IS OVERGRAZING A USEFUL--OR MISLEADING--CONCEPT?
With all the press attention saying that “overgrazing” is a cause of land degradation, “over resting” is the greater problem.
“The science is more and more showing that animal impact is actually essential for optimal ecosystem function. We need the animals. But how do we manage them? That should be the focus.”
--Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of “Defending Beef”
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HART: In your book Defending Beef, you say that overgrazing is not really a problem as much as we're told, and that over resting is more of a problem. How does that work?
NICOLETTE: In Defending Beef, I argue that we shouldn't use the term “overgrazing” anymore. The term suggests that where you have grazing, you're going to have some negative impact and where you have a lot of grazing, you’re going to have more negative impact. It reinforces this misperception that it's all about how many animals you have.
Even among rangeland scientists, there is still a perception that more animals are harmful. But there's more and more science showing that you can have huge numbers of animals, depending on how they're managed. You need the animal impact, and after that you need a rest period.
The term “overgrazing” is unhelpful because it leads to misperceptions and people focusing on animal numbers, when you should be focusing on how much time the animals are in one place, and how much time is the land being allowed to rest in order to have that vital recovery period.
[Editors note: Good grazing can be likened to weight training. You work it hard for a relatively short period of time, and then you rest for a long period. It’s in the rest period that the recovery occurs, but it’s rest in between periods of stress.]
So it's all about the management. It's not about the sheer numbers of animals, per se.
HART: In so-called mob grazing--if you will--we’re talking about a large number of animals on a paddock for a very short time. So they might be in one place for a day, sometimes even a half day or less, and then they move on. And they might not come back to that place for a year.
NICOLETTE: Yes. You can imagine that that piece of land would be rested for the vast majority of the time, but it would get a heavy impact for a period of time.
When you look around the world at the large herds, whether it's Cape Buffalo or bison or Caribou, that's how they function. They're very concentrated in an area for a while, and then they move on. They don't stay in one place in nature.
HART: They're bunched up partly because of predators. In nature you have a high concentration of animals on a relatively small space. If you take away the predators, that can be a problem. But we mimic that bunching and moving by using paddocks.
NICOLETTE: Yeah, exactly. I'm a big advocate of the use of livestock guard dogs. We have them here on our ranch. But I think we need to figure out how to coexist with the predators because there's more and more evidence that the predators are really important for ecosystems as well. When you have your animals more densely congregated, it provides them more protection from predators, just by virtue of the fact that they are not scattered and they're not out by themselves. They have that herd protection, like they would in nature.
There's more and more understanding of how to do things that are good for the soil and create healthier animals. Moving your animals regularly is really good for them because it puts them on clean ground, on fresh vegetation. We know that this has a better impact on soils.
The science is coming together to show that there are better ways to do things. But it's also showing that where you remove animals in the name of land restoration, it's been found again and again that soil health and ecological health decline.
The science is more and more showing that animal impact is actually essential for optimal ecosystem function. We need the animals. But how do we manage them? That should be the focus.