Keylines The Keyline is the contour line drawn through the Keypoint.

Remember, Keylines do not wrap continuously from one primary valley to the next. They have a rising relationship as one moves from one primary ridge to another.

On a contour map, the Keypoint is apparent, because the contour lines are closer together above it, and further apart below it. On a primary ridge, the center of the ridge is typically flatter than the sides of the ridge, closer to the valley. Contour lines are further apart in the center, closer on the sides.

As the contour lines change direction and head into the valley, the lines will diverge if they are below the Keyline and converge if they are above the Keyline.

Water always flows perpendicular to the contour. This can be understood when we observe the heavier flow in the valleys, and the drier ridges.

Keyline Pattern Cultivation The Keyline Pattern Cultivation causes water to drift away from valley centers and toward ridge crests, where it is held until it soaks in. Rainfall and irrigation water are spread evenly over undulating land.

The simplest way to accomplish this, given an gyroscopic laser guidance system, or just a good feel for slope, is to plow slightly downhill from a given point in a valley center out onto the accompanying ridge.

In primary valleys, we cultivate parallel to the Keyline above it and below it. Above it, it is often too steep for plowing, but not always. The point at which we shift from valley pattern to ridge pattern cultivation, below the Keyline, is located where the valley floor becomes the ridge wall, or where the contour line shifts direction, in going from primary valley to primary ridge shape. This plowing pattern will quickly become quite steep/angular, at which point a new contour line should be marked and plowed parallel to and downward. Anywhere lower in the primary valley, we cultivate parallel and below a contour guideline.

On primary ridges, we cultivate parallel and upwards from any contour guideline. It’s good to stake a number of guidelines, i.e., not plowed mindlessly too far from a guideline.

In practice, one would lay out the Keyline across the primary valley, then carry that contour line out onto and around both ridges, then cultivate upward from that in long plow passes. You would then plow downward from that line, restricting yourself to the valley shape. (The ridges would be plowed parallel and upward from a lower contour guideline. In tighter

valleys, there are tricks for simplifying difficult plowing. However, the basic principles must be stuck by, or water will flow the wrong way, concentrating in the wrong places.

TABLE 1. Change in the capacity of soil to store water (litres/ha) with changes in levels of soil organic carbon (OC) to 30 cm soil depth. Bulk density 1.2 g/cm3 (Source:www.amazingcarbon.com)

Water

Change in OC level

1% The third item on the Keyline Scale of 2% Permanence is water. The two costs of water are: 3% 1. Cost in money—cost of improving soils, 4% building dams and irrigation layout, and irrigation operation.

2. Cost in water itself—it is expensive to always have water available. It is more cost effective to have water to bring you through dry times—100 percent droughtproofing would cost a fortune.

But store water is a second savings account. Water in a dam can be traded for many things such as a crop of pasture. A full dam and dry fields in a drought is a sign of failure. Use water in dams for irrigation whenever necessary. Dams can and should be designed to be interlinked so as to be able to move water where it is needed during prolonged dry periods.

Keyline dams always have a large pipe with baffle plates and a valve, through the bottom, for irrigation and control purposes.

The highest site for a storage dam wall in a primary valley is below the Keypoint. This is called a Keypoint Dam. The Keyline is the top water level of the dam. Other types of dams include: Saddle Dams, Turkey Nests & Contour or Ridge Dams.

Good sites for valley dams generally have: • A flatter valley floor slope, backing water up further with less wall • A short wall site • Width of valley behind the dam wall • Suitable location for spillway • Suitable soils (will hold water) • Suitable foundation material Water levels of dams can be connected by a diversion, falling at 1:400+.

Or, water from the lockpipe of one dam can be carried by a diversion to the Keyline of another Keypoint Dam. Sometimes, a dam lower than at the Keypoint is desirable for a whole range of factors.

Water Channels When developing the water resources of a farm, there are two primary water channels.

1. A Diversion/Catchment Drain—for diverting run off, stream flow or pumped water into a dam. It generally slopes at 1:400+ 2. Irrigation Channel—for carrying water for irrigation purposes on hilly land, dug into ground, slopes at 1:400+. On flat land this can be built above land with two banks, called the Flood-flow irrigation channel. The Irrigation Channel is an important artificial water line. Above it is rain pasture, below it is irrigated pasture. Related water control lines are steering banks, perpendicular to contour. Drainage ditches are also water channels, but they are not central to Keyline The Keypoints of successive primary valleys will often have a rising/falling relationship. Keypoint dams can be connected by diversion channels. If the fall of the diversion is less than the fall of the water drainage line (stream), an increasingly large area of land will be irrigable between the dams and the water drainage line.

Irrigation Irrigation has been an integral part of agriculture for centuries. But, no

Change in OC (kg/m2)

Extra water (litres/m2)

Extra water (gal/acre)/(liters/ha)

CO2 sequestered (t/acre)/(t/ha)

3.6 kg 7.2 kg 10.8 kg 14.4 kg

14.4 28.8 43.2 57.6

14,400/144,000 28,800/288,000 43,200/432,000 57,600/576,000

53/132 106/264 158/396 211/528

conventionally irrigated civilization has ever survived. There are three key types of irrigation.

Hillside Irrigation or Keyline Pattern Irrigation. Flood irrigation of hilly land made possible by the Keyline Cultivation Pattern. Water is stored in large dams, released through large pipes in the base of the dams, and is moved in irrigation channels dug into the ground. These channels have to have a fall of at least 1:300. Flags are positioned in the ditches, and spill water onto the land below the irrigation channel. Plowing must be continued indefinitely to spread water evenly. Irrigation can be at rates of up to eight acres per hour, with one person control.

Flat Land or Keyline Flood-Flow Irrigation. Water is stored in even larger dams, which tend to be shallower. It is then released through large two-inch (50mm) pipes in the base of the dam. Water is moved in channels which are located above the surface of the land. The channel is generally level. Gates in the channels are opened, and water spreads in a wide sheet across the land in irrigation bays. Irrigation bays are bounded by “steering banks,” which run perpendicular to contour. Water can be applied at 20-50 acres/hour (8-20 ha/hour), and cultivation need only happen during the soil-building conversion period of three years.

Traditional Irrigation. Slow irrigation drowns soil aerobes and is not generally sustainable. Adverse evaporation is also a concern with some methods. There are a variety of methods: • Border Check Irrigation—similar to flood flow, but slow • Contour Bay Irrigation—such as rice paddies • Furrow Irrigation—common for vegetables and orchards • Spray Irrigation—common, expensive, lots of machinery • Drip tape—vegetables. It is not a broad-acre strategy and requires lots of plastic.

Roads Roads on contour require less energy to travel. They do not erode easily or concentrate run-off and should be built in relation to water control lines.

The possible locations for roads are: 1. Along boundary lines. These generally are not on contour, often difficult to maintain, and tend to self-destruct. They are useful for fence maintenance, but I wouldn’t invest much in these roads, if at all.

2. On ridge crests (watershed lines, main ridge centers). They are high, dry, easy to maintain, a good site for a main road.

3. By water channels: diversion channels, irrigation channels, irrigation areas.

• Below diversions—dry, cross dams that cross valleys • Above irrigation channels in hilly country, but bridges are often necessary • Below Flood-flow irrigation channels • At low end of irrigation area • Along streams CONTINUED ON PAGE 16 Number 124

IN PRACTICE

15

Keyline Primer

continued from page fifteen

Keyline soil development on pastureland prior to tree establishment will accelerate tree growth. Build soil fertility first.

Trees

Buildings

Tree locations fall into place when the first four factors have been considered. Clearing of trees and planting of trees should be considered in light of the four first landscape design considerations. A key practice is the Contour Strip Forest.

Contour Strip Forests generally follow the patterns of water harvesting/distribution channels, as well as the roads. Trees usually border roads, and are located above irrigation channels. It is good to plant trees along riparian corridors and around lakes and ponds. Pasture and crop land are separated by contoured tree lines. In the long run, trees do not interfere with productive crop land, they enhance it because they: • Act as mineral pumps • Reduce the effects of wind • Give edge effect • Can be designed to provide browse • Provide wildlife habitat • Provide shelter Contoured timber belts in hill country are generally spaced so that the top of the mature trees will be level with the base of the next higher belt of trees.

Building should be placed to optimize the potential energy flows.

Principles include: • Not too exposed. The best view is a often a costly one from an energy consumption perspective • Good solar access to enable energy efficient house and building design • Topographic protection from prevailing wind direction • Build your shed higher than the house so as to use the shed water tank for gravity-fed water to the house • On a slope to allow good air and water drainage, gain gravity potential and out of danger from floods

A Holistic Approach to Economic Crisis continued from page three businesses adding diversity to our culture, our food production, and our capital base.

Testing the Policy Cause & Effect Are we addressing the root cause of the problem?

Why is there no credit available? Because bank balance sheets were weakened by losses. Why? Because investments in hedge funds had no underlying equity. Why? Because loans were based on speculation rather than building wealth. Why? Because consolidation of banks fractured decision making from the land, people, and wealth building potential. Why? Because banks are no longer local. Why? Because decisions were not made toward a triple bottom line.

Root Cause of the Problem: Decision making for loans was removed from the grass roots of land, people, and wealth building. Policy PASSES as it resolves that imbalance.

Weak Link • Social—Have we addressed any confusion, anger, or opposition this action could create with people whose support we need in the future?

Corporate banks may initially resist this as the money will not going to them. There would be a need to show how they benefit from this plan.

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Land & Livestock

Fences Fences follow all the other infrastructure layout. Many paddocks are good, and temporary fence offers flexibility. Fences are built according to natural and artificial water lines. My rule of thumb is to build fences: • Along creeks, drainage lines and main ridge crests so as to create drainage line protection and to connect flows of wildlife from the bottom to the top of landscapes

• Biological—Does this action address the weakest point in the life cycle of the organism?

N/A • Financial—Does this action strengthen the weakest link in the chain of production?

The financial weak link is resource conversion.

For a sustainable diversity in culture, food, and capital formation, we need to invest in research, education, and human creativity. We need to invest in building healthy soil and a mechanism to plow new wealth back into local communities.

PASSES Marginal Reaction (Comparing two or more actions.) Which action provides the greatest return towards our holisticgoal in terms of time and money spent?

The bailout sends good money after bad and leaves the decision making authority in the hands of those removed from the grass roots level. Our proposed action gets money to decision makers at the local level to invest in human creativity and building the real assets of people, land, and generating wealth. PASSES Gross Profit Analysis (When comparing two or more enterprises.)

Which enterprise contributes most to covering the overheads of the business? N/A Energy/Money Source & Use Is the energy/money to be used in this action derived from the most appropriate

March / April 2009

source in terms of our holisticgoal?

Because the money is being used is taxpayer money it could be perceived as failing this test (because it is not the bank’s money). However, others might argue that this is a good area to invest tax payer money and get a return later.

In regards to money use, this would be an investment so it PASSES. Regarding energy source and use, N/A. Sustainability If we take this action, will it lead toward or away from the future resource base described in our holisticgoal?

Our future resource base (as defined by the newly elected administration) calls for building roads and bridges, electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce, restore science, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost, harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories, transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. PASSES Society and Culture Considering all of the questions and our holisticgoal, how do we feel about this action now?

This is our gut-check and it’s for you, you, and you to answer. It feels good to me.

• Lightweight electric internal fencing according to stock type for planned or management intensive grazing • Along all dams and open water bodies to control stock access • Along shelterbelts, strip forests, forest plantations and revegetation forests or areas of natural significance that need protection

Stored water is a second savings account and a critical component to land resilience.

This contour dam is developed into a hillside.

Soil Subsoil can be quickly turned into topsoil. The development and maintenance of soil fertility is a product of management. Good grazing gives the greatest return for the least energy input in increasing soil fertility, while the subsoiler greatly accelerates normal topsoil formation under pasture.

Conversion of subsoil to topsoil involves creating repeated biological climaxes. Soil life requires air, moisture, warmth, space and plenty of high energy, high protein food. Create these conditions, and soil life will respond, transforming some portion (often about 10 percent) of plant exudates and sloughed grass roots into humus.

Create these conditions repeatedly, and subsoil will be “permanently” transformed into topsoil.

Logjam (for Financial Planning) The financial logjam is no liquidity. Banks receiving bailout money have simply paid off debt or invested in other financial companies.

The root cause of illiquidity is not having loan authority at the grass roots level. The proposed action addresses this logjam. PASSES

Building Confidence We are dealing with major complexity. The recent past adequately demonstrates that our world economy is more complex than anyone understands. Therefore, we need to identify early warning indicators to warn us if we are not moving in the right direction. The first confirmation will be improved confidence at the grass roots level, but not through a dangerous ratio of debt/asset. The American dream begins with an education to improve citizens earning ability. As graduates move into the work arena and start families, the dream continues with owning a home. By monitoring college enrollment and home ownership, we have a good early warning indicator of whether we are getting money into the hands of real people at the grass roots level.

Early warning indicators that might suggest we are on the wrong path would be increased filings of unemployment claims, domestic abuse incidents, and debt.

The key will be to use the testing questions as programs and policies are designed. Ideally the

Abe Collins is a co-founder of Carbon Farmers of America, www.carbonfarmersofamerica.com, in Swanton, Vermont. Darren Doherty lives in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia and operates Australia Felix Permaculture, www.permaculture.biz. All photos are Darren Doherty’s unless otherwise credited.

money won’t be an addictive (as unemployment) cost but will move through schools, industry, and business hands to the hands of citizens learning, thinking, and working to build our future resource base.

Crisis = Opportunities Finances have a natural ebb and flow with disturbance and recovery ratios that must be heeded for a healthy resiliency. One cannot expect a sustainable economy to expand at a rapid rate forever. Holistic Management decision making and testing decisions toward the triple bottom line would have retired our national debt during the longest business expansion in post war history (the previous five years) rather than financing our wars with debt. In that case, we would be in the situation China finds itself—debt free. This enviable position allows them to pump massive amounts of money into their economy putting people to work and build their future resource base.

Is national debt a logjam or just an adverse factor? With a total debt of $53 trillion and a $14 trillion GDP, I would suggest debt is not our logjam. Let’s put it in perspective. Say a ranch’s stocking rate is 1,000 AU and our gross sale of $20 per AUM equals an income of $240,000. (1,000 X $20 X 12 months = $240,000) The US debt is 3.78 times the gross income.

Our 1,000 cow ranch would have a debt of $907,200. Our government has the ability to borrow money pretty cheaply now and a 20 year

treasury is 3.2 percent. If we were to plan on paying this debt off in 20 years, our principle and interest payment would be a little over $62,000 a year.

Those of us practicing Holistic Financial Planning know that the tough part of this is mental. The trick is to set aside our profit first, so our human creativity will focus on managing expenses more efficiently. We are used to setting up to half of our gross income aside, which would be $120,000 in this case. We could pay our debt in ten years! This is doable, but we can’t afford to continue deficit spending without building a future resource base that will be sustainable economically, ecologically, and socially. Another ten years of adding $1 trillion more principle plus interest of a trillion or two and we’re talking real debt.

Our economic weak link is the resource conversion link. We need to build worker skills and knowledge to build our future resource base.

It’s time to invest in people. Next time our economy is cranking, we need to retire debt.

Holistic Management is pragmatic and asks the questions that are meaningful for our lives and our situation, wherever we may find ourselves. President Obama called on Americans to face our economic crisis caused by “our failure to make hard choices.” Holistic Management is a systematic way to make sustainable decisions when faced with hard choices. There is opportunity in this crisis. Working toward our vision of what we want to create will make all the difference in the world.

Number 124

Land & Livestock

17

Take Time to Learn from Each Other

by Ben Bartlett, HMI Board Chair

I

had the great pleasure to attend a Mob Grazing / Ultra High Density Grazing seminar taught by Ian Mitchell-Innes from South Africa last fall. It occurred at a two-day Holistic Management conference organized by Terry Gompert, Holistic Management® Certified Educator from the northeast corner of Nebraska.

It’s hard to top Terry’s organization and enthusiasm, but Ian’s belief in the power of Holistic Management and his wealth of handson experience really made this a special event.

When you throw in the excellent practitioners that were in attendance, an event like this ends up being one of life’s memorial events. There were excellent teachers and great discussion; you could just feel the “gray matter” working overtime.

I sure hope you take advantage of any Holistic Management get together be it a pasture walk, a formal gathering, or just a few local practitioners getting together once a month for coffee and pie.

None of us are going to live long enough to make enough mistakes to learn all there is to learn. A wise (and wealthy) man told me many years ago,

A Beginning

“There’s nothing wrong with copying success.” I encourage you to get out of your comfort zone and see what other people are doing, and if there are no events in your area, start one.

There has been a fair amount of popular press in the last year on the rotational grazing versus continuous stocking debate. While those of us with Holistic Management background know that rotational grazing and Holistic Planned Grazing are not the same thing, they are often lumped together. The bottom line is that some people, who have higher education and training, are saying there is no “proof” that planned grazing yields better results.

It seems so obvious to me, I just can’t believe that people would think that continuous or unmanaged grazing could be just as good as planned grazing. At Ian’s presentation, he helped me understand why people can have negative results when they begin planned grazing. He said, “When starting a planned grazing system, you keep the same stocking rate but increase the stocking density. The increase in stock density will improve the health of the land, increase the

by Frank Aragona

S

ince its very early days, the Holistic Management framework has been a subject of debate between scientists, practitioners, educators, and everyone in between. Some rangeland scientists have objected to the claims of Holistic Management practitioners, retorting that little evidence exists to support the premises upon which Holistic Planned Grazing is based. In the meantime, successful practitioners have not been deterred; indeed, over the decades numerous success stories and management insights have helped to flesh out the details of Allan Savory’s well-articulated, observation-based framework.

Yet even today, the controversy continues. For many, facing the hard reality of this controversy is not an easy task. At its heart, this controversy has been about monitoring, research, data, and documentation. It is time to reframe this controversy, and to put the tools and the community of Holistic Management to work on resolution and forward motion.

This is a call to action. We must recognize that it is up to the Holistic Management community to do a better job. We must do a better job monitoring what is happening on the land in response to management decisions. We must engage the research community and get our research 18

IN PRACTICE

March / April 2009

amount of forage produced and provide more forage for more animals in the future. After you have improved the health of the land, you can start to increase stocking rate.” The increased stock density grows more grass to feed more cattle which can grow more grass etc.—a spiral up.

Now just think if you increased stocking rate at the same time you increased stocking density. The land never has the opportunity to get healthier and, therefore, it is possible to see production actually decrease—thus, leading to the perception that planned grazing performs poorly and people end up abusing the land with increased stocking rate. A good analogy is a person starting an exercise program. After you “work out”, you need a rest to respond to that work out. If you work out without a rest, you get “worn down.” So too with the land.

Had I not attended that seminar, I don’t think I would have had that learning experience in quite the same way. I am so glad I attended that great seminar. I now have lots of ideas for my own operation. But the one big idea was the old idea of “stimulus and response” and that you have to give nature a chance to respond. Money does grow on trees or grass (any green leaf), but not over night. I hope each of you take opportunity for a little stimulus and response in your own learning and on your land. It’s time well spent.

questions and concerns included in experimental designs and long-term studies. And, most importantly, we must communicate our results, within the community and outside of the community.

You are not alone. Holistic Management International, under the leadership of CEO Peter Holter, is now implementing a new strategy that will move the organization and the movement forward in this regard. This article is the unveiling of a new feature in IN PRACTICE titled “The Data Mine.”

“The Data Mine” is an important piece of our new strategy, one that seeks to up the ante in the realm of research and monitoring.

Not all researchers are hostile to Holistic Management. On the contrary, many are frustrated with the myopic constraints of traditional research. Great researchers, like Dr. Jean Steiner of the USDA Agricultural Research Service, are engaging Holistic Management practitioners in the course of research design. Through their research, scientists like Dr. Richard Teague, Dr. Keith Weber, and Dr. Judi Earl (to name a few) are gaining key insights into the effects that Holistic Management and Holistic Planned Grazing have on important land health indicators.

Look for “The Data Mine” to include articles written by these and other leading edge researchers. These articles will inform the community of their research goals and activities, and will publish results as they become available. This forum will also be open to farmers and ranchers who have well-maintained monitoring data ready to share with the community. But, “The Data Mine” will not be limited to sharing results. It will only be limited by the general guidelines set forth above and our creativity as a community.

We stand much to gain by applying more attention, greater rigor, and higher levels of communication to the area of monitoring and research. So please participate. Share your concerns, ideas, methodologies, and opportunities with me at frank@agroinnovations.com.

UNITED STATES

Certified Educators

NEBRASKA

To our knowledge, Certified Educators are the best qualified individuals to help others learn to practice Holistic Management and to provide them with technical assistance when necessary. On a yearly basis, Certified Educators renew their agreement to be affiliated with HMI. This agreement requires their commitment to practice Holistic Management in their own lives, to seek out opportunities for staying current u These educators provide with the latest developments in Holistic Management and to Holistic Management maintain a high standard of ethical conduct in their work. instruction on behalf of the For more information about or application forms for the HMI’s Certified Educator Training Programs, contact Ann Adams or visit our website at: www.holisticmanagement.org.

institutions they represent. associate educators * These provide educational services to their communities and peer groups.

UNITED STATES

CALIFORNIA Bill Burrows 12250 Colyear Springs Road Red Bluff, CA 96080 530/529-1535 • 530/200-2419 (c) sunflowercrmp@msn.com Richard King 1675 Adobe Rd. Petaluma, CA 94954 707/769-1490 707/794-8692(w) richard.king@ca.usda.gov * Kelly Mulville P.O Box 323, Valley Ford, CA 94972-0323 707/431-8060; 707/876-3592 jackofallterrains@hotmail.com u Rob Rutherford CA Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 805/756-1475 rrutherf@calpoly.edu

COLORADO Joel Benson P.O. Box 4924, Buena Vista, CO 81211 719/395-6119 • joel@outburstllc.com Cindy Dvergsten 17702 County Rd. 23, Dolores, CO 81323 970/882-4222 hminfo@wholenewconcepts.com Daniela and Jim Howell P.O. Box 67, Cimarron, CO 81220-0067 970/249-0353 • howelljd@montrose.net * Craig Leggett 2078 County Rd. 234, Durango, CO 81301 970/946-1771 crleggett@sisna.com Byron Shelton 33900 Surrey Lane, Buena Vista, CO 81211 719/395-8157 • landmark@my.amigo.net Tom Walther P.O. Box 1158 Longmont, CO 80502-1158 510/499-7479 tagjag@aol.com

GEORGIA Constance Neely 635 Patrick Place Atlanta, GA 30320 706/540-2878 cneely@uga.edu

IOWA u Margaret Smith

Iowa State University, CES Sustainable Agriculture 972 110th St., Hampton, IA 50441-7578 515/294-0887 mrgsmith@iastate.edu

LOUISIANA Tina Pilione P.O. 923, Eunice, LA 70535 phone: 337/580-0068 tina@tinapilione.com

MAINE * Vivianne Holmes 239 E. Buckfield Rd. Buckfield, ME 04220-4209 207/336-2484 vholmes@umext.maine.edu MICHIGAN * Ben Bartlett N4632 ET Road, Traunik, MI 49891 906/439-5210 (h) • 906/439-5880 (w) bartle18@msu.edu * Larry Dyer 604 West 8th Ave. Sault Sainte Marie, MI 49783 906/248-3354 x4245 (w) 906/253-1504 (h) dyerlawr@msu.edu MONTANA Wayne Burleson 322 N. Stillwater Rd., Absarokee, MT 59001 406/328-6808 rutbuster@montana.net Roland Kroos 4926 Itana Circle, Bozeman, MT 59715 406/522-3862 kroosing@msn.com * Cliff Montagne P.O. Box 173120 Montana State University Department of Land Resources & Environmental Science Bozeman, MT 59717 406/994-5079 montagne@montana.edu

Terry Gompert P.O. Box 45 Center, NE 68724-0045 402/288-5611 (w) tgompert1@unl.edu Paul Swanson 5155 West 12th St., Hastings, NE 68901 402/463-8507 swanson@inebraska.com

TEXAS Peggy Maddox P.O. Box 694, Ozona, TX 76943-0694 325/392-2292, westgift@hughes.net R. H. (Dick) Richardson University of Texas at Austin Section of Integrative Biology School of Biological Sciences Austin, TX 78712 512/471-4128

NEW HAMPSHIRE u Seth Wilner

24 Main Street, Newport, NH 03773 603/863-4497 (h) 603/863-9200 (w) seth.wilner@unh.edu

NEW MEXICO u Ann Adams

Holistic Management International 1010 Tijeras NW Albuquerque, NM 87102 505/842-5252 anna@holisticmanagement.org Kirk Gadzia P.O. Box 1100, Bernalillo, NM 87004 505/867-4685 (f) 505/867-9952 kgadzia@msn.com

NEW YORK Phil Metzger 99 N. Broad St., Norwich, NY 13815 607/334-3231 x4 (w) • 607/334-2407 (h) John Thurgood 15 Farone Dr., Apt. E26 Oneonta, NY 13820-1331 607/643-2804 • jthurgood@stny.rr.com

WASHINGTON Craig Madsen P.O. Box 107, Edwall, WA 99008 509/236-2451 • Madsen2fir@gotsky.com Sandra Matheson 228 E. Smith Rd., Bellingham, WA 98226 360/398-7866 • mathesonsm@verizon.net Doug Warnock 1880 SE Larch Ave., College Place, WA 99324 509/540-5771 • 509/856-7101 (c) dwarnock@charter.net

WISCONSIN Andy Hager W. 3597 Pine Ave., Stetsonville, WI 54480-9559 715/678-2465 Larry Johnson W886 State Rd. 92, Brooklyn, WI 53521 608/455-1685 lpjohn@rconnect.com * Laura Paine Wisconsin DATCP N893 Kranz Rd., Columbus, WI 53925 608/224-5120 (w) • 920/623-4407 (h) laura.paine@datcp.state.wi.us

NORTH DAKOTA INTERNATIONAL

Wayne Berry 1611 11th Ave. West Williston, ND 58801 701/572-9183 wberry@wil.midco.net

AUSTRALIA

OREGON Andrea & Tony Malmberg P.O. Box 167, LaGrande, OR 97850 541/805-1124 Andrea@LifeEnergy.us Tony@LifeEnergy.us

PENNSYLVANIA Jim Weaver 428 Copp Hollow Rd. Wellsboro, PA 16901-8976 570/724-7788 • jaweaver@epix.net

TEXAS Christina Allday-Bondy 2703 Grennock Dr., Austin, TX 78745 512/441-2019 tododia@sbcglobal.net Guy Glosson 6717 Hwy. 380, Snyder, TX 79549 806/237-2554 glosson@caprock-spur.com

Judi Earl 73 Harding E., Guyra, NSW 2365 61-2-6779-2286 judi@holisticmanagement.org.au Mark Gardner P.O. Box 1395, Dubbo, NSW 2830 61-2-6884-4401 mark.gardner@vbs.net.au Paul Griffiths P.O. Box 3045, North Turramura, NSW 2074, Sydney, NSW 61-2-9144-3975 • pgpres@geko.net.au George Gundry Willeroo, Tarago, NSW 2580 61-2-4844-6223 • ggundry@bigpond.net.au Graeme Hand 150 Caroona Lane, Branxholme, VIC 3302 61-3-5578-6272 (h) • 61-4-0996-4466 (c) graemeh1@bordernet.com.au Helen Lewis P.O. Box 1263, Warwick, QLD 4370 61-7-46617393 • 61-7-46670835 helen@insideoutsidemgt.com.au

Number 124

IN PRACTICE

19

INTERNATIONAL

AUSTRALIA

KENYA

Bruce Ward P.O. Box 103, Milsons Pt., NSW 1565 61-2-9929-5568 • fax: 61-2-9929-5569 blward@the-farm-business-gym.com

Richard Hatfield P.O. Box 10091-00100, Nairobi 254-0723-506-331 richard_hatfield@yahoo.co.uk Christine C. Jost International Livestock Research Institute Box 30709, Nairobi 00100 254-20-422-3000; 254-736-715-417 (c) c.jost@cgiar.org

Brian Wehlburg c/o “Sunnyholt”, Injune, QLD 4454 61-7-4626-7187 brian@insideoutsidemgt.com.au

Belinda Low P.O. Box 15109, Langata, Nairobi 254-727-288-039 belinda@grevyszebratrust.org

Brian Marshall P.O. Box 300, Guyra NSW 2365 61-2-6779-1927 • fax: 61-2-6779-1947 bkmrshl@bigpond.com

Jason Virtue Mary River Park 1588 Bruce Highway South Gympie, QLD 4570 61-7-5483-5155 • Jason@spiderweb.com.au

CANADA Don Campbell Box 817 Meadow Lake, SK S9X 1Y6 306/236-6088 • doncampbell@sasktel.net Len Pigott Box 222, Dysart, SK, SOH 1HO 306/432-4583 JLPigott@sasktel.net

Holistic Management® Certified Educator Training Program

Kelly Sidoryk P.O. Box 374, Lloydminster, AB S9V 0Y4 780/875-9806 (h) • 780/875-4418 (c) kjsidoryk@yahoo.ca

MEXICO Arturo Mora Benitez San Juan Bosco 169 Fracc., La Misión Celaya, Guanajuato 38016 52-461-615-7632 • jams@prodigy.net.mx Elco Blanco-Madrid Hacienda de la Luz 1803 Fracc. Haciendas del Valle II Chihuahua, Chih 31238 52/614-423-4413 (h) • 52/614-415-0176 (f) elco_blanco@hotmail.com Ivan A. Aguirre Ibarra P.O. Box 304, Hermosillo, Sonora 83000 52-1-662-289-0900 (from U.S.) 52-1-662-289-0901 Rancho_inmaculada@yahoo.com.mx

Want to make the world a better place?

Interested in teaching others about Holistic Management?

NAMIBIA

SOUTH AFRICA

Usiel Kandjii P.O. Box 23319, Windhoek 264-61-205-2324 kandjiiu@nampower.com.na

Ian Mitchell-Innes P.O. Box 52, Elandslaagte 2900 27-36-421-1747 blanerne@mweb.co.za

Wiebke Volkmann P.O. Box 9285, Windhoek 264-61-225183 or 264-81-127-0081 wiebke@mweb.com.na

Dick Richardson P.O. Box 1853, Vryburg 8600 tel/fax: 27-082-934-6139; Dickson@wam.co.za

NEW ZEALAND John King P.O. Box 12011 Beckenham, Christchurch 8242 64-276-737-885 succession@clear.net.nz

SOUTH AFRICA Wayne Knight P.O. Box 537 Mokopane 0600 theknights@mweb.co.za Jozua Lambrechts P.O. Box 5070 Helderberg, Somerset West, Western Cape 7135 27-21-851-5669; 27-21-851-2430 (w) jozua@websurf.co.za

SPAIN Aspen Edge Apartado de Correos 19, 18420 Lanjaron, Granada (0034)-958-347-053 aspen@holisticdecisions.com

UNITED KINGDOM Philip Bubb 32 Dart Close, St. Ives Cambridge, PE27 3JB 44-1480-496-2925 (h) 44-1223-814-662 (w) philipbubb@onetel.com

ZIMBABWE Sunny Moyo Africa Centre for Holistic Management P. Bag 5950, Victoria Falls; sunnyachm@africaonline.co.zw; 263-13-42199 (w)

20-43 dayProblems Carbon Farming & Economy Coures Extensive need Extensive Solutions!

Soil, Water, Carbon, Energy & Economy Columbus NM (20 day) —May 2009 ‘The Farm’ Summertown TN (20 day) - August/September 2009 Marin County CA (26 day) - September/October 2009 Santa Barbara CA (43 day) 0ct/Nov/Dec 2009

Comprehensive Modules including: Holistic Management® (Terry Gompert, Kirk Gadzia) Broadacre Permaculture (Doherty, Lancaster, Dolman) Effective AID (Howard Yana Shapiro, Warren Brush) Soil Food Web (Dr. Elaine Ingham, Paul Taylor) Pathways to Relocalisation (Joel Salatin) Natural Building (Jack Stephens, et.al.)

Fungi (Paul Stamets) ZERI, Pyrolysis, BioChar, Energy Systems & More...

TAKE THE STACK or PICK & CHOOSE!

HMI’s Certified Educator Training Program is an individualized two-year training program developed to produce excellent Holistic Management facilitators, coaches, and instructors. Tailored to meet your needs and interests.

TO LEARN MORE, CONTACT: Ann Adams • hmi@holisticmanagement.org • 505/842-5252 http://www.holisticmanagement.org/n7/Certified_Educators/CE9_ITP.html

20

IN PRACTICE

March / April 2009

20-43 Carbon Farming & Economy Coures INFO day & BOOKINGS @ www.seqC.biz

T H E M A R K E T P LAC E hen keeping livestock, the cost of growing or purchasing the needed feed supply is always a factor to consider. Though the prices are coming down for fertilizer in comparison to last year, some still feel it is just too expensive to properly fertilize pastures. While growing good quality feed for livestock as pasture and hay is always preferable to buying it elsewhere, far too many who have the land for growing hay and pasture dismiss such possibilities based on past crop performance.

Those who have the land to do so, but not a budget to do all that is necessary in the first year, should consider perhaps trying another approach. It is still possible to build soil fertility, improve production and increase feed quality even on poorer pasture soils with a limited budget by wisely considering the application of fertilizer and soil amendments.

When soils are not performing at their best, several nutrients are usually lacking. Generally, what is missing is not just nitrogen or the major nutrients that can be supplied by use of manure or a simple N-P-K fertilizer mix. Taking soil samples and having them properly analyzed by using the information from a more detailed soil analysis can point out exactly what is required. So often, these additional elements have been neglected for so long that it is costly to try and supply everything needed all at once. We specialize in advice for helping to rebuild soils on a limited budget to supply improved nutrition and yields.

W

As a trial, take one even-growing pasture or hay meadow and split it. Take separate soil samples from both sides and send them for analysis and recommendations. Follow your normal program of fertility for that pasture or hay meadow on one side and use our recommendations on the other side. Follow through to the extent the budget will allow. You may want to try this in one of two ways.

One way is by requesting the nutrients be prioritized according to their importance. This program can provide the proper sequence for spending the fertilizer budget to purchase the most needed nutrients for improving each soil’s unique productivity requirements. Spend the money on the most important needs first.

There is yet another possibility on land that has at

IMPROVING PASTURELAND On On A Limited Fertilizer Budget —— —— PA PART RT IIII —— —— When sending samples for testing, mention you read our In Practice ad to be entered in a drawing for a complimentary autogr aphed copy of Neal Kinsey’s Hands-On Agr onomy.

least 33% legumes or where no fertilizer is presently being applied. Take our recommendations to your fertilizer dealer and see what it would cost to do everything the test shows to be needed. If that is too much in terms of cost, determine what you can afford per acre and apply that percentage of everything on the test. If you do this, just be certain you apply that percentage of all the nutrients recommended that way. Some fertilizer reps will try to convince you that “all of this is just too expensive and not necessary� and are sure they are giving you absolutely correct advice. If the advice seems to make sense to you, use that program on one side and the one we recommend on the other. For the proper evaluation, do the testing and applications for three years before you decide which is most effective.

(Note: Recommended fertilizers to supply nutrient needs for the intended crop are included in the cost of the soil analysis. Prioritizing nutrient needs are available upon request for an extra charge. Properly following the instructions we provide for correctly taking and sending soil samples will enable us to best establish the needed priority for required nutrients on each area.)

For consulting or educational services contact:

Kinsey Agricultural Services, Inc. 297 County Hwy. 357, Charleston, MO 63834 Ph: 573/683-3880 • F: 573/683-6227 neal@kinseyag.com WE ACCEPT CREDIT CARD ORDERS (VISA, MC)

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Number 124

IN PRACTICE

21

T H E M A R K E T P LAC E CORRAL DESIGNS

PO Box 1100 Pasture Bernalillo, NM 87004 Scene 505-263-8677 Investigation

The Business of Ranching

kgadzia@msn.com

• On-Site, Custom Courses

By World Famous Dr. Grandin Originator of Curved Ranch Corrals The wide curved Lane makes filling the crowding tub easy.

• Holistic Business Planning • Ranchers Business Forum • Creating Change thru Grazing Planning and Land Monitoring

Roland R.H. Kroos

Resource Management Services, LLC Kirk L. Gadzia, Certified Educator

Includes detailed drawings for loading ramp, V chute, round crowd pen, dip vat, gates and hinges. Plus cell center layouts and layouts compatible with electronic sorting systems. Articles on cattle behavior. 27 corral layouts. $55.

Low Stress Cattle Handling Video $59.

Send checks/money order to:

(406) 522.3862 • Cell: 581.3038 Email: kroosing@msn.com

GRANDIN LIVESTOCK SYSTEMS 2918 Silver Plume Dr., Unit C-3 Fort Collins, CO 80526

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How can RMS, LLC help you?

On-Site Consulting: All aspects of holistic management, inFOXGLQJ À QDQFLDO HFRORJLFDO DQG KXPDQ resources.

Training Events: Regularly scheduled and customized training sessions provided in a variety of locations.

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Land Health Monitoring: Biological Monitoring of Rangeland and Riparian Ecosystem Health.

Property Assessment: Land health and productivity assessment with recommended solutions. www.resourcemanagementservices.com

Start Using Holistic Management Today!

Join Our Distance Learning Program Stay At Home – All You Need Is A Phone

Apply What You Learn As You Learn With Our Hands On Approach, Step

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Realize Immediate Benefits Find More Details On The Web at www.wholenewconcepts.com

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22

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—— C O N T A C T ——

Cindy Dvergsten, a Holistic ManagementÂŽ Certified Educator, has 12 years experience in personal practice, training & facilitation of Holistic Management, and 25 years experience in resource management & agriculture.

She offers customized solutions to family farms & ranches, communities and organizations worldwide.

MARK BADER, Free Choice Enterprises, LTD

IN PRACTICE

March / April 2009

10055 County K Lancaster, WI 53813

608/723-7977 fce@chorus.net

PHONE: EMAIL:

freechoiceminerals.com

T H E M A R K E T P LAC E DON’T HAVE TIME TO MONITOR LAND HEALTH?

Holistic Management Handbook

Let me get you the information you need to improve the health AND productivity of your land.

• Over 40 years of experience with ranching and rangeland • Public and private land experience • 100% satisfaction guaranteed or your money back!

KELLY BONEY 575/760-7636 kboney@ plateautel.net

Healthy Land, Healthy Profits

By Jody Butterfield, Sam Bingham, and Allan Savory, HMI

Dick RICHARDSON Dick consults and offers Holistic Management courses and workshops in and around South Africa and has extensive international experience. His practical experience and success makes his programs highly effective and valuable.

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The Holistic Management Handbook gives you step-by-step guidance for managing a ranch or farm holistically. It is essential reading for anyone involved with land management ORDER TODAY! and stewardship.

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THE

OGLIN A story book that teaches Holistic Management principles.

IT’S A REALLY GREAT READ!

For more information on The Oglin or learning opportunities, contact Dick at dickson@wam.co.za or (+27) 0829346139.

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In Practice a publication of Holistic Management International

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An Introduction to Holistic Decision-Making, based on a lecture given

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_ _ The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook, by Shannon Hayes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $25 _ The Oglin, by Dick Richardson & Rio de la Vista . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $25 _ Gardeners of Eden, by Dan Dagget . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $25 _ Video: Healing the Land Through Multi-Species Grazing (VHS/DVD) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $30 TO ORDER

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