Tag Archive for: Holistic Management

Healthy Soils Help Cities Deal with Floods

Author: Ann Adams | Published: October 19, 2017

A recent article on the Union for Concerned Scientists website, titled “How Healthier Soils Help Farms and Communities Downstream Deal with Floods and Droughts,” was particularly timely given the recent hurricane damage that much of the southeast faced in late August and early September. It is no news to farmers and ranchers how devastating these events can be.

In the United States, floods and droughts together have done damage worth an estimated $340.4 billion since 1980 and taxpayers have paid $38.5 billion in crop insurance payouts from 2011 to 2016 (not to mention all the flood damage numerous cities have had to face). Luckily, the knowledge that soil can be a huge sponge to soak up rainfall is becoming more widespread as people learn about soil health and the power of soil carbon.

The full report noted in the article shares some of the key points learned from the Union’s review of scientific data. They also note that the key practices that increase soil health and resilience are:

  • Ecological grazing (planned grazing)
  • No-till cropping
  • Cover crops
  • Integration of livestock and cropping
  • Perennial cropping

The Union performed a rigorous review of prior field studies (150 experiments on six continents) that used any of those practices and focused on soil properties that improved water infiltration rate and water availability in the soil. Here’s some of the key findings:

  • Water infiltration rates improved by 59% with perennial crops, 35% with cover crops, and 58% with improved grazing practices.
  • The largest and most consistent improvements came from practices that keep live roots in the soil year round, such as cover crops, perennial crops, and planned grazing.
  • Heavy rainfall events – more than one inch of rain per hour – can be significantly offset with some of these practices, particularly perennials. In more than half (53%) of the experiments that compared perennial crops to annual crops, water entering the soil not only increased, but did so at a rate higher than a one-inch per hour rain event.
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Experts Talk Keys to Profitable Silvopasture

Author: Paul Post | Published: October 6, 2017

Silvopasture can be a valuable tool for maximizing forage quality while benefiting livestock and generating income from woodlands.

But achieving such goals requires careful planning, attention to detail and lots of hard work. These were the main points covered in a well-attended silvopasture session at the Sept. 27-29 Grassfed Exchange, which brought together more than 500 farm and ranch owners from throughout the U.S.

The event, held at The Desmond Hotel in Albany, was highlighted by farm tours in New York’s Capital Region, plus a trade show, numerous networking opportunities and a variety of presentations, including “Keys to Profitable Silvopasture Systems.”

 

“The theme of this conference is regenerative agriculture, getting fertility back into the land,” said Joe Orefice, a Cornell Extension specialist. “Silvopasture is the ultimate way of doing that.”

Orefice is a former Connecticut state forester and is chairman of the Society of American Foresters National Agroforestry Working Group. He raises beef cattle on his 76-acre North Branch Farm in Saranac, near Lake Placid, in the Adirondacks.

In contrast to open grassland, silvopasture gives animals a place to graze among trees. In summer, cows seek out shady spots to keep cool, which reduces animal stress. But they can eat at the same time.

In winter, trees provide shelter from cold and wind.

“It’s an outdoor living barn,” Orefice said. “Silvopasture can be a component of your farm. It doesn’t have to be the whole farm.”

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Grazing Management That Regenerates Ecosystem Function and Grazingland Livelihoods

Author: Richard Teague and Matt Barnes | Published: July 14, 2017

Adopting a systems view and regenerative philosophy can indicate how to regenerate ecosystem function on commercial-scale agro-ecological landscapes. Adaptive multi-paddock grazing management is an example of an approach for grazinglands. Leading conservation farmers have achieved superior results in ecosystem improvement, productivity, soil carbon and fertility, water-holding capacity and profitability. Their method is to use multiple paddocks per herd with short grazing periods, long recovery periods, and adaptively changing recovery periods, residual biomass, animal numbers and other management elements as conditions change. In contrast, much research on grazing management has not followed adaptive research protocols to account for spatial effects, for sufficient time to produce resource improvement, sound animal production, and socio-economic goals under constantly varying conditions on rangelands. We briefly review what management has achieved best outcomes and show how previous reviews of grazing studies were limited in scope and applicability to larger, more complex landscapes. We argue that future research can provide better understanding of how multi-paddock grazing management can improve socio-ecological resilience in grazing ecosystems, while avoiding unintended consequences of possible management options, by involving realistic scale and context, partnering with innovative land managers on real operations, applying adaptive treatments, and combining field studies with modelling approaches.

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Less and Better Meat is Key for a Healthier Planet

Published: October 2017

Is grass-fed beef good or bad for the climate? That’s the question examined in a major report released this week by the University of Oxford’s Food Climate Research Network (FCRN). While “Grazed and Confused” intended to reduce confusion about the climate merits of pasture-based meat, the report’s narrow focus on the net climate impacts of grass-fed meat has instead muddied the waters.

That’s because one of the report’s main conclusions—”Eating less meat, of all types, is critical for fighting climate change”—fails to account for the many environmental, animal welfare, and health benefits of well-managed, pasture-raised animals. The report’s message also undercuts the urgent need to expand support for pasture-based and mixed crop-livestock systems as vital alternatives to the industrial meat industry’s inhumane and environmentally destructive practices, including reliance on toxic, chemical-intensive GMO monocultures for feed.

The authors base their conclusion on their finding that the carbon sequestration gains of even well-managed grazing systems are eclipsed by these farms’ methane and nitrous oxide emissions. We agree that reducing meat consumption is key to combating climate change. But does that mean we should focus on eating less grass-fed meat or reducing investment and support for farmers that adopt these kinds of production systems?

No. Since more than 95 percent of the beef consumed in the United States comes from animals raised on polluting, inhumane factory farms, we should focus first on slashing consumption—and subsidies for the production of industrial animal products. We also need to significantly increase consumption of and investment in plant-based protein foods. Research shows the world cannot meet greenhouse gas reduction targets without drastically cutting emissions from our meat and dairy-intensive diets. And most of that reduction must come from the global West and North—especially in the U.S., where we eat more meat per person than any other major country in the world.

Grass-fed benefits go beyond climate

Grass-fed beef is not a silver bullet for climate-conscious carnivores. But for those who do eat meat, eating smaller portions of meat that is produced by well-managed, certified grass-fed, and organic farms has other benefits for the well-being of animals, pollinatorspublic healthbiodiversity, our soilsair, and water.

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Grass-Fed Beef and Black Locust: 30 Years of Silvopasture

Published: January 18, 2017

In Watkins Glen, New York, 45 minutes from Ithaca, is Angus Glen Farm. Here, the Chedzoy Family runs 100 head of cattle over 310 acres of pasture and silvopasture. Silvopasture is defined as the integration of grazing animals into an existing forest, and/or the establishment of tree rows on grazing land. Brett Chedzoy, in addition to working with Cornell Extension, manages the land’s beef herd and forestry enterprises. Brett’s background is in forestry, but he is both a forester and a grazier. Brett met his wife, Maria, in Argentina, while working with the Peace Corps. He returned to the U.S. with silvopasture techniques from down south. We’d like to extend our thanks to Brett for walking us around his farm, and being incredibly open with his successes and failures over the past 30 years. Brett also manages a silvopasture forum, linked here for those that would like to read more and continue the conversation.

Well-managed silvopasture does not consist of running pigs in the woods, but should be thought of as holistic planned grazing under an established canopy or in between rows of trees in a plantation. Animals must be quickly rotated through partially-shaded paddocks, such that their impact does not disturb the trees’ root systems. If pigs or cattle are left in the woods for too long, they will compact the trees roots and slowly kill the canopy. At that, the trees will not show signs of stress until they are already on their deathbeds, and it is very difficult to bring them back to health once they have been damaged. Brett runs 100,000 lbs. of cattle (100 animals or so), through 110 permanent paddocks. His paddocks are fenced with high-tensile wire. He grazes the animals for eight months of the year, and bale-grazes them for another four. Bale grazing consists of feeding animals hay on dormant paddocks in the winter. Living barns of thick conifer trees protect the cattle from cold winds in the winter. The 2016 summer drought was not an issue for Brett, because the trees in his pastures held onto the winter’s moisture.

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The Seeds of Vandana Shiva

Meet Precious Phiri who spends her days teaching farmers in Zimbabwe how to mitigate climate change.
Specifically, she instructs them in holistic land management, a method that rejuvenates depleted water and degraded soil while drawing climate-changing C02 out of the atmosphere.
Originally trained by the Savory Institute, the enthusiastic Ms. Phiri explains that a cornerstone of holistic management is that eco-systems without animals create ecological imbalance. Grasslands, for example, deteriorate when the food chain that keeps them alive is disturbed. Deprived of a symbiotic relationship with ruminants, grass dies and then soil dies. And, in the process, climate-disrupting carbon discharges into the atmosphere.
It’s simple but not obvious: Ecosystems need both fauna and flora to thrive. Think of the oceans without whales or Yellowstone National Park without wolves. It’s the great web of life.
The phenomenon, sometimes described as a “trophic cascade,” is a biological process that flows between every part of the food chain.
Here Precious explains it:
Here’s another obvious but often-overlooked fact: Healthy humans come from healthy food that originates in healthy soil. And there is no way to support this synergy between our health and the biosphere in an industrial food system: Big Ag and Big Food disrupts precious water cycles, destroys biodiversity, pummels the biosphere with toxic pesticides, and imprisons innocent animals that should be on the land. This isn’t mere sentiment; it’s actually climate science.
In a regenerative world, it’s OK to eat meat, but if you’re going to do so, it’s imperative to transition to organic, grass-fed and free-range–and not in the quantities Big Ag and Big Food would have you do. Any other way and we are contributing to global warming, impacting our health and, by the way, engaging significantly in animal cruelty. Of course it’s more than OK to be vegan or vegetarian but, ecologically speaking, there is also an argument for conscious meat eating.
Vandana Shiva is vegetarian and also a founding member of Regeneration International, an organization that promotes and researches this stuff. Here’s a clip of her talking about the animals at her Navdanya farm.
And here are some books to read if you’d like to know more:
It’s a whole new world of hope for the environment, the climate and our own health. Perhaps the most hopeful story ever that too few people have heard.
P.S: About progress on our film about Dr. Shiva’s life story: We’ve just completed laying in additional dialogue, now we’re working on music and B-Roll. Onwards we go!
Please contribute to this next phase of our film about Dr. Shiva’s life story here: Every bit helps to get the film completed (and into your hands) sooner rather than later!

Diversity of Large Animals Plays an Important Role in Carbon Cycle

Author: Taylor Kubota | Published: October 10, 2017

Trees in tropical forests are well known for removing carbon dioxide from the air and storing the potent greenhouse gas as carbon in their leafy branches and extensive roots. But a new analysis led by Stanford University researchers finds that large forest animals are also an important part of the carbon cycle.

The findings are based on more than a million records of animal sightings and activity collected by 340 indigenous technicians in the Amazon during more than three years of environmental surveys, coordinated by ecologist Jose Fragoso and supported by biologist Rodolfo Dirzo, who were working together at Stanford at the time. The team found that places where animals are most diverse correlate with places that have the most carbon sequestered in the soil.

“It’s not enough to worry about the trees in the world holding carbon. That’s really important but it’s not the whole story,” said Fragoso. “We also have to worry about maintaining the diversity and abundance of animals, especially mammals at this point, in order to ensure a well-functioning carbon cycle and the retention of carbon in soils.”

Although scientists have long understood that animals — through ingestion, digestion, breathing and decomposition — are part of the carbon cycle, the work, published Oct. 9 in Nature Ecology and Evolution is the first to suggest the importance of animal biodiversity rather than just animal numbers in the carbon cycle.

If we want to increase carbon sequestration, we have to preserve not only high numbers of animals but also many different species, the authors said.

Mining an unprecedented data source

The inspiration for this work came from a conversation during a Biology Department happy hour years ago. The scientists knew that an ecosystem with more species generally functions better, which they assumed should include the carbon cycle. Proving the relationship between animal diversity and carbon, however, was not so straightforward.

“It is a very difficult idea to test regarding vertebrates in a real-world system such as the Amazon,” said Mar Sobral, lead author of the paper, who was a postdoctoral researcher in the Dirzo Lab during this research. “The amount of data needed to test such an idea is massive and the type of data is a big challenge. The economic resources, time and logistics involved in our project are unprecedented.”

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Bison Returned From the Brink Just in Time for Climate Change

Author: Deena Shanker | Published: July 31, 2017 

Ted Turner owns more than 100,000 acres of pristine land in southwest Montana, complete with lush grassland and forested hills rolling with Douglas firs. There are populations of wolves, black and grizzly bears, deer, elk and pronghorn antelope ranging freely, some crossing from nearby Yellowstone Park. But the real stars of the Flying D Ranch are his thousands of bison, the American beast once hunted to the edge of extinction.

Turner’s bison don’t need much human intervention to thrive. They breed naturally in the early summer, when the grass is at its most nutritious, and they birth their calves in the fields. The bison can withstand temperature fluctuations and snowfall. The animals are vaccinated for common diseases, but routine antibiotics and synthetic growth hormones aren’t used. When one of the animals dies—on the Flying D Ranch, about 2 percent to 3 percent of the herd perishes each year—the carcass is simply left for scavengers. 

The enormous, shaggy animals are making a comeback as a chic, healthy and environmentally friendly source of meat. But to those in the industry, the animals are just the final piece in a larger ecological puzzle. “The grass business is the business we’re in,” said Mark Kossler, vice president of ranch operations at Turner Enterprises Inc. Keep the grass growing, the philosophy goes, and the rest of the ecosystem will follow. In other words: If you grow the grass, your bison will thrive.

And the bison business is thriving. The meat is healthier than beef, with more protein and less fat than salmon, and it is also more lucrative for ranchers. Nearly 60 percent of bison marketers reported an increase in demand, and 67 percent said they were planning to expand their businesses, according to a survey in May by the National Bison Association, an industry group.

Perhaps what makes this growth most surprising is that it coincides with challenging prices for bison meat. A pound of ground beef retails for $4.99 per pound at the moment, according to USDA data. Ground bison currently sells for more than twice that price, at $10.99 per pound. The past three years have seen a 25 percent growth in sales in the retail and food service sectors, according to the trade group, bringing in about $350 million in 2016.

The bison industry is a bit uncomfortable with a price climb that has no end in sight. There is general concern that if it continues, consumers will eventually stop buying. Ranchers are still scared by a market crash in the early 2000s. Nobody wants the bison bubble to burst again. “We don’t want to price ourselves out of the market,” Kossler said.

Bison keeps flying off store shelves—and not just at farmer’s markets and Whole Foods Market IncWal-Mart Stores Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp. are also sellers, and many ranchers offer direct sales online. In 2016, General Mills Inc.acquired EPIC Provisions, whose Bison Bacon Cranberry Bar, made with 100 percent grass-fed bison, is its bestseller. To keep up, bison backers just announceda new commitment for bison herd restoration: One million bison in North America by 2027, more than doubling the current estimated 391,000.

For now, at least, nature is taking care of bison and the people who raise it, including those in the more than 60 Native American tribes across 19 states working with the NBA. But the bison industry, unlike some of its peers in meat production, is keenly aware that climate change is a looming threat to the health of the herds.

Most farmers and ranchers speak of climate change in hushed tones, if at all, probably because they’re considered part of the problem (PDF). At the July International Bison Conference in Big Sky, Montana, however, climate change was the central theme.

Conference attendees included babies, 6-year-olds, teenagers, millennials, mid-life career changers and grandparents. (“My grandkids call me ‘Buffalo,’” one attendee said.) Amongst the crowds, there seemed to be a consensus that the climate was changing and the bison industry would need to adapt.

In a giant conference room at the Big Sky Resort, about 600 ranchers assembled to listen to James Hurrell, the director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, deliver the keynote presentation on the impacts—past, present and future—of a changing climate. An audible gasp was heard in response to a slide about the warmer temperatures expected by the end of the century, and someone in the audience let out a “whoa” in response to predictions of 100-degree-plus days to come.

In a different presentation, ecologist Joseph Craine presented research showing that the warming temperatures were reducing the protein in grass, leading to smaller bison. He urged the ranchers to pay close attention to (and share) what their animals are eating as they naturally seek out protein. “Everyone has a story on strange things their bison eat,” he said. That information could help everyone.

“Ag is risky and it’s getting riskier from a climate perspective,” Dannele Peck, director of the USDA’s Northern Plains Climate Hub told conference attendees. The agency is working to gather information from, and distribute information to, farmers and ranchers about short-term extreme weather events, as well as long-term climate-related changes. While the websites’ tools, such as climate projections and soil data, are not specifically built for bison, Peck urged the ranchers to use them. After the presentation, she said she was “really hopeful” that the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service will fare well in the final Trump administration budgets.

For many bison ranchers, the need for a symbiotic relationship with the environment is clear. “This organization is fundamentally different, a conservation organization that works very closely with sustainable farming organizations,” said Tom Barthel, the owner of Snake River Farm in Minnesota. He raises bison, cattle, hogs and, according to his business card, “damn fine horses.” Not only do his bison live well on his ranch, they die well, too. The bison are pasture harvested—slaughtered in the field without ever knowing what hit them. He sells his meat directly, and—because bison cooks a little differently than typical beef—includes cooking instructions with his invoices. “These are the cowboys’ cowboys,” he said of the people that become bison ranchers. They care not just about money, but about their land and animals as well.

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Ramseyers Using Nature As a Blueprint for Beef Grazing

Published: June 6, 2017 

For thousands of years livestock roamed the plains and forests and contributed to an ecosystem that produced some of the richest soils in the world. More livestock producers are taking note of this system with a long history of proven success and working to implement it on their farms.

Jeff and Michelle Ramseyer raise around 250 cattle in an organic rotational grazing system with neighboring grain farmer, Dean McIlvaine. The Ramseyers provide the livestock and the labor while enhancing the fertility and controlling weeds on McIvaine’s farm ground for their Lone Pine Pastures operation in Wayne County, Michelle said.

“Dean actually owns the properties we have cattle on. We are a grass-fed operation. We started back in 2014 when we got the cattle. Dean is an organic crop farmer and all of the cattle are raised on organic grass. We do not feed anything other than hay and grass. Dean needed more fertility because his crops weren’t growing well. Jeff went to him and said ‘Hey we can get you more fertility, why don’t we start a grass fed operation?’ That is what we did,” Michelle said. “Our first 40 heifers were delivered in December of 2014 and we calved in March-April of 2015 and have gone from there. We graze on his cropland and we have about 200 acres of permanent pastures. We market our beef to Heinen’s Grocery Store and we have freezer beef we sell in the community. We also have organic raised pork in an open barn with outside access.”

Emulating nature is the goal behind the beef operation. The Ramseyer operation has drawn from the experience of Gabe Brown from North Dakota. Brown was a speaker at the Soil Health Field Day at the farm of Dave Brandt in early April where he shared about his work with regenerative agriculture involving crop and livestock production.

“No matter where I go, I am 100% confident that the principles I use to get our ranch to be an ecosystem in North Dakota are the same no matter where I’m talking. It will work on your operation. The principles are the same anywhere,” Brown said. “Nature has been around for thousands of years. That is the model we need to emulate. There is another way of doing things and the way I found that works best is nature’s way.”

Brown completely changed the way he was farming to put a focus on building up his soils rather than degrading them.

“In nature there is no mechanical disturbance. That is a fact. There is always armor on the soil surface. Nature tries to cover herself. Nature cycles water very efficiently. Through our farming practices we’ve destroyed that water cycle. We need to heal it. In nature there are living plant root networks and those networks are very efficient at building the biology,” Brown said. “The greatest geological force on earth is life itself. Plants take in CO2 out of the atmosphere photosynthesis occurs and a portion of that is translocated to the roots where it is leaked out as exudates. That is how all of us in production agriculture get our profits. We have to have that functioning properly to make a profit. Part of that root exudate is converted carbonic acid that breaks down the rocks to make nutrients available to the plants. It is the biology in the soil that makes nutrients available. The fungal network is also very important.”

Tillage and synthetic fertilizer release carbon and the result is degraded soil. Brown has implemented a system that minimizes synthetic fertilizer and tillage while maximizing soil biology and plant root growth in the soil with a no-till/cover crop system that also includes intensive livestock grazing.

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“Carbon Farming” Offers New Chance for Cattle Ranch

Author: Deborah Sullivan Brennan | Published: May 12, 2017 

he cattle herds at Santa Ysabel Ranch have provided meat and milk for centuries, and now they’re on the cutting edge of a new kind of agriculture: carbon farming.

By bunching cattle together and grazing them intensively for short periods, ranchers hope to restore grasslands and soil, and capture carbon from the atmosphere. In the ideal scenario, the operation could sequester more carbon than it produces, offsetting greenhouse gas emissions from cars or electric power.

If it sounds counterintuitive that grass-munching cows could beef up vegetation, or that cattle ranching — often criticized for its deep carbon footprint — could be a climate solution, Kevin Muno and his partner Jarod Cauzza aim to prove otherwise.

Through their company, Land of Milk and Honey, they’re conducting an experiment on the back country ranch in what they call regenerative agriculture, a process that aims to improve the area’s ecology. And they’re betting they can turn a profit doing it.

“We want to build soil, have more wildlife, have more cattle and more money for the families” working the land, Muno said.

They plan to sell grass-fed beef online, and eventually add other livestock to the operation. For now, they’re developing the system, which they hope will be a template for other ranches in the county.

The Resource Conservation District of Greater San Diego County received a $10,000 grant to develop a carbon farming plan with the ranchers that could guide similar efforts throughout the county, said executive director Sheryl Landrum. With more than 5,000 small farms and 208,564 acres of range land, San Diego could employ carbon farming to help meet its climate goals.

“We’re hoping that through this plan we might have something tangible for other agencies and other interested parties,” Landrum said.

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