Community involvement can be many
things to many people. For my father it
meant being involved in the local
neighborhood clean up day and writing letters to
local and federal politicians and newspapers. For
my mother it meant active involvement in her
church and its ministry. For both of them it meant
giving to organizations to which they felt
allegiance. The message I received in watching
their efforts was that part of a fulfilling life was
figuring out how your skills and interests could
best serve the community and becoming actively
involved in making the world a better place.
As a parent, one of my main contributions to
my community has been my involvement in my
son’s education and in AYSO (American Youth
Soccer Organization). For those of you not
familiar with the AYSO phenomena, it is the
organization that runs the recreational soccer
program all over the U.S. and keeps parents
hopping every Saturday.
AYSO is structured to ensure that parents
volunteer in some capacity such as coaching,
refereeing, or fundraising. While some parents are
avid supporters who attend each game and even
watch practices, many parents drop the kids off,
relieved to know they are in a “safe” place for a
couple of hours. At the end of the season they
express their gratitude to the coaches for putting
all that time and effort toward their kids.
As one of those coaches, I am always rather
surprised at being thanked for doing something I
have enjoyed so much. In coaching the team, I get
to play with my son and his friends and help
them improve as soccer players and as team
members. But when those parents say thank you
to me in that relieved sort of manner, I suspect
that for them coaching soccer is comparable to
listening to nails scratched across a chalkboard.
From my point of view, I am exceedingly
grateful that through soccer I have this avenue to
be involved in one aspect of my local community
and one of my son’s extracurricular activities. To
engage with others’ children is an added bonus. I
like to think that these 13- and 14-year-old boys
might view the world a little differently after
being on a team with a female soccer coach than
if they hadn’t had that experience. I know I have
certainly been affected by coaching these boys
and gained a greater appreciation for their ability
to be open, adapt, and grow.
A Life We l l - L i ve d
When I think of volunteering, membership,
or community involvement, I think about a line
from a Kate Wolf song: “Find what you really
care about, then live a life that shows it.” Like
Holistic Management, that song reminds me that
it is important to determine what gives our life
meaning because once we do so we can move
mountains, and even have fun in the process.
I think our holistic goal helps us define what
we find enjoyable and important in our lives.
With that knowledge we have greater clarity
about what we can bring to our work, our family,
and/or our community, as well as knowing what
skills we need to acquire ourselves or through
collaboration to succeed. Working with this
understanding is one of the reasons Ernesto
Sirolli’s Enterprise Facilitation (see “Growing
Community Power” on page 5) has had such
success in rural economic development.
And as Dennis Wobeser points out in his
interview (see “From Feedyard to Grassfarming”
on page 4), jobs are performed better and people
enjoy their work more when people know what
they are good at and have the opportunity to do
it. This might not be news to some readers, but
look at the number of people not doing what
they are good at or perhaps doing things they
do not enjoy for any number of reasons.
In contrast to such demoralizing
circumstances, the McNeil family (see “Doing the
RiGHT Thing” on page 7) has achieved
incredible results not only for themselves, but for
their community. By making a difference in how
they have lived their lives and run their business,
they have been better able to expand their
success into their community. Such community
involvement is an outgrowth of a life well-lived.
For me, such a story suggests the incredible
possibilities if each of us were to have the same
success at what we felt assionate about. I hope
these stories inspire you toward that end.
in t h is I s su e
From Factory Farming to National
Prosperity
Allan Savory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
From Feedyard to Grass Farming
Peter Donovan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
Growing Community Power
Peter Donovan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Doing the RiGHT Thing
Rio de la Vista . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
LAND & LIVESTOCK—A specialsection of IN PRACTICE
The Nonbrittle Pampas of Argentina:
A Pastoral Paradise
Jim Howell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
On the Slick Rock Ranch: Big Dreams
and Stark Reality
Jim Howell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
Savory Center Bulletin Board . . . . . . .16
Development Corner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17
Marketplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
How are you involved in your
community? As many holistic managers
have found out, community involvement
is often necessary to move you toward
your holistic goal. The McNeil family is
a prime example of such involvement
and what they have been able to
accomplish with Holistic Management.
See their story on page 7.
Making a Diffe r e n c eby Ann Adams
JULY / AUGUST 2001 NUMBER 78
HOLISTICMANAGEMENT IN PRACTIC EP r oviding the link between a healthy environment and a sound economy
2 HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE #78
The Allan Savory
Center for Holistic Management
The ALLAN SAVORY CENTER FOR
HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT is a 501(c) (3)
non-profit organization. The center
works to restore the vitality of
communities and the natural resources
on which they depend by advancing the
practice of Holistic Management and
coordinating its development worldwide.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Lois Trevino, Chair
Rio de la Vista, Vice Chair
Ann Adams, Secretary
Manuel Casas, Treasurer
Gary Rodgers
Allan Savory
ADVISORY BOARD
Robert Anderson, Chair, Corrales, NM
Ron Brandes, New York, NY
Sam Brown, Austin, TX
Leslie Christian, Portland, OR
Gretel Ehrlich, Gaviota, CA
Clint Josey, Dallas, TX
Doug McDaniel, Lostine, OR
Guillermo Osuna, Coahuila, Mexico
Bunker Sands, Dallas, TX
York Schueller, Santa Barbara, CA
Jim Shelton, Vinita, OK
Richard Smith, Houston, TX
STAFF
Shannon Horst, Executive Director; Kate Bradshaw, Associate Director; Allan Savory, Founding Director; Jody Butterfield, Co-Founder andResearch and Educational MaterialsCoordinator ; Kelly Pasztor, Director of Educational Services; Andy Braman,
Development Director; Ann Adams,
Managing Editor, IN PRACTICE andMembership Support Coordinator
Africa Centre for Holistic Management
Private Bag 5950, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
tel: (263) (11) 213529; email:
Huggins Matanga, Director; Roger
Parry, Manager, Regional Training Centre;Elias Ncube, Hwange ProjectManager/Training Coordinator
HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT INPRACTICE (ISSN: 1098-8157) is publishedsix times a year by The Allan SavoryCenter for Holistic Management, 1010Tijeras NW, Albuquerque, NM 87102,505/842-5252, fax: 505/843-7900; email:[email protected].;website: www.holisticmanagement.org Copyright © 2001.
Ad definitumfinem
From Factory Farming to
National Prosperityby Allan Savory
Editor’s Note: This editorial discusses the
far-reaching results that can occur when
people cooperate at a community level to
achieve the quality of life they want.
hile many agricultural producers
know that current agribusiness is
not a pretty picture, most of them
don’t know how to do things differently, given
their economic constraints. For the most part,
producers want to earn a profit while
consumers need food they can afford. Few
think beyond this simplicity to the bigger
picture or longer term.
The current agricultural system can offer
short-term profit, but at what cost? We have
only to look at monocropping and factory
farming to know the price is too high.
Currently high numbers of livestock (fish,
shellfish, pigs, poultry and cattle) are produced
in factory settings by good people making
good money. Profits are in large measure
due to economies of scale and many hidden
subsidies that favor such factory-style
production. We need to relook at such
policies for a couple of reasons.
Conventional economists, who have
masterminded today’s agriculture, do not
account for costs commonly called
“externalities.” These are costs that do not arise
immediately, or close to the operation, and are
thus hard to calculate. However, the fact that
flooding has become our leading weather-
related cause of deaths, and that eroding soil
outweighs all our exports from all sources
combined annually, carries a cost of enormous
consequence. Economies of scale for corporate
America are, in fact, dis- economies of scale for
Americans who eventually have to pay the bill.
Liabilities to Assets
There are immediate concerns with factory
style animal production (apart from such
emotional issues as humane treatment). First,
high numbers of animals are desperately
needed on the land where dung, urine and
trampling are priceless assets if we are to
reduce forest fires and biomass burning,
as well as to reverse land degradation
(desertification) and store carbon once more
in the soil, in order to combat global climate
change. In contrast, dung and urine, are costly
polluting liabilities in animal factories.
Water, our urban/industrial Achilles heel, is
required in vast amounts to produce a pound
of feedlot beef, while little is required to
produce that same beef off the land. Further,
those animals, on the land, could be reducing
floods while more than doubling the soil’s
capacity to hold water for later use. The
amounts of water that can be held, and
gradually released, from soils over our vast
water catchments makes the water stored in
dams look ridiculously miniscule. And
water held in the soil does not cause the
environmental and social damage attributable
to dams. With cities running out of water this
factor alone would dictate the need to get the
animals out of feedlots and back on the land.
Those of you raising grassfed livestock
need to fully market all you are doing to heal
the land. Many of you already promote the
healthful qualities of your product as these
animals are less susceptible to the diseases that
plague factory-raised livestock. The current
mad cow (BSE) and foot and mouth disease
outbreaks in Europe as well as high antibiotic
usage are, I believe, unquestionably linked to
factory farming and/or animals too static on
land. Last year in the U.S. over 20 million
pounds of antibiotics were used on animals,
mostly for growth promotion. And in a recent
study, 74–100 percent of wild fish near fish
farms had residues of the antibiotics used in
those fish factories.
As sustainable producers you are also the
leaders of a new agriculture. Your success
will encourage those who are still involved in
feedlots and animal factories. Surely no one
wants to pass on the pollution, and potential
health problems to their children or their
neighbors’ children. Nor do these producers
willfully want to contribute to the land
deterioration (desertification) and social
problems associated with it. Yet many continue
to choose that option as if there were no
other choices, whether out of habit,
desperation, or misinformation. Your success
will change that not only for the producer
but for the consumer.
W
To be able to market the environmental
benefits of grassfed beef you do, however,
need also to understand that the labels
“grassfed” or “organic” are not sufficient.
Throughout history by far the greatest beef
production has been, and much continues to
be, grassfed and organic. However, the manner
in which graziers handle the animals has led to
the development of the world’s major deserts
and is now contributing globally and in the
U.S., more than any other factor, to floods,
increasing droughts and desertification. Such
grassfed organic production is also not socially
sound simply because degraded land always
leads to poverty, social breakdown, violence,
and more.
Graziers can offer increased quality of life
opportunities for themselves, their families,
their employees, and the consumer because
not only can they offer a higher quality,
healthier product but they are also capable
of using their livestock to regenerate the land
and water resources of the nation as many
who are managing holistically are doing.
As consumers become more
environmentally conscious, the demand
for land restoration and more socially,
environmentally and economically sound
policies will grow—whether related to noxious
weed infestations, choked and increasingly
fire-prone National Forests, desertification of
America’s grasslands and savannas, loss of
wildlife habitat, or sustaining urban water
supplies. However, most consumers still do not
see the connection between what graziers can
do to produce healthy food and to address
environmental problems that also concern
them. In other words, they do not yet
understand that livestock are the greatest
tools for land restoration we have available.
Consumers, however, cannot be blamed for
ignorance of such facts when many livestock
producers are equally ignorant. Or if they are
aware, they do little to change how they run
their livestock on the land—be it private or
public. Those of us who want healthy land
and abundant wildlife and water must educate
the livestock industry, agricultural leadership,
and consumers until it is common knowledge
that graziers can produce healthy food and
healthy land. Graziers face two choices of
concern to all Americans:
• Run their animals so they continue the
destruction of land, water, wildlife and rural
economies while polluting and producing an
unhealthy product, or
• Run their animals in such a manner that
they become the most powerful tool for the
their community. But we need to move
beyond that to a regional, national, and
international level.
Regional Cooperative s
If we look at the short-term urgent problem
graziers face, it is clear the principle area of
difficulty is distribution and marketing rather
than production. Any grazier can learn to
manage holistically. But, what can the ordinary
person do about shifting a national subsidized
marketing system?
Most farmers and ranchers simply do not
like marketing, and with most beef marketing
in the hands of a few mega companies, graziers
feel helpless. A few have done well individually
or in small groups niche marketing their clean,
grassfed beef. But we need massive marketing
transformation to realistically tackle America’s,
let alone the world’s, problems of
environmental degradation.
While I don’t know how that change will
ultimately happen, I suspect that an early
step would be well-led, large-scale marketing
collaboration between producers. Organic dairy
farmers, such as those involved in Organic
Valley, offer one approach. This company now
markets more than dairy products for members
from many states and is increasingly getting
their products into mainstream retail stores
even outside of Wisconsin.
As more of the grazier industry is able to
create similar alliances and corporations so that
they can meet consumer demands in the short-
term while educating consumers and policy-
makers for the long-term, their success will
affect government policy, consumption, and
supply. As feedlot owners see the writing on
the wall, they will change their production
methods proactively or be forced to do so by
consumer demand, subsidy changes, and
energy costs.
As individual graziers you can do
something to change the current agricultural
system that leads to environmental
degradation and unhealthy food. By keeping
the goal of healthy food and land in mind
we can find the means to change this system
to benefit everyone. It will take a level of
moral courage to move beyond the status quo
and make the extra effort of informing
yourself, your consumers, your fellow
producers, and the leaders of your agricultural
organizations. I believe many of you who
work closely with the land and animals you
love possess the fortitude to create that
change from which personal and national
prosperity will arise.
restoration of land, water, wildlife and rural
economies while producing a healthy clean
product.
Catching the Wa ve
People and corporations currently heavily
committed to feedlot production, and its
associated meat packaging and marketing, will
maintain that they cannot change as so much
is invested. While acknowledging this problem,
I feel those who are wise should heed the
warnings of impending massive change as
many corporate leaders are doing.
Over the next few decades entire industrial
sectors and many corporations will disappear
and whole new industries will appear, simply
because the sleeping giant of public opinion,
concerning social and environmental issues, is
awakening.
People and corporations heavily invested
in animal factory production have a choice to
change early, proactively and profitably, or to
do so later in crisis with great loss. While
changing production, handling, and marketing
may warrant national financial help, it will
take years to gain the level of national
understanding required for such dramatic
policy shifts. So what can graziers do in the
meantime?
Individually they can do a great deal
by simply producing cleaner, more
environmentally beneficial products. I know
many graziers are concerned about how they
will survive in the short-term as they make
this shift, given USDA policies that favor
diseconomies of scale, feedlot production,
and marketing in the hands of virtual
monopolies.
But remember, there are graziers who are
not only surviving but also thriving in this
current unfair situation. Using the Holistic
Management™ model and other tools such as
humane livestock handling, continually
improving temporary fencing technology,
and their own human creativity in marketing,
they have been able to make changes on an
individual and local level for themselves and
HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE • JULY / AUGUST 2001 3
Consumers . . . do not yet
understand that livestock
are the greatest tools for
land restoration w e
have available.
4 HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE #78
In 1999, Dennis and Jean Wobeser, of Hi-
Gain Ranching, in Lloydminster, Alberta,
won the Emerald Award in the small-
business category. This is a major Canadian
environmental award, and this is the first
time it has been won by an agricultural
operation. In the words of the press release
that accompanied the award:
“Dennis and Jean Wobeser have been in
the cattle business since 1963. For over 20
years they ran a custom feeding and feedlot
company that, at its peak, handled 7,000 head
of cattle. In the late 1980s, the Wobesers, along
with daughter Kelly, son Brady, and four
employees, decided to transform their high-
technical/high-input commercial feeding
operation to a low-input, nature-based grazing
operation. Hi-Gain Ranching now manages
4,500 acres (1,822 hectares) with most of
that land dedicated to seeded pasture and
maintenance of natural areas, supporting
600 cows and 600 to 800 yearlings.
“The Wobesers’ approach has resulted in
healthier and higher-volume grass, increased
organic matter in the soil, more diversity
in plant species, and an increase in
beneficial insect species. Bare ground
has decreased and healthier land has
increased due to disallowing pesticides and
chemicals. The effects of floods and drought
have been reduced due to a layer of thatch
(dead and decaying plants) on the surface
of the ground, which increases the water
holding capacity of the soil and reduces
erosion and runoff. Hi-Gain Ranching is
truly a demonstration of a healthy and
vibrant ecosystem.”
The following is from a too-brief
interview with Dennis Wobeser. Thanks
much to Brady Wobeser for his comments
and contributions.
Dennis: I graduated from university in
1961. There’s never been a faster explosion
in technology in agriculture than there was
in the twenty years after 1960. Now we’re
finding out that not only do you go broke
buying things to help you, but you’ve
destroyed the soil, the base. That’s the
turnaround.
All my life I’ve wanted to be a cattleman.
When I got into Holistic Management I
the financial planning stuff, and I can still
stumble around and go to a market or two
and do the marketing, so we’ve got a pretty
good team.
The key to the whole thing is the people
aspect. If you can just get the people thinking
right, there’s no stopping you. There’s so
much potential out here right now.
In our club (the Devon management club
meets monthly), we’re weak on the people,
goal aspect [quality of life], particularly the
men. They’re so prone to jump out and go
recreational fencing or farming—it’s the hardest
by far to get people into the people aspect.
But once you get involved in this aspect,
it flows. For our management club, the
biggest thing has been the
involvement of the entire family
[in management]. To get more
involvement [in that] by everyone
has been key.
The feedlot was right for the
times, but then we realized we had to
do something totally different, or get
a lot bigger. When we looked at the
financial aspect of the inefficiencies
of growing and feeding grain to
confinement livestock, we didn’t like
it. Now we’re exceptionally glad we
made the change [to a nature-based
operation]. Now everybody’s yowling
about the price of diesel fuel and gas,
and we don’t need very much around
here, and that helps a lot.
Working with nature instead of
against nature looked exciting. And the
economics—we were going through vast
amounts of money here and hanging on to
very little of it. Neither Kelly nor Brady
wanted to carry on with the feedlot. And
it was a rat race.
Brady Wobeser: The grass management
beats slogging around the mud in the feedlot
by a long ways. With the feedlot, we didn’t
have time to do anything.
Dennis: Everything—labor, money, effort,
land—everything was geared to supporting
this feedlot. It devoured everything. We
said, there’s something wrong here. Let’s get
back to managing the land. If there’s some
aspect to the feedlot where it can fit into
realized that collecting solar energy through
growth on the land was more important than
the animals, and the animals were only tools.
Begrudgingly, I had to drop my sacred cows
from number one to number two, and put
growth ahead of it. We’ve got friends just
south of us, Larry and Toby Bell, who told
us that we weren’t looking deep enough
yet. They convinced us that all our future
and everything is dependent on the
health of our soil. If you have healthy
land, you’ll have healthy plants, which you
can then harvest by livestock if that’s the
way you choose. Now the cows are the third
priority: put the soil first, then the growth,
then the animals.
People said, what did you learn from
Holistic Management? I said, I finally learned
that there is a light at the end of the tunnel,
and no, it isn’t just another freight train. That’s
when the quality of life thing started to come.
Allan Nation (editor of The Stockman
Grass Farmer ) keeps saying, when you’re 50,
you’re running out of steam, so you have to
use your expertise and the young people’s
energy to put it together. Ernesto Sirolli (see
next article, “Growing Community Power”)
says that the three things that are key are
production, finance, and marketing. We’re
very fortunate here. Our son, Brady, has got
the energy and can do the production. Our
daughter, Kelly, is just really good and likes
Meet Dennis Wo b e s e r —
From Feedyard to Grass Farmingby Peter Donovan
Dennis Wobeser outside what used to be his
7,000-head feedlot before he shifted to a grass-based
operation.
HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE • JULY / AUGUST 2001 5
production, and the soil has started to come
alive again.
What we just finished doing with the
feedlot wasn’t necessarily wrong. It might
have been right at the time. But the whole
key is that the most difficult thing for society
to accept is change. We have to learn to
accept change. Nature cycles, everything is
trying to do that to us. And we get in real
trouble if we start to ignore that.
I’ve enjoyed [educating others]. The feedlot
started that. It was a custom lot. It was a
people place, so we learned to work with
people. We’ve enjoyed helping people.
Brady: When we quit custom feeding it
was like a ghost town around here, because
people weren’t coming in. Now it’s just about
as many people coming in—related to renting
grass, etc. Our neighbors don’t think we’re
crazy anymore.
This excerpted article first appeared
in Patterns of Choice . You can learn
more about this journal at
www.managingwholes.com or by
calling Peter at 541/426-6490.
continued on page 6
that, we would still do it. Otherwise, no, we
won’t do it.
We wanted to move the feedlot outdoors.
We wanted the cattle to work to find their feed,
and we wanted them to spread the nutrients
back on the land in the form of manure.
We’ve always bought a lot of the feed.
The biggest breakthrough was when we
found out a cow can lick snow instead of
having to have water. That allowed us to
move the herds away from home, to where
they’re doing some good on the land.
We grew up with the European
philosophy, that all the cows were tied in the
barn. I often wondered why that was. That’s
the way my dad was; you tied everything
up in the barn.
We have a lot of opportunity here, and
we’re just starting to scratch the surface. If
the consumer keeps demanding more
healthy food, then we’re really on the right
track. But we’ll always have cycles and so
forth. We’ve got to try and not pattern our
operations after price, we’ve got to pattern
them after cost. Do the best you can with
what you have, where you are. We keep
uncovering more adaptability and flexibility
in these cattle.
We’re a long ways away from the grass-fed
thing in North America because we still have
political manipulation trying to encourage the
production of grain. As long as we have that,
we’ll have cheap grain that we have to dispose
of through livestock. The bottom line still
comes back to cheap production on grass.
We’ve also now realized that the cow can
survive strictly on byproduct during the
winter feeding period. Our cows are wintering
on bales of straw, with the chaff put back in
the straw, and supplemented with a pea/lentil
screening pellet.
We’ve got some neighbors growing milling
oats. The oats have to be hulled. The oat hull,
ground up, is producing an extremely good
cow feed. We’re got a lot of cows in this
district—by and large people who are
involved in Holistic Management—existing
100 percent through the winter on
byproduct feed.
So we’ve more than doubled our
a subtly designated elite, who by virtue of
their professional backgrounds and civic
commitment “know” what is best for others.
T h ey develop plans and strategies to remedy
the deficiencies, write for grants, and hire
exe c u t i ve directors and program officers. The
perceptions, knowledge, skills, and techniques
to create change in any other way did not
exist in our community.
H owever, two things occurred. We gained
skills, experience, and success in envisioning
and running programs, which helped us gain
and even share power. We also began to
experience some dissatisfaction with the
results, and with the way we were looking
at the problems.
The Holistic Management™ decision-making
f r a m ework was a crucial turning point for me.
But when a community sees itself as controlled
by outside forces, as lacking power, setting a
holistic goal appears to be an abstract exe r c i s e ,
like a two-dimensional drawing of an
“impossible” three-dimensional geometric
shape. Most could not see how to get “there”
from “here.”
Editor’s Note: Enterprise Facilitation is a rural
d e velopment process developed by Ernesto
Sirolli that focuses on creating locally
d e veloped enterprises to increase the economic
health of a rural community. For more
i n formation about Enterprise Facilitation see
the book review of Ripples from the Zambezi
i n IN PRACTICE # 7 6 .
Here in northeast Oregon’s Wa l l owa
C o u n t y, our local economy has
depended on the export of
commodities—lumber, cattle, and grain. People
feel powerless, as if their future is being
dictated by outside markets and money, urban
environmentalists, and federal regulations.
When you are powerless, you can’t hide the
fact from the younger generation. They leave .
By nature they want a chance to play, on the
“A” team perhaps, and to swim with the current
instead of against it.
When you are powerless, you depend on
others for your money. An eroding tax base
increases your dependence on grantwriting. Yo u
become adept at depicting the distress of yo u r
c o m m u n i t y, rather than its strengths (ex c e p t
when it comes to selling real estate). Absentee
ownership of real property increases.
When you are powerless, you are
guaranteed to be in conflict. Here the wo r d
d e ve l o p m e n t has tended to bring out suspicion,
fa n t a s y, avarice, hopelessness, or active
resistance, depending on who you talk to.
People disagree on what development is,
where it comes from, why it occurs, and
whether it is a good thing. The phrase
sustainable dev e l o p m e n t doesn’t help, because
people have radically different notions of what
sustains what. For some, agriculture sustains
civilization. According to others, civilization
should sustain agriculture.
Good Intentions
O ver the years, there have been many
e fforts in Wa l l owa County to do something
about high unemployment, social problems,
degraded riparian conditions, weeds, fiscal
problems, and more. All too often, these
e fforts have been characterized by a top-dow n
approach, focused on the problems or
symptoms, rather than on the
p owerlessness itself.
The participants in these efforts are
typically capable and well-intentioned people,
G r owing Community Powe r by Peter Donovan
6 HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE #78
meaning of engaging an outside consultant to
help us move in that direction. Again, this wa s
about power. Would engaging an outside
consultant really change things for us and our
community? Would this be a series of seminars
or strategy sessions, interesting perhaps, but
only resulting in plans and documents that sat
on a shelf? Did we need to do it
on our own, to “reinvent the
w h e e l ? ”
Some people called board
members and facilitators of
projects in the Midwest. We built
confidence that the Enterprise
Facilitation strategy would wo r k
for us, and Sirolli came again to
Wa l l owa County in Nove m b e r
1999 and spoke to more people,
enlarging our circle. We began to
fundraise the $170,000 that wo u l d
make possible a two - year trial.
We concluded that in making the
radical shift from top-down to a
bottom-up approach, we could lessen our risk
by engaging an outside authority who had
d eveloped through experience a proven and
c o s t - e ffe c t i ve method. The “packaging”—the
community operations manuals and the training
p r ovided to board and facilitator by Sirolli—has
helped to protect our effort against the
tendency to seek control, to suppress dive r s i t y,
and to implement projects from the top dow n .
The interest and cooperation of positional
leadership has been crucial. Certainly Sirolli’s
passionate advocacy of an empowe r m e n t
approach to development threatens some
traditionalist economic deve l o p m e n t
p r o fessionals. However, Lisa Lang, our local
economic development director, was an active
proponent from the start, and raised much of
the money needed for our project from state
and federal government grants.
Four months after Myron Kirkpatrick, our
full-time facilitator, hit the ground here, we have
s everal startups and expansions in the wings.
(Baker County to the south also began an
Enterprise Facilitation project after Sirolli’s visit
to them in February 1999, and preceded us
in fundraising and implementing it. Their
facilitator, Ruth Townsend, has helped with
13 startup enterprises so far.) We are trying to
shift our funding base to include more local
and private-sector dollars in order to take
responsibility more fully and to grow powe r .
The Power of Beliefs
The primary barriers to the practice of
Enterprise Facilitation are beliefs—for ex a m p l e ,
Ripples from the Zambezi
One of the notable failures of our linear,
needs-based, top-down approach was in economic
d evelopment, where our county failed to recruit
or retain major employers after much effort and
expense. In November 1998, after learning about
Ernesto Sirolli’s Enterprise Facilitation method
from Washington State University’s Don Nelson, I
was intrigued enough to go to Hastings,
Minnesota to visit a project. I spent time with the
facilitator there, Ron Toppin, meeting clients and
learning about how Enterprise Facilitation wo r k e d .
I read Ripples from the Zambezi at one long
sitting in a coffee shop.
Here was a path we could fo l l ow in
Wa l l owa County that would create new
economic activity quickly and cheaply. Here
was a practical and proven social technology fo r
a l l owing passionate individual entrepreneurs,
rather than speculators and planners, to chart
the future. By encouraging development from
within, by building on our strengths of
c r e a t i v i t y, resourcefulness, intelligence, skill, and
commitment, by helping serious people build a
foundation of sound management under their
ideas (rather than using incentives to create
often-rickety superstructures), we would grow
p ower locally, and begin to resolve some of our
conflicts about deve l o p m e n t .
In February 1999, Sirolli came to Enterprise.
He outlined his background, philosophy, and
method to 25 people in the basement of the
t own library. I made 30 audiotape copies of a
speech Sirolli had given in Spokane. Liberals and
c o n s e r va t i ves were galvanized by his message.
A self-selected core group of about a dozen
people met monthly, with a good deal of
additional interested participation. We used the
consensus circle, asking ourselves,
“What is the situation with regard to
economic development here?”
“What are the worst possible outcomes of
change?”
“What are the best possible outcomes?”
“What are the beliefs, behaviors, strategies,
and actions needed to foster the best possible
outcomes?”
This was a simple way of testing whether
the Sirolli Institute’s community package wo u l d
m ove us in the direction of our best outcomes.
We decided that it would, although we had
some issues around the expense and the
G r owing Community
P ower continued from page 5
that the people in your community are not
c r e a t i ve or resourceful, that they must be told
what to do, and that development comes from
s o m ewhere else. Or, that private enterprise will
a l ways seek to damage natural and social capital
in order to prosper, and that “sustainability” is
t h e r e fore achieved through control.
What helped us go
fo r ward is our local sense
of the “entrepreneurial
r evo l u t i o n ” — t h e
a forementioned creativity,
resourcefulness, and
commitment, the sense that
people across the social
and political spectrum are
increasingly committed to
right live l i h o o d s .
Like many areas in the
rural West, Wa l l owa County is
at a pivot point about powe r .
For twenty years we have
implemented programs from
the top down. These have helped build the
necessary skills, knowledge, and commitment.
N ow we are able to try something different, in
a conscious manner, while taking advantage of
what we have learned.
F i n a l l y, the implementation of Enterprise
Facilitation requires champions or leaders who
see the possibilities and can help others see
them, who understand that the primary barriers
are beliefs that are disguised as fact and
experience. Who these people turn out to be
may surprise you, as will the motivated people
with ideas who will come fo r wa r d .
In changing beliefs, an effe c t i ve technology
helps. Galileo’s telescope played an important
role in the collapse of the belief that the
sun revo l ved around the earth. Enterprise
Facilitation, by making competent management
coaching available to the grassroots, is show i n g
itself to be an effe c t i ve technology fo r
e m p owering people who have dreams for a
better life, and for helping people see each
other’s assets.
Peter Donovan, who lives in Enterprise,
Oregon, edits and publishes Patterns of Choice:
A journal of people, land, and money t h a t
reports on what people are learning from
conscious attempts at managing wholes rather
than parts. The Patterns of Choice w e b s i t e
contains many articles based on firsthand,
on-site reporting, including several on
Enterprise Facilitation projects
in the Midwest and Canada:
w w w.managingwholes.com
Peter Donovan
HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE • JULY / AUGUST 2001 7
more and more of the hay fields, cycling them
in and out of hay production. They also reduced
the amount of hay they cut and returned to an
old-time practice of simply cutting the hay into
w i n d r ows and piling it with a dump rake rather
than putting up bales. In this wa y, they could
use portable electric fence to dole the hay out to
the cattle. However, the McNeils plan their
grazing to allow sufficient regrowth so the cattle
can go through the pastures and find adequate
standing forage in most seasons.
The McNeils have also changed their calving
season to a June/July calving so that their 800
mother cows can be dry and pregnant through
the cold months and be on fresh green grow t h
and warmer temperatures during calving,
lactating and rebreeding. This change has also
greatly enhanced the McNeils’ quality of life .
As Mike likes to relate, “I
used to say that I wished I live d
s o m ewhere where we didn’t have
to put up hay all summer and
c a l ve in January. Then I finally
realized, I live in that place!”
To further enhance their
quality of life, the McNeils have
decided to take “non-use” on their
Forest Service grazing permit
(which they have used to
summer graze 600 yearlings in
the past) and run the entire herd
on their own land. With their
many years of experience and
very careful Holistic
Management™ grazing planning,
t h ey are confident the land can
carry this increased number of
animals and sustain the health of the grasses
and biodiversity at the same time.
A Better Quality of Land and Life
All of these management changes have led to
very measurable improvements in the McNeil’s
l i ves and land. From a production standpoint,
their enhanced planning has allowed them to
sustainably increase the carrying capacity of their
land by approximately 30 percent—perhaps eve n
more. The earlier panic of how to feed their
l i vestock is long gone and their independence
from public lands gives them a real sense of
security given the political and social pressures
Doing the RiGHT Thing—The McNeil Ranchby Rio de la Vista
continued on page 8
hat underlies a successful,
holistically managed ranching
operation? How does a family in a
high altitude, 6- to 8-inch (15- to 21-cm) rainfa l l
va l l ey in southern Colorado win national
a wards for their progressive management?
If there is one common denominator in
these questions, it seems to be the willingness
and ability to change with the times and
respond effe c t i vely to the demands of the day
while looking into the future. And that’s how
the McNeil family have protected a heritage of
100 plus years of ranching on the Rock Creek
Drainage on the southwestern slope of the
San Luis Va l l ey (SLV) in South Central Colorado.
Waking Up From Tr a d i t i o n
The McNeil family originally
m oved to Colorado from Vi r g i n i a
in 1890. To d a y, the ranch is run by
the fourth and fifth generations
of McNeils: Mike, with his wife ,
C a t h y, their 13-year-old daughter,
K e l l y, and nephew, Michael, along
with two long time employe e s .
T h ey run 800 mother cows on
3,033 acres (1,228 hectares), with
a p p r oximately 1,200 of those acres
irrigated. In the past, they have
also run their cattle on an
a p p r oximately 30,000-acre (12,146-
hectare) summer grazing permit
in the nearby National Forest.
As a young boy, Mike spent
summers irrigating hay fields,
driving tractors to harvest 3,000
tons of hay or riding the herd in
the high country range. He spent the cold
winters of his youth feeding that same hay to
the herd and, in the tradition of the area, calving
in the deep freeze of January. He also studied
agriculture briefly at Colorado State Unive r s i t y
until the bottom fell out of the cattle market,
and he returned home.
When Mike’s father, Bill, passed away in 1983,
the family had to deal with the challenges of
inter-generational land transfer issues, especially
the looming estate taxes. They were able to take
financial planning steps to protect the fa m i l y
and the ranch, albeit through some extreme and
very ex p e n s i ve measures.
Then, in the drought of 1989, the Forest
Service told them they had to remove half
their herd from their grazing allotment. Such
an unexpected situation could well have been
disastrous, but some summer rains saved them
at the last minute. This “wake up” call made
them realize that “business as usual” was
getting more and more risky, if not
d ownright untenable.
So Mike and Cathy began to explore other
options and new ways to manage their ranch.
Having heard about “HRM” (Holistic Resource
Management) and thinking it was “a way to
double their stocking rate,” they decided to learn
more about it. They began to study va r i o u s
a l t e r n a t i ve approaches, with their training in
Holistic Management providing a framework
for integrating these new ideas and practices
into their operation.
Rather than try to make immediate changes
in their livestock operations, they realized that
the real “logjam” at the time was in their fa m i l y.
So their first “new idea” was to address fa m i l y
issues and begin to heal some of the schisms
that existed. Difficult and challenging as it wa s ,
over time and through honest communication
and family meetings, many old issues we r e
r e s o l ved and this led to a more creative and
r e l a xed environment.
Greater Sustainability
From there, the McNeils began to make
gradual changes in the actual operation of the
ranch itself. Over the years, they began to graze
W
Sandhill cranes rising from the waters of the Monte Vista National
Wildlife Refuge. The McNeils have worked with this refuge over the past
five years to help protect the water rights in the area as part of their
conservation ef forts.
8 HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE #78
Trust is now backing the effort through support
of a local project coordinator and direct land
protection efforts.
The list of partnering organizations now
also include: the U.S. Fish and Wi l d l i fe Service,
Natural Resources Conservation Service, Ducks
Unlimited, the Trust for Public Land, Colorado
Wetlands Partnership and the SLV We t l a n d s
Focus Area Committee, Colorado Division of
Wi l d l i fe, the SLV GIS/GPS Authority, Colorado
Cattlemens Agricultural Land Trust, the Rio
Grande Headwaters Land Trust, and many more.
At the same time the Rock Creek Heritage
Project was developing, it became clear to the
McNeils and their colleagues that they also
needed a local land trust to work throughout
the San Luis Va l l ey for protection of agricultural
land and water. As the founding President of the
Rio Grande Headwaters Land Trust (RiGHT),
(See IN PRACTICE #70) Cathy McNeil has
brought her rigorous thinking, contagious
enthusiasm and the family’s good community
standing as long-term land owners and
successful ranchers to the effort. In partnership
with the many national and regional
c o n s e r vation organizations that are also wo r k i n g
to conserve the tremendous ecological and
agricultural resources of the Va l l ey, RiGHT
also offers educational and management help
(including Holistic Management training).
Making A Diffe r e n c e
The McNeils’ work on the land and in their
community has not been ignored. In 1999 they
r e c e i ved statewide recognition for the health
of their land when they were named
“ C o n s e r vationist of the Year for Ranching”
by the Colorado Association of Soil
C o n s e r vation Districts.
on public lands grazing in the U.S.
From a financial standpoint, they have
stabilized their operation, kept the entire ranch
intact, and remained debt free, (even when
Mike’s mother passed away and they had to
deal with a massive inheritance tax). They have
cut their annual operating expenses by about
20 percent since 1991, operating the same ranch
with more cattle for about $60,000 less per ye a r
while paying their help the best wages of
a n yone in the area. All of their employe e s
continue to receive training in Holistic
Management and other progressive management
ideas and are invo l ved in the financial, grazing
and infrastructure planning, and biological
m o n i t o r i n g .
Changes in the Community
While their own land base and operation
became more stable, profitable, and increasingly
h e a l t h y, the McNeils could not ignore the fo r c e s
of change going on around them. They wa t c h e d
the intensifying second-home growth and
d evelopment pressures that are resulting in
tremendous loss of agricultural lands and wa t e r
throughout the state of Colorado.
The impacts came very close to home as the
McNeils realized that the Rock Creek Drainage
was one of very few undeveloped stream
corridors remaining in the entire 8,000-square-
mile (3,239- square-hectare) basin. With upstream
neighbors threatening to sell out to deve l o p e r s
for subdivisions, they conceived a project that
could include all the landowners in the drainage
in a collective conservation effort through a
combination of donations and sales of
d evelopment rights. The Rock Creek Heritage
Project has now been underway for three ye a r s
and is working to protect approximately 15,000
acres (6,073 hectares) and associated water rights
adjacent to the 14,000-acre (5,668-hectare) Monte
Vista National Wi l d l i fe Refuge over the nex t
three to five years.
The startup of this landowner initiative
was originally supported by The Nature
C o n s e r vancy and the Great Outdoors Colorado
(GOCO) Trust Fund through a capacity building
grant which funded landowner education and
initial negotiations for donation and purchase
of conservation easements with participating
ranchers. Because of the outstanding
opportunity to protect a significant block of
agricultural land and water rights, as well as
exceptional wildlife habitat, American Farmland
Doing the RiGHT Thing—The McNeil Ranchcontinued from page 7
In 2001, the McNeils also received national
recognition for their community contributions
and good stewardship when they were named
American Farmland Trust’s “2001 Steward of the
Land.” The McNeils were selected from more
than 75 farmers and ranchers from 35 states
because of their efforts “to stop the loss of
p r o d u c t i ve farmland and promote fa r m i n g
practices that lead to a healthy environment.”
The McNeils were also honored by the
Environmental Law Institute for their
contribution to wetlands protection, restoration,
and education and were named winners of the
2001 National Wetlands Award in the Land
S t ewardship and Development category.
Such awards demonstrate how many live s
the McNeils have touched as they have active l y
shared information about their management
practices and sponsored Holistic Management
training for other ranchers and agency
e m p l oyees over many years. In the past ye a r
alone, three classes have been held for Rock
Creek landowners, conservation organization,
and government agency personnel and others.
These workshops have included eve r y t h i n g
from basic Holistic Management to riparian
restoration using cattle as a tool.
The McNeils are doing their best to manage
their own land with innova t i ve and sustainable
practices (often against the tide of public
opinion and “tradition”). But just as importantly,
t h ey are actively sharing creative approaches to
resolving local and community-wide problems
and creating a viable future for agriculture as
t h ey pour their hearts, minds, time, and money
into conservation efforts they support.
By first attending to business at home and
within their own fa m i l y, the McNeils have
created a foundation for contributing to their
community and are helping to restore the land
and provide new management and marketing
options for land owners throughout the San Luis
Va l l ey. In doing so they have created
opportunities for many others to participate in
agricultural life, conservation, and enjoyment of
the land while creating and protecting habitat
for the animal and plant life that shares it.
Undoubtedly their enthusiasm, creativity, and
generosity have touched many people in their
community and beyond and will indeed prov i d e
a heritage long beyond their years.
Rio de la Vista is a Holistic Management™
Certified Educator and Vice-Chair of the
Center’s Board of Directors. She is also
American Farmland Trust’s coordinator for
the Rock Creek Heritage Project and can
be reached at [email protected]
“I used to say that I wished
I lived somewhere where
we didn’t have to put up
hay all summer and calve
in January. Then I
finally realized, I live
in that place! ”
IN PRACTICE • JULY / AUGUST 2001 LAND & LIVESTOCK 9
LAND L I V E S TO C K& A Special Section ofIN PRACTICE
JULY / AUGUST 2001 #78
continued on page 10
For those who get their kicks out of grass, cows, horses, and
gorging on beef, the Argentine Pampas are hard to beat. In
March of this year, my wife, Daniela, and I led a group of
American beef producers on an intensive, technical grazing tour of
this incredibly productive region, one of the world’s great natural
grasslands. We visited dairy, beef finishing, cow/calf, and organic
cropping operations. Some outfits were specialists in one or two
enterprises, while one place integrated all of the above.
Holistic Management hasn’t found its way to Argentina yet, at least
not on a notable scale, but holistic thinking is alive and well, even if
nobody calls it that. Each farm and ranch on our itinerary, without
exception, consistently emphasized its focus on the long term ecological
health of its resource base. Each place was likewise equally focused on
generating a healthy profit, with ranch personnel deeply involved in
strategic as well as day-to-day decision making. With the addition of
some of the key insights offered by the Holistic Management decision
making framework, these producers could emerge as leaders in the
Holistic Management movement.
Beef from Grass
The heart of the Pampas comprises one of the earth’s truly blessed
environments. With precipitation ranging from 700 to 1300 mm (28 to
52 inches) per year, and evenly spread over all 12 months, warm humid
summers, early springs, late falls, mild winters, deep fertile soils, and flat
topography, this is grass-growing heaven. On our 2500-mile journey, we
were seldom out of sight of several herds of 100 or more head of cattle.
Altogether, the Argentine beef herd totals about 40 million head.
Alfredo Villegas Oromi, our local guide who works with most of the
farmers we visited on our tour, told us during his pre-trip orientation
that “We Argentines are beef eaters. We consume 80% of our
production and export only 20%.” The average Argentine puts away
about 140 pounds (65 kg) of beef per year, over twice the consumption
An Argentine gaucho. “Ranch personnel on all the places
we visited are deeply involved in strategic as well as day-
to-day decision making.”
The Nonbrittle Pampas ofA r g e n t i n a —
A Pastoral Paradiseby Jim Howell
of the average American (they’re a lot thinner than the average
American, too).
Nonetheless, it was difficult to imagine that this country of 36 million
mouths could keep up with that many bovines. But they do, and 90%
of that beef comes straight off the rich grass of the Pampas, with only
10% produced in now-failing feedlots. Two years ago, feedlots were the
new fad. They just don’t work in Argentina, but that’s another story.
This story is about grass.
The humid temperate core of the Pampas stays just cool enough
through the summer to allow cool-season perennial grasses to thrive,
and just warm and humid enough to permit subtropical warm-season
perennials to likewise succeed. It’s also the perfect environment for
alfalfa. There aren’t very many places in the world where perennial
ryegrass, orchard grass, tall fescue, white clover, alfalfa, paspalum, and
bermuda grass (not to mention a broad assortment of native cool- and
warm-season grasses and legumes) can blossom within the same square
meter. On our trip in early March (the northern hemisphere equivalent
of early September), we saw pasture after pasture with each of these
species in a beautiful vegetative condition.
This pastoral paradise is of course a big reason the Argentines are
famous for their grass-finished beef. It’s like having the best of both
Minnesota and Mississippi, but without the seasonal extremes of either.
North Americans who are dubious of the practicality of developing a
grass-finished beef industry in their country might cite this Argentine
advantage as “the reason they don’t need feedlots and we do.”
I would argue that with partnerships between northern and
southern graziers, we have the potential to produce grass-finished
beef nearly as efficiently as the Argentines. But to do so, we’ll need to
become much more sophisticated in our grazing management.
On that note, let’s examine a couple of these operations and
10 LAND & LIVESTOCK IN PRACTICE #78
see what we can learn.
Estancia San Ricardo
Estancia San Ricardo, owned by Pedro Landa near the town of
General Villegas, covers 690 ha (1700 acres) of flat grassland in an
800-mm (32-inch) precipitation zone. This little patch of the Pampas
supports 300 mother cows and 1400 steers, year round. It lies on the
edge of the northern subtropical zone, so Brahman-cross cattle do just
as well as or better than straight British breeds. Pedro prefers to stock
San Ricardo with eared cattle, partly due to their adaptability, but
mainly because he can typically find good deals on large bunches of
Brahman-cross cattle from the more tropical northern provinces.
Animals usually arrive as early-weaned calves weighing about 140
kg (310 lb.). They tend to spend nine months on the ranch, after which
they’re sent to slaughter at a grass-finished weight of about 360 kg (790
lb.). That’s an average daily gain of 1.8 pounds (.8 kg) over 270 days, or
a total gain of nearly 450 pounds (200 kg). Not bad, especially at a
stocking rate of 4 steers per hectare (1.6 per acre), and considering the
fact that San Ricardo is managed organically, with no chemical fertilizers,
herbicides, or insecticides.
Focus on Profit
How is this possible? Juan Goldaracena, the ranch manager, quickly
pointed out to our group that the overriding aim of this operation is
profitability per hectare, and to maximize profit per hectare requires a
high stocking rate. Instead of stocking according to seasonal lulls in
pasture production, San Ricardo maintains a stocking rate that nearly
matches their spring production peak. In other words, when plant
growth rates are peaking from September to February, they don’t have
much leftover grass. That’s San Ricardo’s first principle of profitability.
More on that in a minute.
The Alfa l fa-Grass Challenge
The second principle deserves a more detailed agronomic
explanation. The San Ricardo pasture base includes a diversity of species
closely resembling that described above. Some 30 to 40 percent of that
forage mix is composed of alfalfa, and it is the alfalfa that, according to
Juan, makes everything else possible. It is the best producer in terms of
total dry matter production, it is the most valuable in terms
of quality, and it builds soil fertility through nitrogen
fixation. The hitch is that an alfalfa/grass-based pasture
requires a very sophisticated level of management.
Over the course of a year, each pasture on the ranch is
typically grazed a total of eight times, and usually for 1-day
grazing periods. Recovery periods range from 21 days in
spring, to 40 days in summer and fall, to 120 days in winter.
During the spring and much of the summer, growth rates
are so fast that grazing periods longer than one day can lead
to overgrazing. We stopped and looked at one pasture that
had been grazed two days prior, and the cool season grasses
already had about an inch (2 cm) of regrowth. Juan pointed
out, however, that the alfalfa hadn’t started to recover yet.
He explained that Argentines tend to be so focused on
alfalfa that they tend to ignore the health of the grasses.
Alfalfa won’t start to recover until a week following a
grazing, so most Argentine managers assume they can get
by with one-week grazing periods without hurting the
alfalfa, and they’re right.
The problem is that the grasses get hammered, because
as we could clearly see, if conditions are right, after two
days they’re already trying to recover leaf area. If regrazed
within a week of the first bite, the grasses get set back
significantly, but the alfalfa isn’t hurt at all. After that first
week, however, the alfalfa starts to take off, quickly catching
up and eventually overtaking the grass. If the grasses have
been stunted due to excessively long grazing periods, this
growth rate discrepancy is even more marked. But if grazing
periods are kept to one day and the grasses are protected
from that second bite on tender regrowth, both the alfalfa
and the grasses tend to reach a recovered, high quality vegetative state
at the same time.
With one-day grazing periods, combined with adequate recovery
periods, much more sunlight is trapped, resulting in greater overall
forage production, which translates into higher stocking rates. Since
all forage species are kept in a more vegetative condition, animal
performance benefits as well. With week-long grazing periods, the alfalfa
recovers before the grasses. If grazed at that point (when the alfalfa has
A Pastoral Paradisecontinued from page 9
The “cuerpo” herd on San Ricardo. Because they get mo ved every day in a low-
stress manner, they’re almost like pets.
The “cabeza” herd on San Ricardo after a half day in a paddock of alfalfa, cool-
and warm-season perennial grasses, and annual warm-season grasses and forbs.
At the end of the day they’ll move to the next paddock.
IN PRACTICE • JULY / AUGUST 2001 LAND & LIVESTOCK 11
recovered), the grasses will be overgrazed once again. If the recovery
period is extended to allow for full recovery of the grasses—a more
common practice on most finishing operations—the alfalfa loses much
of its quality.
Topping the Alfa l fa
San Ricardo goes one
step further to maintain
equal rates of recovery
and high quality pasture.
During the spring and
summer seasons, most
pastures are mowed within
two days of grazing. The
purpose of the mowing is
to clip off the tops of the
alfalfa stems (the top 4-5 inches of a 10-inch residual stem) that remain
post grazing. If this isn’t done, much of the regrowth on the alfalfa
sprouts from growth points along the stem. If that stem is clipped,
however, all of the regrowth comes from the crown. This new material
coming from the crown is not only higher in quality than the stem
regrowth, but much greater in total dry matter production as well. So
again, timely clipping is another way that total forage production and
quality, and hence high stocking rates, are maintained.
The key is in the timing. The clipping has to be done before any
regowth of grasses or alfalfa starts to take place. Juan admitted that
pasture clipping is only viable if done by on-farm labor.
Contractors frequently aren’t able to get the job done at
the critical time, plus the rates they charge question the
practice’s economic viability. The local government
research station (INTA) has done trials showing that timely
alfalfa stem clipping ends up costing one cent for each
additional kg of dry matter produced. If 1 kg of forage can
produce .1 kg of beef (assuming a 10:1 feed conversion
ratio), and each kg of beef is worth 80 U.S. cents (or 36
cents a pound—the price at the time of our visit), each kg
of forage is worth 8 cents, or a net of 7 cents. That’s a 700
percent return. It’s hard to argue with that.
Stocking Rate is Key
Now that we know a few details of just how this
productive alfalfa/grass sward is managed, let’s take
another look at San Ricardo’s first principle of
profitability mentioned above—that of matching stocking
rate to the peak of the pasture growth curve. Obviously,
if nearly every leaf of forage is being consumed during the spring and
summer growth peak, there won’t be much dry matter left over to
conserve as hay or silage to make up for forage deficits during the slow
growth period. Here in General Villegas slow growth starts in March
and continues through August. The San Ricardo model makes up for
this forage deficit by the direct grazing of mature corn, grown on about
100 of the 690 total hectares. Starting in late summer/early fall (mid-
March), cattle are put into the cornfields at night, and then moved back
onto pasture during the day. The 1400 steers on the ranch are divided
into three herds, referred to as the cabeza, cuerpo, and cola (head, body,
and tail). The cabeza herd is closest to finishing and the cola herd
contains the lightest, youngest animals. In March, only the cabeza herd
grazes the corn, the rationale being to get them to a finished condition
and off the farm prior to winter. By June (beginning of winter), each
herd gets nightly access to the corn.
Here’s the interesting part. Juan and his employees have figured out
how much of each cornfield they need to ration out per nightly feeding
to result in an intake of 3 kg/head (6.6 lb.) per night of actual corn. This
rationing is done with portable electric polywire. If they were feeding
this 3 kg as whole shelled corn, they would also have to feed round
bales to balance out roughage intake, but since the cattle have access to
the whole corn plant (as well as lots of volunteer grasses and weeds
growing amongst the corn—remember, they’re organic), there’s no need
to put out round bales. More significantly, the tedious steps of harvesting,
storing, and then hauling the corn back out to the cattle are all bypassed,
as is the cost of baling and feeding out round bales. Juan says they end
up wasting about 5%, which is the same they would waste if they did all
that handling. The result of all this careful management is a net annual
profit per hectare of $250.
The Problem of Alfa l fa Persistence
The San Ricardo model does have one black spot: at this point, Pedro
and Juan can’t figure out how to get around the necessity of replanting
the perennial pastures every six years. The reason for the replanting is
due to alfalfa die out. On the whole, the pastures are still healthy and
productive after six years, but the alfalfa declines to the point that beef
production per hectare drops below economically acceptable levels.
Renovating pastures is one of their biggest expenses, not only due to the
direct costs of establishing the pasture, but because it requires nearly
20% of their land area to be out of production at any one time.
Additionally, replanting causes a setback to humus buildup in the soil,
harms earthworm activity, etc.
I asked if growing alfalfa was really that necessary. “Couldn’t you have
a ryegrass/white clover based pasture, like the New Zealanders, who
never have to replant?” The answer was no, white clover doesn’t produce
like alfalfa, especially during their fairly hot summers. Even with 20% of
the ranch out of production at any one time, Juan claimed the total
production with an alfalfa base would be more than with the whole
ranch in permanent white clover/perennial ryegrass pasture.
Two years ago, feedlots
were the new fad. They
just don’t work in
Argentina, but that’s
another story. This story
is about grass.
Hereford steers close to finishing weight right after moving into a fresh paddock.
Notice how full they are and that they’re not desperately hungry—a key to preventing
bloat on alfalfa-based pastures. Estancia Santa Elena, Buenos Aires Province
continued on page 12
12 LAND & LIVESTOCK IN PRACTICE #78
After leaving the ranch, I had an idea. Because of their high stocking
rates and their clipping program, the pastures are in a perpetual
vegetative condition. They
never have the chance to
head out and produce a
new bank of mature seed. I
wondered if it would be
possible to skip a couple of
grazings in the late spring
early summer, say once
every other year or so, to
allow this new seed source
to accumulate. That might
be all that’s needed to help the alfalfa persist. If that would work,
it would certainly result in a lot less time “out of production.”
This question was partly answered on our visit to Estancia La
Invernada, owned by Rodolfo Zechner, in the center of the province
of Santa Fe. Rodolfo farms 1700 ha (4200 acres) of country similar to
San Ricardo’s. In addition to finishing 1800 yearlings, running 400 brood
cows on his bottom land, and growing organic wheat, soybeans, corn,
sorghum, and sunflower, he also milks 500 grass-fed Holstein cows twice
a day. All production is certified organic, and the milk is all processed
into several types of organic cheese in the local cheese plant—but back
to this alfalfa persistence question.
We walked out into one of Rodolfo’s pastures, which was currently
being used to finish heifers, and the diversity of plants—cool and warm
season, native and introduced grasses, forbs, and legumes, plus a healthy
dose of alfalfa—was amazing. It was a true salad bar. The really exciting
thing is that many of Rodolfo’s pastures are going on 30 years without
being turned over and replanted.
Rodolfo’s management is similar to San Ricardo’s, but with one major
difference. He intentionally lets his pastures get away in late spring/early
summer. He can do this because, believe it or not, he isn’t stocked to the
absolute maximum. Rodolfo claims this chance to “get away” is critical
to maintaining soil fertility on an organically managed farm, where soil
amendments tend to be minimal. The excess growth looks a little
unsightly for a few weeks in the summer, but as growth rates slow
down and the pastures get regrazed at high densities for 1- to 2-day
grazing periods, this extra organic matter gets laid down on the soil
surface, forming an outstanding mulch. On our visit, it was rapidly
decaying into the soil profile. Allowing the grass to grow tall and rank
also shades out developing warm season weeds, and of course it results
in the production of a new seed bank.
Rodolfo admitted that they still find it necessary to interseed alfalfa
every six years or so, but unlike San Ricardo, this seed is direct drilled into
the existing sward at far less cost. In my view, it was a more ecologically
sound approach, but I don’t want to take anything away from San Ricardo.
Both operations are models of sustainable, if not regenerative, production.
Even with their pasture renewal program, the soil organic matter
percentages on San Ricardo have increased from 2.6% to 3.6% since 1992.
What about Bloat?
One final point: most Americans I know are terrified of grazing alfalfa
due to the risk of bloat. Make no mistake, Argentine cattle are just as
bloat-prone as their northern relatives, and it’s definitely something
Argentine graziers have to be aware of. The difference is that it doesn’t
scare them. First of all, they claim that bloat is mainly a problem in the
spring when the alfalfa is just starting to become an important
component of forage intake. The rumens aren’t yet adjusted to the
alfalfa, so they have to be careful.
This problem is partly prevented by only letting alfalfa
comprise a maximum of 40% of the sward. Also, by planning short
grazing periods at high densities, animals graze a greater percentage
of plants than they would under more lax management. This helps
ensure daily intake is balanced with a high proportion of grasses.
Finally, cattle are always kept full. They never move onto a new
break of pasture hungry and empty. This is done by leaving high
post-grazing pasture residuals. On San Ricardo, the aim is for
animals to enter a pasture with a cover of 2200–2600 kg dry
matter/ha (this translates to roughly the same quantity in lb/acre),
and removing them with a residual of 1200 kg dry matter/ha. On
our trip we looked at several dozen herds of intensively managed
cattle—i.e., big herds at high stock density being moved daily to
every three days. Not once were we met by a bawling mob of
bovines waiting to be moved.
The good managers know what these pasture masses look like out
on the ground, so these estimates are made with quick visual assessments.
For those of you who want to do this on your own non-brittle pasture,
you’ll initially have to clip and weigh forage samples, or measure pastures
with an electronic pasture probe (much easier) to get an idea of what
different sward heights equate to in dry matter per acre or hectare. After
doing a few of these measurements at different heights in different
seasons, you’ll quickly develop an eye for estimating pasture mass.
Argentina is still a “developing” country with plenty of problems, but
sometimes such challenges stimulate a level of creative adaptivity that
is slow to occur where things come easier. Make no mistake, there are
plenty of Argentine producers who are managing unsustainably, and the
ranches on our tour were definitely among the country’s best. Overall,
though, with their focus on forage finishing instead of feedlot finishing,
the Argentines are sure ahead of their North American neighbors when
it comes to the efficient, ecologically sustainable, and profitable
production of beef.
The hitch is that an
alfalfa/grass-based
pasture requires a
very sophisticated level
of management.
Our group discussing pasture establishment after cropping on Alfredo
Oromi’s ranch in the province of La Pampa. The plan in this paddock was
to let succession, combined with good grazing planning and high stock
density, dictate which species would establish, rather than seeding.
A Pastoral Paradisecontinued from page 11
IN PRACTICE • JULY / AUGUST 2001 LAND & LIVESTOCK 13
I’ ve had the opportunity to personally
visit a broad range of grazing operations
around the world, and on nearly every
outfit, from the tropics to the alpine tundra,
people on the land complain about the hardships
they have to overcome in their particular
environment. The only exception was a grass
finishing operation I visited while on a field trip
in college, somewhere on the North Island of
New Zealand. That particular spot was so
productive and climatically benign that the
manager was at a loss to find something to
bellyache about. Of course, everything is relative.
Most places do have their share of challenges, and
without a doubt, some have more than others.
Last February I spent the day with Dave
James on his public lands winter grazing
allotment in the canyon lands that surround the
one-building town of Slick Rock in western Colorado. Some places
have poorer feed than Dave’s place and some have rougher terrain
(but not much rougher). Some have a more erratic precipitation
pattern and more bare ground, brush encroachment, and biodiversity
loss. Some places get hotter in the summer and colder in the winter.
Some are administered by less reasonable bureaucrats than Dave gets
to work with, and some are even a little farther from civilization. But
when all of those potential challenges are weighed, considered, and
combined on the Slick Rock Ranch, I’m not sure I’ve ever been on a
tougher place.
From Dreams to Reality
I first met Dave
James and his family
at the Center’s
annual gathering in
Albuquerque in 1995.
At that time my wife,
Daniela, and I were
managing the High
Lonesome Ranch in
southwestern New
Mexico, which was
another pretty tough
place. We found out
that Dave and his wife,
Kay, were friends of the previous owner of the High Lonesome, and
they’d visited the ranch, so that gave us something to talk about. We
also learned that Dave and Kay had been ranching for 35 years in the
lush, irrigated Animas Valley near Durango, Colorado. Dave said that
On the Slick Rock Ranch—
Big Dreams and Stark Realityby Jim Howell
Dave James on the Slick Rock
after learning about Holistic Management and hearing all this talk
about transforming brittle environments into Gardens of Eden with
cows, he was hankering to expand beyond the Animas Valley to give
it a try. “I really want to find a brittle ranch to try some of this stuff
on,” I remember Dave telling me.
Now, six years later, his dream has come true on the Slick Rock.
But like many of us who found our way to arid, brittle environments,
Dave has realized this kind of country is nearly overwhelming in its
challenges. But while it may be challenging, Dave hasn’t been deterred
from his goal of creating a holistically sound cow outfit in the brittle
West. At 62 years young, he acts, talks, works, and continues to dream
as if he were 30. I’m 32, and I could barely keep up with him.
The Slick Rock allotment comprises 40,000 acres (16,200 ha) and
ranges in elevation from 5,500 to 7,100 feet (1,670 to 2,150 meters).
Precipitation varies from 12 inches (300 mm) at the low end to 17
inches (430 mm) on the top. The ranch lies in a transition zone
between a mild steppe and a cold steppe environment. Unlike a mild
steppe, where adequate winter moisture can result in green forage in
the winter months, it stays too cold through the winter to grow any
new grass on the Slick Rock. Unlike a truly cold steppe, light snows
received through the winter tend to melt rather than accumulate as
standing frozen moisture, so the spring green-up isn’t as reliable.
Summer rain can bring excellent growing conditions, but those
exceptional growing seasons tend to be few and far between due to
the erratic summer rainfall pattern. This all equates to a high level
of brittleness, with very little biological decay taking place at any
time of the year. Ungrazed plants stagnate and oxidize, eventually
dying from overrest.
continued on page 14
Like most new holistic
enthusiasts, Dave was
keen to get straight to
work concentrating his
cattle, planning the grazing,
and watching the land
spring back to life.
14 LAND & LIVESTOCK IN PRACTICE #78
Reality Bites
Like most new holistic enthusiasts, Dave was keen to get straight to
work concentrating his cattle, planning the grazing, and watching the
land spring back to life. But after a winter of trying to keep big
bunches of cattle concentrated on rough rocky ledges, and watching
his fat red bovines slip down to body condition scores of three and
four, Dave realized he had to back off and take a different approach.
He realized that cattle have to be able to select from a broad range of
plants to meet their needs in this type of country. With mainly
dormant low quality grasses like galleta, three awn, and cheat grass,
mixed in with higher quality, but much less abundant, blue grama and
Indian rice grass, cattle need to be able to browse on the randomly
spaced salt bush, winter fat, shad scale, and rabbit brush scattered
across the range to meet their protein needs. The tighter cattle are
concentrated in this country, the tougher that becomes, and
performance starts to suffer.
So Dave has relaxed his stock density. And his two riders, Al and
Jerry Heaton, who run 100–125 of their own cows on the allotment,
loose-herd the 500 head (according to a grazing plan devised prior to
the winter grazing season) up and down the various canyons, benches,
and plateaus comprising the ranch. The side canyons usually have live
water, and the ranch’s main canyon (containing the Dolores River)
always has open water, even during cold snaps in mid-winter. The
narrow benches traversing the canyon walls have been developed with
dozens of stock ponds. The high mesas between the canyons are also
well supplied with water, but those areas of the ranch are tough to
utilize until late winter/early spring, after the ice melts off the ponds.
For parts of most winters, the cattle are also able to meet their water
needs by licking snow, which tends to hold in shady spots and on
northern exposures
A Sagebrush Dilemma
As we gained elevation on our way to one of these high plateaus,
I noticed the low growing snakeweed and other lower elevation
shrubby species gradually giving way to sagebrush and greater
concentrations of pinyon and juniper trees. Once on top, the low
growing shrub canopy was completely dominated by sagebrush, with
very little grass growing between the sagebrush plants, and lots of
bare ground. Dave pointed out the deeper and more fertile soil, and
claimed the sagebrush was the only thing holding back an explosion
of grass. He reasons the sagebrush has come to dominate the
landscape due to a total suppression of fire over much of the past
century, although he does recognize that if grazing is planned to
minimize overgrazing and improve animal impact, grasses should
dominate the landscape instead of sagebrush.
I wasn’t convinced on the fire suppression theory. The
Dominguez-Escalante expedition explored this region of Colorado in
1776, and they repeatedly described “long sagebrush stretches” with
“very little pasturage for horses,” a description remarkably similar to
much of this area today. My theory is that once the big herds of
original megafauna were eradicated from this area of the West by the
first American immigrants 10,000 or so years ago, and replaced
by scattered bands of desert bighorn sheep, mule deer,
pronghorn, and elk, the shift to brush was inevitable. The lack
of periodic animal impact and heavy grazing would have led
to an overrested soil surface and a shift to nearly 100% woody
shrubs, especially on those hard-to-get-to mesas that are far
from natural water.
No matter the reason, a near monoculture of sagebrush
doesn’t fit Dave’s future landscape description. Moreover, he has
identified energy conversion to be his weak link in the financial
chain of production, which means he needs to grow more grass
and less sagebrush if he is to produce more pounds of beef. In
addition, Dave sees the need to plan for longer recovery periods
than one year, which has been the practice to date, to help
improve energy flow. With at least two growing seasons between
grazings, plants will have the chance to accumulate material to
not only feed the cattle, but to provide a source of soil-covering
litter as well.
In this arid, brittle environment, bare soil is the most critical
impediment to improving the water cycle, and hence all the
other ecosystem processes, including energy flow. By grazing
most areas of the ranch every year, even for relatively short
periods during the dormant season, this litter source never has the
chance to accumulate. If these sagebrush-dominated areas had more
grass, longer recovery periods would become more feasible.
Cause and Effe c t
If fire suppression were the cause of the sagebrush, controlled
burning would pass the cause and effect test. If overrest were the
reason, high doses of animal impact, preferably in the form of herd
effect, would pass. Both treatments have practical difficulties. Burns
are hard to pull off due to weather conditions needing to be just right,
and because of the bureaucratic maze that needs to be negotiated to
get the okay to burn, mainly due to the archeological primitive sites
prevalent in this area. When there is little to no grass for the cattle
to graze, thousands of difficult-to-access acres needing treatment,
Big Dreams and Stark Realitycontinued from page 13
One of the hard-to-get-to benches without water. Cattle were concentrated
here at high density three years prior and water hauled in at great expense.
Grasses have fully recovered and probably should have been grazed the
previous year because old material is starting to accumulate. It will,
however, provide litter once the animals get there to trample it down.
IN PRACTICE • JULY / AUGUST 2001 LAND & LIVESTOCK 15
relatively few cattle, very limited labor resources, and a narrow
window of opportunity due to a short season of use, applying the
tool of animal impact starts to look pretty far-fetched, too.
To deal with these practical challenges, Dave has elected to take a
little aspirin in the form of technology through a one-time herbicidal
spraying Tebuthiuron (called spiking), and so far has treated 1,000
acres. Spiking kills about 90% of the sagebrush and is done in a
mosaic pattern, leaving patches of sagebrush intact for wildlife cover.
Dave realizes spiking doesn’t directly treat the cause of the sagebrush
being there in the first place, but sometimes it makes sense to treat a
symptom if that makes it easier and more practical to deal with the
cause. More on that below.
These 1,000 acres were
treated in 1999, and the
BLM (Bureau of Land
Management—the public lands
agency that administers this
land) has insisted that this
area be deferred from grazing
for two years. After two years
of recovery, the quantity of
grass on the treated area is at
least five times that of the
untreated area (even though
both areas had been deferred
from grazing). That still isn’t
much, however. We estimated
there were about 7 ADA
(animal days per acre) of
forage on the treated area.
This treatment costs Dave
$7.50/acre. The total cost is actually $15/acre, but the BLM picks up
half the bill. If an animal unit month (AUM) of forage is worth $15
(the standard rate in this area), and 28 animal days comprise one
AUM, that additional 7 ADA of forage is worth $3.75. Since it takes
two years to grow that much forage, it’s actually a value of $1.88/year.
So including the two years of mandatory rest after the treatment, it
takes six years to recover the initial investment of $7.50/acre.
Now, back to addressing the cause. Dave recognizes that he will
have to get tighter control of his cattle if he expects the newly
released grasses in these treated areas to thrive. They’ll need to be
managed to minimize overgrazing, especially in the early spring when
the ice melts off the ponds, the grass is starting to green up, and these
mesas can begin being utilized. He’ll have to create high enough
density to achieve at least some degree of animal impact, and he’ll
have to give long recovery periods (probably two years) to allow
for these newly released plants to increase in vigor and produce
sufficient leaf and stem to both feed the cattle and begin covering
the soil with litter.
Without spiking the sagebrush and releasing the stunted grasses,
this is pretty near impossible. But now that there is a reasonable
amount of forage, it’s realistic to bring cattle to those areas, and to
manage them in a way that will do some good. Again, if management
doesn’t change, the sagebrush will probably come back.
A Ye a r-Round Range Outfit
You may be thinking that Dave is a little off his rocker to have
elected to take on this kind of challenge at this stage in life.
Amazingly, this is only half the story. Before buying the Slick Rock
Ranch, the James Ranch cowherd was wintered on the Durango
property by feeding hay on their snow-covered meadows. With the
Slick Rock addition, the cowherd has only been spending the green
summer months in Durango. But after years of careful, well-planned
grazing on these productive irrigated pastures, Dave has created a
grass sward that will put five pounds a day on a yearling steer. For
the past several years, he has realized that this forage is too valuable
to put through a mother cow.
As luck would have it, a U.S. Forest Service summer range
allotment 20 miles down the highway from the Slick Rock Ranch was
up for sale. Dave saw an
opportunity to keep his
cows on the range all year,
freeing up the irrigated
grass in Durango for more
value-adding enterprises.
The plan is to expand their
production of grass-
finished, direct-marketed
“Valley Sweet Beef” by
grazing yearling steers
produced on the range
outfit, and to start a grass-
based dairy, concentrating
on the production and
marketing of fine cheeses,
which son, Dan, and
daughter-in-law, Becca,
will operate.
True to form, Dave made the deal of a lifetime and bought this
beautiful 40,000-acre (16,200-ha) summer range, in addition to 10,000
more acres (4,050 ha) of winter range that lie at its base. The summer
range is permitted for 900 cows for 6 months, and its highest point
tops out at 8,100 feet (2,500 meters). Most of the range is on a broad
flat mesa covered with a mosaic of aspen forests and grassy mountain
meadows. Dave plans to run a base herd of about 600 head between
the entire 90,000 acres he now controls, and to stock up with
yearlings during the summer to fill out his summer allotment. This
summer will be the first year running in the high country, and Dave
is looking forward to it with the enthusiasm of a young man just
starting out on his career.
Dave and his riders, Jerry and Al, are also in the process of
developing a rustic ranch vacation business—horseback all day, wall
tent accommodation, simple, hearty grub. Adventure-seeking groups
who know how to ride and are keen to work should definitely get
their fill. Dave sees the main draw being their vast tracts of rugged,
diverse, incredibly scenic terrain.
To restore the biodiversity of the arid brittle West in an economically
sound manner, we need tough but idealistic people who love the land
and aren’t afraid to dream big. The West is full of tough, practical people.
It’s the idealistic and visionary qualities that are rare. Dave James is a
modern western rancher who combines all of these traits. He is a genuine
leader in the new rangeland industry. I’m glad I drove down for a visit.
Dave James can be reached at [email protected].
The Slick Rock’s main canyon always has water—the Dolores River, bottom right.
16 HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE #78
N ew Africa Training Program
The 2001 class of the Africa Certified
Educator Training Program just completed
their first two-week training session at the
Africa Centre for Holistic Management
Training Center near Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.
The session, taught by Director of Educational
Services, Kelly Pasztor, and Allan Savory,
proved to be a great learning experience for
everyone.
Those attending the session included:
Christine Jost is Assistant Professor in
the International Programs/Center for
Conservation Medicine at Tufts University. She
is interested in bringing Holistic Management
into the curriculum at Tufts.
Colin Nott and Bernard Roman work for
Integrated Rural Development and Nature
Conservation (IRDNC) in Windhoek, Namibia.
Moses Nyapokoto works for the Zimbabwe
permaculture organization Fambidzanai and
will bring Holistic Management into that
organization and its curriculum.
Colleen Todd, from northern South Africa,
is a botanist who teaches at the University
of Venda where she works with indigenous
students.
Douglas Uuandara, a communal
farmer/rancher/herdsman from Namibia,
works for the Sustainable Animal and
Rangeland Development Program, a German-
sponsored project
We are excited about these trainees as
they are a diverse group and are already
working at the community level.
Excitement Down Under
Over 200 people spent two days in
Christchurch, New Zealand in April,
learning, discussing, challenging and sharing
ideas in one of the most stimulating Holistic
Wiebke Volkmann at 264-61-22-4325 or
In Memoriam
The Savory Center
staff were
saddened to learn of
the death of long-time
member, Les Davis, 81.
Les was the third
generation to run the
sprawling CS Ranch in
Cimarron, New Mexico
which he led for more
than 35 years. Novelist
Max Evans, who wrote books set in the CS
Ranch area, says, “[Les was] an institution in
northeastern New Mexico, and his family were
pioneers in many different dimensions all over
that part of the country.” And so they were
and still are. For 18-plus years they have
worked to practice Holistic Management and
shared what they could with their community.
Les leaves behind his wife, Linda, their six
children, and eight grandchildren—all of whom
remain closely involved, as the fourth and fifth
generations on the CS Ranch.
S o f t ware Upgrade Ava i l a b l e
The long awaited Office 2000 version of the
Savory Center’s Holistic Management™
Financial Planning Software is now available.
If you use Microsoft Office 2000 (Excel 2000),
you can now use our financial planning
software! Also included in this new version is
a small-stock worksheet that works like the
livestock production worksheet. So if you also
run small stock, you’re going to find this makes
the planning a breeze. See the back page for
ordering information.
Holistic Gathering Registration Open
The Colorado Branch is still accepting
registrations for the Holistic Management
Celebration, “Whole Land: Healthy People,”
being held at the Chico Basin Ranch in
Colorado Springs, Colorado, July 27-29, 2001.
This gathering promises to bring inspiring
Holistic Management practitioners and
educators from around the world to share
their experiences. Allan Savory will be
present throughout the gathering and will
lead several workshops. Camping on the
ranch is available.
Registration is limited to 300 people, so
please get your registrations in early. Those
interested in receiving more information
should contact Cindy Dvergsten at
970/882-4222 or [email protected].
Management conferences yet. The
conference attracted folks from
various parts of New Zealand, a large
contingent of Australians, a handful of
North Americans and several farmers
from southern Africa, among others.
The conference theme—The Future
Resource Base: Continuing the
Challenge for Change—was highlighted
again and again by an inspiring array
of speakers: New Zealand’s
parliamentary Commissioner of
Environment; the manager of Banrock
Station winery and its wetlands program; a
British actress turned community activist; a
variety of farmers/ranchers from New Zealand
and Australia; a practical research botanist; a
specialist in managing water’s natural energy
levels; and from the U.S., Enterprise Facilitation
creator Ernesto Sirolli, and from the Savory
Center, Allan Savory and Jody Butterfield.
That such a conference took place in
New Zealand is a credit to Certified Educator
Bruce Ward (and his wife Suzie) who has
been running training programs over the last
three years in New Zealand. There are enough
practitioners now that the desire to get
together and exchange ideas was considerable
and there was no lack of determination in
making it happen. The excitement this
conference generated will subside at some
point, but there were lessons learned to last
a lifetime.
Congratulations, Kiwis!
Namibia New s
The Namibia Centre for Holistic
Management began working on a land
reform initiative for Namibia after their annual
meeting last year in October. Among those
gathered were Certified Educator Wiebke
Volkmann, Namibia Centre members, and
representatives from the Ministry of Land,
Resettlement and Rehabilitation and the
Ministry of Agriculture. The focus is to help
commercial and communal farmers, among
other stakeholders, begin to discuss land issues.
They are in the process of expanding the core
planning group to include a broader spectrum
of organizations and individuals dealing with
these issues.
The 2001 Annual Gathering will be held on
October 2-3, 2001. For more information contact
S a vory Center Bulletin Board
Left to right: Chris Jost, Ben Roman, Moses Nyapokoto,
Colin Nott, Douglas Uuandara, Colleen Todd.
Les Davis
HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE • JULY / AUGUST 2001 17
H ewlett Increases Support
The Savory Center is pleased to announce
the receipt of a two-year grant from The
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for
$250,000. This general support grant will help
with overall operation of the Savory Center and
our programs in 2001 and 2002.
The Hewlett Foundation, through their
Environment Program and Program Officer
Michael L. Fischer, has been a major supporter
of the Savory Center’s mission and our
programs since 1994.
Flora Family Grant
e are also pleased to announce that we
received a two-year grant from the Flora
Family Foundation for $80,000 for our work on
the National Learning Site in the Lost Rivers
Valley in Idaho.
Africa Donations
e would like to thank the following
members for their recent donations to the
Africa Centre and to the Village Banking
initiative as part of the Matetsi Project. We will
provide an update on this effort in the next
issue of IN PRACTICE.
Sam J. Brown, Austin, TX
Harriett Faudree Dublin, Midland, TX
Stephen, Betty, and Jack Greenhalgh,
Salt Lake City, UT
Doug McDaniel & Gail Hammack, Lostine, OR
Jane Reed, New Castle, CO
Dean William Rudo y, Cedar Crest, NM
In-Kind Donations Support Savory Center
We would like to take this opportunity to
thank all those donors who have offered in-
kind donations of goods and services. If you
have a product or service that you think would
benefit the Savory Center and our work, please
contact Andy Braman at 505/842-5252 or
[email protected] to discuss your
donation. This year’s contributors include:
Christina Allday-Bondy, Austin, TX
Ellen Ashbrook, Tajique, NM
Kitty Bennett, Sonoita, AZ
Julie Bohannon, Altadena, CA
Sam Brown, Austin, TX
Mary Child, Mo yers, WV
Ken Dickinson, CGI USA, Houston, TX
Mark Gardner, Dubbo, NSW, Australia
Gifts in Kind International, Merrifield, V A
Guy Glosson, Snyder, TX
Ken Jacobson, Albuquerque, NM
We would hope that pledges made for the fiscal
year of 2001 would be paid by the first week of
January 2002.
Q. What is the minimum amount a month I
can pledge?
A. Any gift of any size is always appreciated
and will be invested wisely in the Center’s
work. If you wish to pay your pledge monthly
we will mail you a reminder monthly. To help
in the cost of reminders, stationary, printing and
postage we would ask that you pledge $25 or
more a month.
Q. How much does the Savory Center need to
raise though contributions this year?
A. The Center has a goal of $250,000 to raise
this year through individual and corporate
donations.
We hope you can give again this year, and
maybe even a little more than last time. Your
gift to the Center is an investment in Holistic
Management and its continued growth. We’re
grateful for your support.
C o r r e c t i o n s
In the Memoriam for Laurence (Rummy)
Goodyear in IN PRACTICE #77, we should have
reported that Rummy left behind five, rather
than four, children, as well as his wife, Lorraine
Gallard.
We would also like to correct the listing
of one of our Savory Center Supporters. We
wish to thank the Charles & Betti Saunders
Foundation from Houston, Texas for their
contributions.
Robert Pasztor, Albuquerque, NM
Colleen Reeves and The Red Corral Ranch,
Austin, TX
Steve Saunders, Dallas, TX
Lois Trevino, Nespelem, WA
Vicky Turpen, Albuquerque, NM
Bill and Paula Woodward, Buf falo, WY
Annual Campaign Underwa y
The Savory Center has launched a new fund
drive called the Savory Center Annual
Campaign. Our Annual Campaign is very
similar to a university or college Annual Fund
Drive or a church’s Every Member Canvas. The
intent of this campaign is not to take the place
of the Center’s end of the year Annual Appeal
but to supplement it. The plan is to contact
about 200 of the Center’s past donors and donor
prospects by mid-summer for their support. The
Center’s Development Office with the help of
the Advisory Board will be working diligently
over the six weeks making these contacts.
Here are some answers to some questions
asked about the new Campaign:
Q. Can we make a pledge of our gift?
A. Pledges are great! A number of Savory
Center contributors have made pledges, some
for the year, a few for two or three years and
one for five years. Pledges really help with
financial planning and forecasting of income.
D evelopment Corner by Andy Braman
W
W
As always, I read IN PRACTICE with a
mixture of appreciation and awe. So many
environmentalists have no appreciation of
the interrelationship of animals, domestic or
wild, with their habitat. As advocates for
rare breeds of livestock, we must constantly
point out that most livestock are grazers or
browsers that evolved over millennia to
forage on living plants, not grain and
processed feed. If we are to have healthy
ecosystems, animals must be integrated.
Since we must feed an ever-increasing
human population, food-producing animals
must have an integrated role in these
ecosystems.
Allan Savory’s article on the “New
Agriculture” in Issue #75 is brilliant and
articulates many of the same issues the
American Livestock Breeds Conservancy
espouses for the conservation of genetic
diversity in livestock. I hope that his use
of the term “large herbivores” also includes
sheep and goats. Other cultures might
include llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs, and
rabbits. Geese are well utilized in Eastern
Europe as herbivores, and other monogastrics,
such as pigs and other poultry can contribute
to mixed species production on grassland,
forest, and in rotation with crops.
I was pleased to see the article about
Karl North and his sheep dairy—another role
for sheep to play in North America—and
appreciated all the articles by Jim Howell.
Don Bixby
American Livestock Breeds Conservancy
Pittsboro, North Carolina, www.albc-usa.org
Readers fo r u m