Dan Hemesath's Blog

For my blog update 12-08–16

After a long pause in my blogging due to  a number of reasons including some health issues, I hope to post some thoughts that I think are worthwhile.

Since I plan to make these thoughts available to anyone who may be interested, including friends, students, and professors in the Fresno State school of agriculture, I will try to avoid saying anything that I can’t back up.  Of course I expect that there will be differences of opinions, and clarifications that should be made, and I invite your comments.

The first general area that I cover has to do with my interest in agriculture, and is related to global warming and the future of the planet. This will be a number of posts. I’ll try to keep them short to make it more digestible.  I plan to write about two general areas:

1. Allan Savory’s ideas about saving the planet through Intensive planned grazing.

1. Elaine Ingham’s ideas about working with soil micro-organisms as a next step in the evolution of agriculture.

1. Allan Savory has become one of my few heroes.    

           For a summary of his basic ideas, go to Ted Talks and type in “Allan Savory”.  Savory has many presentations on Youtube, but the 22 minute summary on Ted Talks is a good starting point.

           He points out how the processes of desertification  and soil erosion are proceeding more rapidly than ever before.  Desertification and erosion, caused by humans’ agricultural practices, are the reasons why many civilizations have disappeared over the course of history.

          The most powerful way to turn around desertification and global warming is found in grazing animals in a way which mimics nature, according to Savory.

          Savory points out how the great agricultural areas of the world were built up, in large part, over the thousands and even millions of years by activities of grazing animals—prey animals, such as buffalo and elk in North America, and wildebeests and zebra in Africa to cite two examples.

In the great western plains the buffalo formed immense herds,  staying closely grouped for protection from predators such as wolves. Over thousands of generations their migrations along with the migration of other animals such as wooly mammoths, elk, etc. over the immense plains have led to the formation of some of the richest soils the world has seen.

The same process takes place, to some extent, in Africa to this day with the annual migration of wildebeests, zebra and other prey animals making their annual migration around the immense Serengeti Park, trampling the grass and fertilizing with dung and urine, leaving the savanna time to recover and flourish as one of the world’s most productive savannas or grazing lands.

Grazing practices of humans, at least until recently, have not been successful in duplicating nature’s symbiotic relationship between grazing plants and grazing animals.

But, or the past 40 years, Allan Savory has been perfecting his intensive, planned grazing principles using grazing animals as the tool to turn around desertification, erosion, and CO2 loss to the atmosphere.   At this point ranchers and farmers from all six continents are applying his principles on many millions of acres, increasing the productivity of their lands, sequestering much more carbon, while improving their profits. It’s a win-win that just needs to be much more widely used.

In my next post I’ll try to explain, or at least give a summary introduction of how this planned, intensive grazing, mimicking nature, is done.

This entry was posted on December 8, 2016 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.