Living organisms didn’t develop in a vacuum. Plants require animals, animals require plants; both require insects, bacteria, and viruses. The healthier the community, the more diverse the organisms that live in it, and the more stable those organisms are.
Energy from the sun is the key to all life on earth, and its transfer from one living organism to the next characterizes the energy cycle. This cycle is also known as the food chain (Figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2. Plants convert solar radiation into food for primary consumers (insects and cow). Secondary consumers feed on primary consumers (fish eating an insect, humans at barbecue). Tertiary consumers eat secondary consumers (fisherman eats the fish that ate the insect). A mosquito biting the fisherman would be a quaternary consumer.
Plants are the primary consumer of solar energy. Through photosynthesis, they convert incoming solar radiation into organic (carbon-based) molecules, feeding themselves and providing food for the secondary consumers. Microorganisms, insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals that eat vegetable matter make up these secondary consumers. The tertiary consumers eat secondary consumers. The levels continue to rise, like a pyramid, each layer feeding on the layer or layers below it (Figure 2.3). The top levels contain scavengers and organisms of decay. Many creatures feed through more than one layer. For example, humans can feed at layers two, three, and four. Canines, both wild and domestic, can feed at layers two, three, four, and five.
Plants capture just a fraction of the sun’s energy, and with each move up the pyramid, less energy is available. This reduction in energy means less total biomass can survive at these higher levels. In other words, predators can’t outnumber prey. At the same time, the lower levels are very unstable if there are insufficient predators in the upper levels, as evidenced by outbreaks of disease or starvation in secondary consumer populations when their numbers get too high.
The water cycle is the movement of water between the atmosphere and the earth (Figure 2.4). Some water runs off the land to enter streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans, but in a healthy ecosystem the soil matrix is capable of absorbing large quantities of moisture. Of the water that is absorbed by the soil, some evaporates back out of the soil, some enters the groundwater, and some is used by the living organisms in the soil, including plants through their roots. In an effective water cycle, water is readily available and used by plants. In an ineffective water cycle, most of the water runs off or evaporates from the soil.
The ability to absorb water and bank it for future plant use requires a healthy, living soil that contains plenty of humus, or organic matter, in the soil. Organic matter is made up of decaying and living organisms. Scientists estimate that tens of millions of living organisms live in a single tablespoon of healthy soil.
Figure 2.3. Energy levels above ground represent the consumer levels that are at work, but there is more mass (weight) of organisms below ground than above. As energy is lost in the form of heat, it is no longer available for higher levels.
(Modified from Allan Savory, Holistic Resource Management. Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1988, pp. 96, 97.)
Figure 2.4. Approximately 25 percent of precipitation falls on land; the rest falls on major water bodies. Of that portion, one-third leaves the land as runoff, one-third evaporates or is transpired back into the atmosphere, and one-third enters the ground water. Ground water can move in either direction, in and out of surface bodies of water.
The mineral cycle is the breaking down of materials into a form that can be used by plants and animals (Figure 2.5). Through this breakdown, essential trace nutrients and minerals are made available to plants and animals. The mineral cycle includes subcycles, among them the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the phosphorus cycle.
Carbon is the building block of all life. The implementation of the carbon cycle is not gentle or kind: Death is the absolute partner of life (Figure 2.6). Without death and decay, no new life is possible. One of the hardest parts of livestock farming can be coming to terms with this reality.
When all of these cycles are optimized, plants and animals thrive. Cycles that no longer operate properly result in increased water runoff, crusting of soils, erosion from both wind and water, and a variety of other symptoms. The extreme example of cycles that have gotten out of balance is seen in desertification, but even in humid environments — which tend to be more forgiving — you’ll often see the same symptoms.
Figure 2.5. The mineral cycle is the process by which complex molecules are broken down into their respective parts, or elements. Manure and urine, and dead plant and animal matter are broken down by soil organisms such as earthworms and bacteria into nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon, to name just a few elements. Then some of these elements are taken back up by plants as a source of food, beginning the process again.
Figure 2.6. The carbon cycle is one of many subcycles within the mineral cycle. Plants remove carbon from the atmosphere with the help of solar radiation, through the process of photosynthesis, and make it available as a food source to other forms of life. Death and decay return carbon to the soil. Carbon enters the atmosphere from both respiration by living creatures and from the combustion of fossil fuels.
Brittle versus Nonbrittle Environments
All four processes (community dynamics, energy cycle, water cycle, and mineral cycle) behave somewhat differently depending on the type of environment they are operating in, brittle or nonbrittle. If you look at these two as extremes of a continuum, a true desert environment represents complete brittleness; complete nonbrittleness is seen in a rain forest (Figure 2.7).
In the United States, think of Death Valley, California (with about 2.2 inches, or 5.6 cm, of precipitation per year), as the extreme brittle environment and a Louisiana bayou (with 60 to 70 inches, or 152 to 178 cm, of rain per year) as the nonbrittle extreme. Most of us live somewhere in between.
The brittleness of an individual environment is a factor not only of how much precipitation occurs but also how often it occurs, and how much humidity is in the air. In other words, Los Angeles, California, gets about the same amount of precipitation as Fort Morgan, Colorado, but the rain comes in a shorter period of the year and during the winter (the monsoon season) (Figure 2.8). In fact, during the summer months Los Angeles receives virtually no rain, whereas Fort Morgan gets most of its precipitation during the summer growing season. Although Colorado is brittle, southern California is more brittle. There are highly brittle environments in some areas of the world that receive more than 30 inches (76 cm) of rain per year, but like southern California, it all comes during a short monsoon season.
Study Table 2.1, which illustrates certain characteristics of the extremes of the brittleness scale. Think about how your land falls on the brittleness scale. Figure 2.9 might help you determine in general the brittleness of your area of the country, but remember that within any area there are more and less brittle pieces of land — like an oasis in a desert. Even on your own farm, there can be more brittle areas and less brittle areas.
Figure 2.7. Brittleness is a measure of both the amount of precipitation that falls in a given area and the distribution of that precipitation during the year. Areas that receive little moisture, or whose moisture all comes during a very short season, are considered brittle; areas with more moisture spread out more evenly during the year are nonbrittle.
(Modified from Allan Savory, Holistic Resource Management. Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1988, p. 39.)
Figure 2.8. Although Los Angeles, California, and Fort Morgan, Colorado, are low precipitation areas with approximately the same annual precipitation, Los Angeles is more brittle than Fort Morgan, because its precipitation comes during a shorter period of the year. Los Angeles goes through a period in summer and early fall with virtually no precipitation; Fort Morgan’s precipitation is more evenly distributed throughout the year.
(Data from National Weather Service.)
Table 2.1
CHARACTERISTICS OF BRITTLE AND NONBRITTLE ENVIRONMENTS
>
Conclusion
Livestock is capable of turning grasses that are not edible by humans into a high-quality protein for human consumption. By covering more soil with long-term grass crops for livestock forage, we feed ourselves and improve the environment.
Grass plants reduce erosion by breaking the size of raindrops that strike the soil and by acting like tiny dams, slowing the water movement along the surface of the soil. The blades of the grass plants also reduce wind speed at ground level, thereby reducing wind erosion. The plants, along with livestock manure and urine, add nutrients to the soil and build up organic matter. When grass is a long-term crop, the plants’ roots tend to open the soil structure for air and water to move easily.
Figure 2.9. Brittleness areas vary. On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being the most brittle and 10 being the least brittle areas), this map provides some general indication of brittleness throughout the United States, but even within these areas there are more brittle and less brittle spots. To get a sense of the variability that’s possible within an area, think of an oasis in a desert.
(Data from Oregon Climate Service and USDA/Natural Resources Conservation Service.)
CHAPTER 3
The Holistic Management Model
We may be very busy. We may be very efficient. But we will also be truly effective when we begin with the end in mind.
— Steven Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Whether or not a farmer becomes a successful producer depends largely upon his ability to judge true values in his land, crops and livestock. To judge correctly, he must see each object or enterprise as a whole with all its essential parts and understand their relation to each other as well as to the desired result.
— Wilbur J. Fraser, Profitable Farming and Life Management
NO ONE PLANS TO FAIL. Yet so many people, particularly in agriculture, fail at what they try to do. Beginning farmers and third-generation family farmers often suffer from the same types of failures, and those failures usually lead to jobs in town. Farmers have lots of things to blame their failure on; weather, prices, government regulations, and markets are all popular. Granted, all of these may be contributing factors to failure, but their impact on individual producers is more often than not a symptom of the real problem — lack of planning, monitoring, and adjusting.
In the holistic management model, planning is not simply a process to be completed once. It is a continuous process that involves multiple parts: setting realistic, broad goals; developing plans and making decisions that move you toward those goals; continually monitoring what is happening with respect to your plans and your goals; and making appropriate adjustments to your plans if things are not working out the way you anticipated. And make no mistake about it, no matter how good your planning and monitoring, things have a way of not working out the way you thought they would. Planning should be started now. Whether you have yet to buy your farm or have been farming all your life, don’t put it off for another day.
Part of the reason Ken and I succeeded at all over the years was that we were very goal oriented. Still, we didn’t arrive at a structured approach to planning until after we’d made many costly mistakes. As we look back, none of these mistakes would have been as bad had we been planning in a logical and methodical manner. I’ll give one example: We raised pigs one year. Unfortunately, it happened to be a year when corn prices hit their all-time record high. Irregular summer weather (hotter and wetter than normal) and gray leaf spot, normally a minor disease in corn that didn’t behave in a minor fashion that year, triggered the record prices. We knew corn prices were high in fall and going to get higher during the winter, but we kept feeding our pigs for finished weight. We justified the decision based on our direct-marketing, for which we were paid more than the regular commercial return for finished hogs. It didn’t pay us enough more.
Because of our direct-marketing, we were hurt less than farmers selling through the typical commercial venues were, but when the numbers were all in, we just broke even. Hundreds of unpaid man-hours went into an enterprise that didn’t return any profit because of prices and weather. But the prices and weather weren’t the real problem; our failure to monitor the situation and make early adjustments was the problem.
By following the holistic management model, we began making changes to our lives and our farming operations that moved us toward our broad goals.
Overview of the Holistic Management Model
The holistic management model (Figure 3.1) has four major parts:
1. The holistic goal, which takes into account quality of life, forms of production, and future resource base.
2. The ecosystem processes, which I talked about in chapter 2. These include community dynamics, energy flow, water cycle, and mineral cycle.
3. The tools, including human creativity, money, and labor, along with rest, fire, grazing, animal impact, living organisms, and technology.
4. The guidelines, including techniques for testing and managing your system.
The holistic management model is based on the concept that you plan, monitor, control, and replan. The model provides logical ways of doing this. The full planning process, as developed by Allan Savory, is time consuming and complex. In part IV, Planning, I’ll present a somewhat easier and more compact version. This easier version will serve well enough for farmers living in a moderate to nonbrittle environment, particularly those with smaller acreages and those who do not have a high debt ratio. If you are living in a very brittle environment, are trying to manage a very large piece of land, or are trying to make your living off your farm despite a high debt ratio, I urge you to study the full methods of planning. (See appendix E for sources of information on the full method.) Even if you choose to use the more simplified planning procedures outlined in part IV, a brief overview of the full model is helpful.
Figure 3.1. The holistic management model. Use these guidelines to decide which tools to apply to a given situation, so that you move the ecosystem processes toward better community dynamics, energy flow, water cycling, and mineral cycling, and to move yourself closer to your goal.
(Modified from Allan Savory, Holistic Resource Management. Covelo, CA: 1988, p. 5.)
FARMER PROFILE
Jim Weaver — North Penn Holistic Management Model
Learning is often easier in a group; Jim Weaver can attest to that fact. Jim is a member of the North Penn Holistic Management Network.
For Jim, 1992 was an important year; that was when he first heard of holistic management. “One of my neighbors had been to a conference where Allan Savory spoke. He was excited by what he heard. He brought a copy of the Holistic Management textbook back with him, and began passing it around.”
Jim admits that his first introduction to the textbook was confusing. Parts of what he read made perfect sense, but other parts left him with more questions than answers.
“I wasn’t involved with farming at the time, though I grew up on a farm. I am an aquatic biologist by training and operate a consulting business that deals with aquaculture and wetlands management. I saw connections to my own work when reading the textbook, but I needed to learn more.”
A small group invited Allan Savory to Pennsylvania to give an overview of holistic management, and things started to become clearer. Next, the group scheduled an introductory training session with Ed Martsof, a certified holistic management educator.
“We finished the intro class and formed the North Penn Holistic Management Network. There are about ten of us who have met every two weeks ever since, and other people who attend sporadically.” Group members act as a support network for each other; they host field days and pasture walks, and they are trying to get involved with nonfarmers to create a dialogue about agriculture, the environment, and “where our food comes from.” Members help each other run ideas through the testing guidelines. Some outcomes of the group process: One dairy farmer installed an outdoor milking parlor for the summer grazing months; another installed
a solar dairy barn; still others diversified into pork and pastured poultry; and Jim began experimenting with on-farm aquaculture, an endeavor that meshed well with his aquatic biology interests.
As a result of his involvement in holistic management, Jim and his family — wife Beth and three sons — also decided that they needed to get into livestock agriculture. His first approach was to raise stocker cattle, but as he says, “Stockers beat me up pretty good. I didn’t study the markets enough, and prices hit bottom. That convinced me that I didn’t want to do ‘commodity’ agriculture — I needed to get into value-added approaches.”
Today, Jim and his family background dairy replacement heifers for another member of the network, and graze dry cows as well. They raise some beef and hogs for a fledgling direct-marketing meat program, and are trying to develop the aquaculture into a viable on-farm business.
“When I began getting involved with holistic management, it dawned on me that I never really thought about life goals. Developing a holistic goal has been good for us as a family. I think it’s helped us communicate with our kids, and involve them in something positive.”
Small-Scale Livestock Farming Page 3