Rangelands

In my first post on rangelands (Part 1, posted 22nd June), I wrote how these are vast areas covering most of Australia. And I asked the question, how should these areas be managed/not managed?

Graham Finlayson is a reader of this blog and has a property near Bourke in New South Wales. Graham is also an advocate of ‘holistic management’. His property has been destocked for 15 months out of the last 41. He has had 60mm of rain over the last fortnight.

According to Graham, “My decision on when to restock will be based on if and when the condition of the land and pasture are capable, as a minimum ground cover level is targeted.I always try to keep in mind what I want the place to look like in 5 to 10 years time and base todays decisions on that.”

Graham emailed the following comment on rangeland management:

“There is currently a lot of conflicting debate over how we are managing our rangelands, or in fact any of our land or ecosystems in general. This has been accelerated I believe by the ongoing drought, to the extent that most of the metropolitan population are now more aware and concerned.

Rather than look for pity for ‘the poor farmer’ with this kind of exposure, I feel embarrassed at the extent of the damage that we have inflicted on our landscape. The paddock does not become a dust bowl because of ‘the drought’, rather it is a direct result of the decisions we have made. If our management of stocking rates, crop choice, animal movement etc are based on hope, tradition, ignorance or apathy, and we do not put the health of our land first than it will suffer. This can happen in any season but we feel it the most when it just ‘won’t rain’.

I am a firm believer in the methods and philosophies of Alan Savory, which are being practiced in differing variations all over the world with great success. Rather than fight against what I was starting to learn, I embraced the new way of thinking as the answer that I had been looking for in my never ending battle against mother nature. Suddenly I realised that not only do we not have to be constantly struggling to survive, but we also have within our grasp the ability to greatly improve our ecology as well.

This country is badly scarred by claypans (bare ground) which I believe probably formed originally in the late 1800’s as a result of very poor grazing management. The Western Division (aprox. 45 per cent of NSW) actually carried 15 million dry stock equivalents (dse) or sheep in the late 1880’s until the inevitable drought of the 90’s which saw that number decimated. Since then, in over one hundred years we have averaged approximately 7 million dse with plenty of good and bad seasons throughout that period. This tells me that not only have we dramatically altered the landscape to the extent that we have halved its capability, but also that it had that capability. Even though we greatly improved our water and fencing etc we continued to gradually mine our resources through using management techniques not suited to our environment. If the land could sustain 15 million dse before we altered the environment then perhaps it will again, if we provide that sort of environment for a similar system to flourish.

Imagine the benefit to every country town of doubling production and profitability. Economic independence, more jobs and younger people, less crime and welfare dependence. The positive effects would be enormous, especially if the land management took into account inevitable dry spells as just another factor to be aware of and managed for without reducing profitability. It is these interrelated aspects of ecology, economics and people that holistic management is all about.

For us to be able to improve our grazing management and control we almost quadrupled the number of paddocks we have. This allows us to combine the effects of using larger mobs for beneficial “herd effect” where it is required, and the ability to ‘rest’ the paddocks for 48 to 50 weeks every year. The amount of time the livestock are out of the paddock is more crucial then the number of head that you have present when grazing. This system negates the need to use fire as a tool that is used often. It seems to me that fire is the only tool in the tool box for many people in decision making positions.

Remember that if the only tool in the toolbox is a hammer, then all your problems look like nails.”

I appreciate not everyone is a fan of holistic management. I am keen to post alternative views. Email me at jennifermarohasy@yahoo.com.au.

I am passionate about Australia’s rangelands. They cover about 75 percent of the land area of this continent – according to a website that I’ve just discovered.
The Australian Burea of Statistics (ABS), from memory, suggests about 60 percent of Australia is rangeland under pastoral lease.

I am not sure how these vast areas should be managed. I know they are changing – always changing.

Some in the rangelands subscribe to a book published by Allan Savoy in 1999 titled ‘Holistic Management’. I can’t get my mind around much of what Savoy writes, but I do think he raises some important issues.

While I have posted some pieces at this blog that promote the use of fire, Savoy has a very different perspective. He suggests,

“The world was not terribly overgrazed before modern humans, despite animal numbers that are unimaginable today, due to the constant movement of large herding herbivores. Constant movement was brought about by one of the defense mechanisms large grazing herbivores developed to coexist with high numbers of pack-hunting and other predators in a functioning whole. Most herding herbivore females do not have horns or other means of defense. Males generally use their horns for dominating other males and defending territory rather than protecting females and young. So to survive, females of herding herbivores seem to have developed similar strategies – drop all young over a very short period to overwhelm predators, and combine in large herds, which predators fear.

What had the bunching into very large herds to do with minimizing overgrazing of plants and maintaining plant and soil health? This is easy to understand if we look at plant physiology research rather than range research, as the Frenchman Andre Voisin (1988) did over 50 years ago.

What Voisin discovered was that overgrazing of plants is a function of time of exposure and re-exposure of plants and not a function of animal numbers. Concentrated herds of grazing animals feeding with their mouths close to the ground, dung and urinate in high concentration and thus are obliged to move off any ground within a short time and not return at least until weathering has cleaned their feed.

No creatures normally will feed on their own feces, or that of closely related species. Such constant movement, involving short periods of plant exposure followed by a longer period during which plant recovery could take place, would have minimized the overgrazing of plants (only individual plants, not whole ranges, can be overgrazed). And in fact this is just what we experience with holistic planned grazing (described in Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making (Savory and Butterfield, 1999), which simulates nature’s grazing of old.

I believe, as we build our knowledge, we will come to understand that just as soil cannot develop without life, so grassland soils could not have developed without grass, and that grass was mostly as animal-dependent as the animals were grass-dependent. Nature only functions in wholes and patterns. With vast numbers of herbivores, as there simply had to be for the world’s grasslands and their soils to have developed, most vegetation would be grazed by year’s end, leaving little combustible material at the time of most frequent lightning.

Today not only is burning by humans more widespread and frequent than probably at any time in history, but I believe lightening fires are more prevalent in grasslands than would have been the case before humans killed off most herbivores. Where rapid biological decay previously prevailed, today we see gradual chemical/physical breakdown providing billions of tons of highly inflammable material over vast areas of rangeland and certain forests in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere. Toward the season of most lightening, much of the land is a tinderbox simply waiting to be ignited. In addition, the more we humans use fire as a tool to maintain grasslands or forests, the more fire-dependent and flammable the vegetation becomes.”