Understanding how productive your land once was will help you make holistic management decisions to benefit generations to come
Many regenerative farmers are digging holes and looking down. But should we be looking up too? What is the guiding star that leads you on the right path when you must make a big decision? What are you trying to regenerate, and what is possible?
Before we started down the path of regenerative organic farming in 2007, my family created a “holistic context,” or a description of the lifestyle we wanted, asking ourselves what our land needed to be like to support that lifestyle for us and for our unborn grandchildren. This would guide our decisions to move us toward the green, productive, restored landscape that we envisioned.
Our farm’s natural capital — that is, our land’s ability to produce — had been drawn down by the growing of continuous corn on some fields since the 1970s. There were hardly any earthworms in these fields when we bought the land in 1997. As we intentionally built our soils back up with holistic planned grazing and grew more pasture for our cattle, we were providing more food and habitat for wildlife too. The returning bobolinks, Karner blue butterflies, native pollinators, peepers and bluebirds gave us a glimpse of the species richness that was possible for our land.
This made me wonder how productive our ecosystem used to be. Without knowing this, how could we know what ecosystem regeneration should look like? We could be following the wrong star.
Abundance Begets Abundance
I learned that the eastern U.S., where we farmed, like most temperate ecosystems, was not dense forest when humans first arrived, as I had assumed. Rather, it was a mosaic of lightly forested areas and meadows kept open by now-extinct Eastern bison, American horse, mastodon and mammoth on savanna that had prevailed through many ice ages over millions of years.
These long-extinct megafauna (species weighing 100 pounds or more) used to knock over woody bushes and trees and rip down branches like elephants do in Africa today to help maintain more open savanna. When large grazing and browsing animals are removed from temperate savannas that have reliable moisture, dense forest takes over. Humans arrived in the Americas with their hunting dogs between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago and hunted many species of megafauna to extinction. The result was more dense forest across North and South America than before.
European temperate landscapes were also mostly lightly wooded savanna or mosaics of forest and open meadow before humans arrived. Like American savanna, they were teeming with life, according to clues left by our ancestors. In the caves at Lascaux, France, 30,000-year-old rock art depicts open plains replete with woolly rhino, giant elk, and aurochs, the giant ancestors of modern cattle that weighed twice as much as contemporary cows.
Nature evolves to high states of productivity by leveraging diversity, abundance and shifting mosaics to capture the most solar energy. Abundance was fueled by the sun and stoked by grazing and browsing animals on ancient landscapes, helping nutrients cycle faster, which allowed plant biomass to grow faster and lifted what scientists call primary productivity. True to God’s design, the Earth was an exceptionally abundant garden of Eden before humans limited ecosystem productivity by limiting diversity with unsustainable hunting.
Besides their outsized ability to speed up nutrient cycling by grazing and trampling, megafauna possess another superpower that could explain their unexpected former abundance. As described in Kleiber’s Law, larger animal are more efficient at utilizing food for body maintenance. As the average size of a species doubles, they are 25 percent more efficient at utilizing plant food. This means the same amount of plant food can support fifty times as much elephant biomass as mouse biomass! The teeming entourage of giant animals on ancient savanna turbocharged nutrient cycling impacts, counterintuitively resulting in more productive landscapes.
Higher plant diversity also makes both solar energy harvest via photosynthesis and the transfer of energy through ecosystems more efficient. If your regenerative farming efforts on your ranch are not allowing you to increase your stocking rate and support more wildlife, then it is time to go back to the drawing board and ask yourself why. Don’t be afraid to lift your carrying capacity by growing more pasture — abundance begets abundance in nature.
Ancient prairies and steppes around the world teemed with giant methane-burping herbivores, yet they constantly helped draw down carbon from the air into the biosphere. The plants grazing animals tended and fertilized sourced carbon from the air, and it eventually pooled not only in the carbon held in animal and plant biomass but especially in the ever-deeper soils that built up. Apparently, the effect of this carbon sequestration in the biosphere was more important than the warming effect of methane released by ruminants because 800,000 years of ice core data show that during every cold phase of ice ages, both CO2 and global temperatures trended downward. Herbivores were cooling the planet by jumpstarting more photosynthesis and building soil deeper.
Migrating herds are also very effective at moving nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus across the landscape to areas where these nutrients are limiting. The cohort of small animals left on our planet do not travel very far or carry meaningful quantities of nutrients from areas of abundance to areas that are lacking, and this puts limits on the productivity of entire regions. Today, fences prevent the few existing wild megafauna from providing this ecosystem service. This means modern “pristine” ecosystems are less productive than before human intervention limited their productivity. People can help cool the planet today by managing the remaining megafauna — mostly livestock — to mimic nature.
Yet in a few places it is still possible to observe the profound power of living organisms — what Allan Savory describes as “community dynamics.” One such location is Kati Thanda (Lake Eyre), now a usually dry salt flat in the desiccated heart of Australia.
Lessons from Australia
The minerals and nutrients in Australian soils have leached away over millennia. In contrast, minerals in American and European soils were replenished by glacier action that crushed bedrock into mineral dust that is more available to fertilize plants. Yet when the first Australian people arrived on the continent over 65,000 years ago, even the vast central Australian savanna ecosystem was very productive. It had self-organized to swamps, chains of ponds, rivers and woodlands built up and maintained by abundant animals.
Kati Thanda was a mega lake covering 30,000 square kilometers, fed by a thriving savanna water catchment that had a capacious ability to infiltrate water. This savanna was made possible by the megafauna, like giant kangaroo, giant flightless birds like Stirton’s Thunderbird, and the grazing marsupial Diprotodon, which were the size of small cars. The evidence of abundant aquatic and terrestrial life in what is now stark desert is so mind bending to people living there today that it is “almost too incredulous to contemplate”, according to palaeontologist Steve Webb, who unearthed many fossils at Lake Eyre.
Abundant flocks of seabirds deposited tons of nitrogen and phosphorus sourced from the sea in guano that fertilized plants near the coasts. The migrating trains of Diprotodon and other grazing animals fed in these fertile areas and transported these nutrients inland over millennia. Birds, fish and insects helped spread the transported nutrients even more widely. Although birds and insects can’t do much to fertilize landscapes these days, they once were a fertilizer-spreading force of nature. If Australian bird flocks were as abundant as birds in North America even up to the 1800s, the idea becomes more plausible.
In 1813, naturalist and wildlife painter John James Audubon reported that a single migrating flock of passenger pigeons in Kentucky passed overhead undiminished for three days. He wrote, “The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow….” This would equate to an application of liquid foliar fertilizer, since plants can take up nutrients through their leaves, not just their roots. By 1914, guns and deforestation eliminated forever as many as 3 to 5 billion wild passenger pigeons. This clue of fantastic former productivity is why farmers who want to lift farm productivity by mimicking nature may want to import some limiting nutrients as fertilizer in the absence of large-scale wildlife migration.
Farmers may also want to reconsider why they consider some bird species pests and overlook the ecosystem services restored populations of birds can provide. Before we stopped feeding grain on our dairy farm, we considered starlings to be pests because they fed in feed troughs and dropped their “waste” there. When we started to grow more tons per acre of reliable summer pasture and switched to all grass-fed management, the birds completely changed their behavior. Instead of making a mess in the barns, they waited in the trees nearby while we milked the cows so they could follow them out to pasture and eat flies at their feet. Their “waste” now fertilized our fields as they provided the service of pest control. The problem was never the birds — it was our management.
For millions of years, birds and animals searching for food or migrating in Australia transported nutrients from the fertile coasts to the heart of the continent to help green plants grow widely. Trees and other green plants create rain by inoculating the air with Aerobacter sp. bacteria, which act as nuclei to seed rainclouds. Plants also draw water from underground and put water vapor into the air destined to be rainclouds and help regulate their own climate.
After eons, many rivers and lakes dotted the interior of Australia. Megafauna were some of the very threads making up this green cloak that covered soil and protected it from the strong sun at that latitude. Life kept the continent’s interior cooler and wetter. Australian Microbiologist Walter Jehne explains how green landscapes can cool the planet. So, when people over hunted and depleted megafauna in the million-square-kilometer water catchment that fed Kati Thanda and other watersheds in the heart of Australia, the land turned to desert — as is usually the case when grazing animals are removed from semi-arid savanna regions.
Scientists often blame climate change due to Earth’s orbital patterns for ecosystem shifts that caused megafaunal extinctions. But the dependence of semi-arid savanna ecosystems upon their megafaunal gardeners was far more important than science acknowledges. Maybe science has it backwards and the extinction of so many large species at the hand of man could have been the cause of regional and even global climate changes. In the case of Australia’s now arid interior, ecosystems had once evolved to such a high level of diversity, including giant crocodiles and large fish, that they had already survived the changes associated with scores of ice ages before human habitation. It is likely human intervention initiated both megafaunal and ecosystem collapse.
While natural climate change due to orbital changes can initiate drying periods, the interaction of living organisms to offset those effects and impart resilience has been completely ignored by science. In Australia, like most of the planet, our simplified landscapes are far more vulnerable to flooding and drought now that plants to not always cover the soil, which itself is less able to soak up rainfall.
Modern landscapes are deprived of the vast abundance and diversity of life where each species has a role in making the whole ecosystem stronger and more productive. In modern horticulture, millions of species above and below the soil are often fumigated to death to grow just one species of plant. Without the help of migrating megafauna to transport nutrients and abundant birds and insects to spread them, farmers are trucking and spreading fertilizer at great cost.
Can we restore Mother Nature to the point where she can once again provide these services for free? Can migrating bird populations be managed to lift their abundance? Can wildlife corridors for the migration of the few remaining megafauna like pronghorn antelope be better protected? Maybe someday virtual fencing will make post-and-wire fencing obsolete and will open the opportunity of restoring natural bison migratory behavior in their former ranges to reduce wildfire risk across the U.S. and Canada. After all, former bison (and mammoth) range neatly overlaps the regions most affected by uncontrolled wildfires last summer.
Back to the Future
Our paleolithic ancestors discovered green landscapes with mega-lakes, rivers and swamps in other areas that are now some of the driest places on our planet, including the Eastern Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Atacama Desert in Chile. They left evidence in rock art depicting savannas that teemed with wildlife and even themselves swimming in what is now the driest part of the Egyptian Sahara.
By eradicating entire species and subsequent pastoralism and farming, people have been causing our life support system to unravel around the globe. But we can sew it back up! Even desertified land can be restored back to thick grassland, as Alejandro Carrillo has done on his 30,000-acre ranch in the middle of the Mexican Chihuahuan Desert using holistic management.
The only thing that can stop further destruction of your land’s natural capital and of Earth’s ecosystems is changing from our Stone Age method of making decisions to a more advanced decision-making framework. No, it is not AI generated, but holistic.
Understanding how productive your land once was will help you envision the landscape your people will need going forward. The further back you look, the further forward you can see. You can simultaneously consider the environment and the people who depend on it for food, clean water and oxygen — not just economics — when you make decisions.
We need to pause and thoughtfully make holistic decisions, especially as consumers, or else marketers (including farm input suppliers) will persuade us into buying things that will eventually make us bad ancestors to our own grandchildren. Don’t so easily give salespeople permission to write your family’s future script. Write your own future story in a setting richer in natural capital and abundance.
Siobhan Griffin is a regenerative livestock farmer and grazing consultant based in New Zealand. Learn more about her at nextlevelgrazing.com.
