HOW NATURAL SELECTION WORKS IN NATURE AND HOW A WELL-SELECTED HERD HAS THE GREATEST POSITIVE IMPACT ON FLOOD CONTROL.
Animal conformation--relative measurements of their bodily dimensions--shows which animals are the strongest and therefore the best additions to the herd.
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From a conversation with Ricardo Aguirre, a rancher and civil engineer who specializes in flood control. For the entire conversation, please click on the link to the YouTube video.
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HART HAGAN: Ricardo, you've studied under ranchers such as Gabe Brown and Greg Judy who are somewhat famous in the regenerative agriculture space. What have you learned from them?
RICARDO AGUIRRE: I was fortunate to be on a panel with Gabe long ago. He may not remember, but I certainly do because he's such a luminary in this space. This is back in 2015, in California.
I was seen as the water guy, and Gabe was really the figure that everybody listened to, because of the work that he had done at that time. This is in 2015.
Gabe invited me out later that year to his ranch and I flew out to North Dakota to see him. I'm also affiliated with other luminaries that he's associated with, Alejandro Carrillo, for example.
I like to bring in these folks into my engineering contracts that I have with local, state and federal governments. It's an opportunity to rub shoulders with them and learn from what they're doing.
I'm more active with Greg Judy. I've been to his grazing school. I will be going and taking another engineer in May to his grazing school. Greg has been out here to Arizona. He's been to our demonstration site four times now, here in Red Rock, Arizona. And he's been to our Cochise County project and three Canyons down by the Mexican border. In fact, he and Jan helped build the land planning improvements.
It's been a wealth of knowledge with both these guys. Greg really laid out the blueprints. So I was compelled to reach out to him and go on a farm tour. I like to say it's the blueprints because Greg really drills down in the details when it comes to Holistic Land Management.
There's a lot of detractors to holistic management. Some of them understand that holistic management works, but they say it's a lot of work which immediately signals that they don't understand holistic management.
When you set up the plan properly, the project is not a lot of work. It's a matter of just going out and opening a gate or moving a fence, and it really shouldn't take more than an hour or so just to move the animals.
There's obviously the need to observe their response to plants and so forth. But this is where I tip my hat to Greg because he really drills down into the details of what fence posts to use, what high tensile wire to use, what pliers to use when you're building a fence and how to set up corner posts.
Greg has written two books that are specific to this craft of holistic land planning. He also is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to grass-fed genetics. I think that's incredibly important.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ANIMAL CONFORMATION AND FLOOD CONTROL.
This might sound unusual--but I think there's a direct relationship between what's called animal conformation and flood control.
Animal conformation is something that I learned from a book that Greg recommended which is Reproduction Animal Health. The author takes measurements of the heart girth, the distance from the head to the backbone and other measurements of the animal. These measurements are important because they signal the health of the animal.
Mother Nature culls in three ways, but chief among them is predation. The predator is going to remove the weakest. It’s not like what Darwin says, which is survival of the fittest. That's actually not true. I found out that Darwin actually plagiarized off of a commoner named Robert Wallace. His Paradigm was not survival of the fittest. It was elimination of the weakest. This makes the most sense because the wolf is not going to go in and chase the strongest amongst the herd; they're going to clean up the weakest. Right?
So when you look at conformation, and you look at the measurements of the animal, it actually speaks to Mother Nature's intelligent system. These animals have these measurements for a reason because these measurements are signaling strength.
Other animals that are not measuring up will tend to be the weakest. Mother Nature by Design will cull in three ways. One is predation, which we mentioned. The other is groups organizing, like a wolf pack for example, but herbivores do it as well, because of predation. Wolves will never organize in order to take out another wolfpack. They'll always organize to remove the weakest link within the pack.
But I would say the most important form of selecting for fitness or eliminating the weak is females selecting for fitness. I mean, no species would really exist unless there was a qualified female selecting a male to advance the species.
One of my favorite stories--and I think this is important. I’m going to get back to Greg and tie the loop here.
I read a book called American Serengeti. Each chapter is on one of the great megafauna of the western states. One chapter was on Pronghorn sheep. Every season females would come out of their harem and observe males competing for endurance and speed. When they’ve finished the competition, the female Pronghorn sheep would go mate, of course, with the fastest and the one that had the most endurance.
So that's an example of one species where the female is selecting for fitness. The female is not going to go for the slower one.
So that’s three areas, the three means of selecting for fitness (natural selection). Allan only really talks about predation. I've dug into this and these other forms of selecting for fitness are incredibly important.
That's why I wanted to tie it into animal conformation. You measure the animal based on what Greg had taught me. And that's a form of intelligence that nature has kind of installed if you will.
There's a direct relationship to the hydrologic cycle or let's call it hydrology. And then there's a relationship to geomorphology. And then there's a relationship from that to ecology.
So it might have been a little bit heavy there but I think it's important because a lot of people take a lot of what goes on in nature for granted. And that's why the work that Gabe Brown and Greg Judy are doing are important.
Coming at it from a philosophical angle, the material that I've learned from them, the books that Greg has recommended have really expanded my vision for how nature works systematically.
For the entire conversation with Ricardo Aguirre, please click on the link to the YouTube video.