Driving Social Change

Rancho La Inmaculada in 1977. This is the "before" picture.

As I have mentioned before, I have been reading a lot lately about sustainability, particularly what a sustainable society would look like. There always seems to be a piece missing, though. How do we get there? Change doesn’t start at the top. It has always started at the bottom, with a groundswell of people who decide that the current way isn’t good enough and have an idea of how to make it better. The top is populated with the people who got their money or power (or both) from the current way of doing things. They have no reason to change and every reason to prevent change. The onus for change falls on the disaffected masses who know the life they have been given isn’t good enough. Right now, millennials are making up the bulk of the workforce and they are feeling the brunt of the economic crunch right now. This means that the responsibility for this change will fall to the millennials.

There is a problem with that, though. If you are familiar with my blog, you will know that I am a firm believer in the fact that the only way to fix this mess we are in, and to fix nearly every aspect of it, is to bring people back to the land and get them involved in regenerative agriculture. The problem there is that, as a group, millennials aren’t buying land. They just can’t afford the big house in the suburbs. So how do we get them onto the land and working it in such a way that they build soil and produce food? Let me propose two ideas, one for rural areas and one for urban areas.

First, let me start with the rural solution. To be fair, I think this solution will work best in the American west where land tends to be drier and more sparsely populated. The problem out here is that the land is brittle and requires animal impact to regenerate. But the great herds of hoofed animals are long gone. The grasses of the prairies need that animal impact grow and build soil. As the grasses suffer, so does the soil. The remaining soil organisms live off the carbon stored in the soil for many years, but in doing so, they consume it. As the soil loses its carbon, it loses its ability to capture and retain moisture. It becomes more erosive. The grassland turns into a desert.

The tricky part is that plopping some cows on the desert and letting them graze doesn’t help. It makes it worse, in fact. Taking the cows off the land and letting it rest doesn’t work either. It also makes the problem worse. It is only through either using the natural processes that created the grasslands or closely mimicking the impact of those natural processes that the desert can be returned to grassland. Holistic Management is one process for mimicking the natural processes, but there is considerable debate about whether it works or if there would be something better. For this reason, I think that it would be best to base the solution on results rather than method. Under this program, the method that promotes the best results would quickly rise to the top.

Rancho La Inmaculada in 2013. This is the "after" picture.

So here is what I propose: In the American west, the vast majority of rural land is owned by the government and it is turning to desert as it is being subjected to either overgrazing or too much rest. I propose that we institute a new version of the Homestead Act. Sell the land, at market value, to families willing to work the land. Tie the land payment to soil carbon. Before the land is sold, a baseline measurement is taken, just a simple soil test. Every year, before the year’s land payment, retest the soil. If the percentage of soil carbon has gone up from the previous year by some baseline amount, say a half percent or one percent, no payment is due. This provides a considerable financial incentive to improving the soil carbon, which is a pretty good baseline for ecosystem regeneration.

Now let me talk about a different solution for urban areas. I think that most people would agree that neither tall grass prairie nor herds of hoofed mammals would be particularly desirable in urban and suburban areas. It would be possible to have a goat lawn mowing service, but the logistics would be difficult. No, I think that a food forest and urban regenerative agriculture would be a better solution. If done correctly, the increase in plant cover would help with the urban heat island effect and air pollution. People capturing rainwater for personal use would decrease flooding problems that are common in urban areas. A diversity of food producing plants would help urban wildlife, like birds and beneficial insects. Plus, there is a huge demand for locally produced, organic produce.

For this solution, I would propose a private solution rather than a governmental one. If someone were to create a market to collect and sell locally produced, organic produce, they would be in a position to work with homeowners to buy produce from them and sell it in their market. This would create a demand and encourage people to grow their own food. Heck, even harvesting all the fruit from trees that go to waste and selling that would create a significant market.

For the actual program, I would think that such a market would struggle first with supply. The demand is already there. Where would they get the produce they need to sell? In a changing market, companies need to diversify services, maybe even creating their own circular economy that is internal to the company. For example, I worked with a developer many years ago who had teamed up with a mining company. The city they were operating in had many lots that were ideally located and in high demand, but couldn’t be developed because they were too rocky. It was too pricey to get the rock removed prior to construction. This developer would work out the design and then send in the mining equipment. First they would collect all the boulders and sell those to landscaping companies, even charging for placement onsite where they were needed. Then they would grind down and remove the rock that was in the way for development. They would sell this as aggregate for road beds or other uses. This used an existing business model and had its own profit sources. Then they would move in the builders and build the buildings and whatever else was needed for the site. It was a pretty brilliant business model.

I would propose a combination of a market selling local, organic produce and a home remodeling, real estate, and mortgage company. The realtors could find homes for sale that were in need of work and buy them at low prices. While they are fixing them up, they plant the beginnings of a food forest and do whatever else would be necessary to get food production set up. Then they sell the homes, at market prices, to families looking to start a new life.

I am a big believer that when someone owns their own property, it is theirs to do with as they please, and indeed most people would find a way to do just that. Again, as in the rural example, incentives for proper behavior would need to be brought to bear. If you sell the houses for below market value, there would be people who would buy it cheap, tear out the food production methods, and sell it at market value. So it would need to be sold at market value. The selection process would be a bit different, though. Instead of looking at credit and income, buyers could be selected on the basis of gardening knowledge, personal situation, and willingness to participate. Rather than going through a banking institution, the company could carry the mortgage and write some interesting terms. First of all, there would be the interest rate. As long as the homeowner agrees to participate in the local, organic produce program and sell (not give, mind you, all produce is sold at a rate based on the market) a minimum of a certain amount of produce monthly, the interest on the mortgage is either significantly reduced or eliminated altogether from the payments due on the home. The proceeds of the produce could either be applied to the mortgage or given as cash to the homeowner. This would give the homeowner significant leeway regarding how they want to handle their finances. They could up production and offset their entire mortgage payment with produce. They could give themselves a second income, they could even seek to pay off their mortgage early.

Right now we are in a tough spot, environmentally and economically. Most methods being suggested today tell people what they have to give up in order to make the changes we need. I really don’t think this is necessary. With some creative thinking and problem solving, I believe that there are ways to help people get pointed in the right direction towards making a real difference while still making the world a better place.

Moving Towards a Sustainable Culture

In the South, they say eating greens on New Year's Day
will bring you wealth in the new year. I say do it every day.

Happy New Year, everyone! 2017 was an interesting year for me. In June, I left my job to pursue intellectual property, but I will talk more about that in the coming months. I still need to finish and file the patent. But I also did a lot of reading, research, and ruminations on the subject of sustainability. Through that process, several things became very clear to me. One of those is that, despite the fact that there are more people passionate about sustainability than ever, the availability of information on what they can do to make a difference is pretty slim. It is even harder to find ways to make a difference while making your life better, not worse. The dominant narrative is that of what we all need to give up.

We have reached a point where mere sustainability isn't enough. We don't want to sustain what we have. We need to be regenerative. They tell us things to do, but most of them are either not regenerative or make such a tiny impact that they are all but inconsequential. Recycling your trash? That's sustainable, but not regenerative. Reducing carbon emissions? Sustainable, but we need to sequester them if we want to be regenerative. Turning off the water while brushing your teeth? Well, that's a good idea, but just about inconsequential in the bigger picture.

I also noticed that there are some really great books out there on sustainability, but all the ones I have found so far fall into one or both of two traps. The first is that they are written by academics for academics. I am an engineer by profession and an avowed autodidact. I had trouble slogging through a couple of the books. The second is that they have a wonderful vision for what a sustainable society would look like, but offer no real plan on how to get there. They often offer some vague governmental policy changes as the impetus to move us in the right direction. Personally, I think this is the wrong way to go. All change starts at the bottom, with the people. The status quo is maintained by the people who made vast sums of money on the status quo and have no interest in changing it. The people in charge have an economic base that is sustained by keeping things as they are and will always be resistant to changing it. So the real question is how do we get average, middle class people to truly adopt a sustainable lifestyle?

The important thing to remember is that a person who is prospering on the current system will resist changing it. What about the people who aren't prospering? What about the millions of Millennials who are in their 30s and still can't afford to buy a home? What about all the people who have seen their wages stagnate while prices rise, watching as their standard of living slowly erodes? What about the estimated 60% of people who will see their jobs evaporate to automation in the next 20 years? One of the constants of the human condition is that we are always looking for a way to improve our lot. We need to find a way to use the regenerative and productive aspects of nature to improve the lives of people who are struggling. If you bring prosperity to those who have found it elusive, others will want a part of that.

The thing is, nature is regenerative. Every single natural system knows how to regenerate itself from damage to return to health and prosperity. If they didn't they'd have never survived all of the natural disasters that every single environment is subjected to somewhat frequently. These environments do this while providing bounty for all who live in them and they do it because every organism has a role to play. If you haven't already seen it, I strongly recommend checking out the video on how wolves change rivers for a beautiful example on how all of the organisms interact in an ecosystem. And this video only shows the interactions among animals and some plants. When diversity is increased and the full contribution of plants, fungi, and microorganisms in the soil is understood, the results can be mind-blowing.

How, then, are ecosystems degrading across the entire world simultaneously? It's quite simple, really. They are being managed incorrectly by people. It doesn't have to be this way, though. There are numerous examples from tropical areas of food forests that have been managed by the people who live in them for thousands of years. The problem is, to the uneducated, the food forest and the forest are indistinguishable and we tend to label people living in these food forests as "savages" and the areas they live in as "third world countries."

So here we are, living largely in urban and suburban sprawl. A friend once told me that suburbia is the most unsustainable thing ever and asked me how we'd change it. That's easy. Let me offer an analogy. When white people came to North America the bison herds were massive. Some estimates put them at 60 million strong. Most people think that it was over hunting, with millions of animals killed every year, that decimated their population. I read recently that this likely had little effect on the population. In a herd of 60 million, a couple of million lost every year aren't going to even offset the birth rate. It was habitat loss that did it. They depended on the grasses of the prairies for their food source. By fencing and burning that food source, then tilling it up to grow our own grains, we deprived them of their livelihoods and the great herds dwindled and disappeared.

That is exactly how we are going to get rid of suburbia. It is only through the loss of the habitat that supports the suburban sprawl that we are going to get rid of it. The problem is, nobody wants that. Well, nobody with a heart anyway. Do we really want hundreds of millions of people to lose everything and die or move on? I don't. I really think there is a better way, and suburbia may be just the place to start it.

Let me ask you a question, for those of you who grew up in suburbia. You remember that crazy lady down the street with the big garden? Remember how she kept knocking on your door to try to give you zucchini? Why was she giving it away? Simple, she had more than she could eat. Let that sink in a minute. She. Had. More. Than. She. Could. Eat. And she grew it in her yard, in suburbia. She was likely using some version of conventional or organic agriculture, with crops in the ground grown with loving care and fertile soil. That, there, is our new model. You want to reduce your footprint? Make it as big as your yard.

Now, granted, she spent an ungodly number of hours a week out in that garden, and she did it because there was no place she'd rather be. The problem is, not everyone wants to be like her. We have this amazing technological life. We have culture and theater and reality TV that we'd so much rather be participating in than mucking around in the dirt. So how do you transition from that one person in every neighborhood to nearly everyone? Technology.

Yeah, I know. Technology is bad. We all know that's what ruined the environment in the first place. I learned an important lesson from Allan Savory on this point. A resource and the management of that resource are two very different things. To be fair, he'd probably bristle at the thought of my applying his maxim to technology, as he does tend to view technology as bad. But I really think that technology applies as another resource that can be part of the solution if managed properly.

Over the last several decades, there have been many new innovations in the realm of growing food and repairing ecosystems that have a huge amount of potential. These include the understanding of tropical food forests and the development of temperate food forests, mushroom growing, biochar, and garden/mechanical hybrids (like hydroponics and aquaponics). We have developed effective frameworks for managing natural systems like Holistic Management and Permaculture. These are all really great innovations, but I really think that we are just scratching the surface. There is another leap in understanding that we need to take before we can really make the magic happen.

Most technology is used as a replacement. I don't want to water my garden, so I install an irrigation system. I don't like paying workers on my assembly line, so I install robots to assemble the cars I sell. Often the thing being replaced is human labor or natural systems. Industrial agriculture has taken this replacement model to new heights and the destruction has been vast, with the UN estimating that we have a mere 60 years of agriculture left. I don't think we should get rid of the technology any more than I think we should get rid of the cows. Instead, we should manage it differently.

Before I jump into what that would look like, let me throw another concept in the mix: systems thinking. Put simply, systems thinking is the process of understanding a whole system by examining all of the connections between functional parts of the whole. Ecology is, by necessity heavy in systems thinking. The problem is that science is typically not strong in systems thinking. The scientific method is typically a reductionist process where variables are removed as much as possible so specific tests can be performed. Any more than 2-3 variables and the results are questionable. So while the data and understanding gathered by science is incredibly valuable, it is important to use science as a starting place, not as the whole process. Science tends to be reductionist. If we are going to build something, we need a constructionist method. Engineering, which uses the information gathered by science, is constructionist. Holistic Management and Permaculture are both also constructionist methods.

The thing I have found in learning about all of the advanced techniques of growing things is that very few people are combining them. Those that are are typically combining only one or two of the items. I think that widespread use of these techniques, combined with technology would be a way to really create something truly regenerative. The important step, though, is that the technology needs to be viewed differently. The natural systems are complex and interrelated in ways that we don't fully understand, so these processes get first priority. If nature CAN do it, something natural SHOULD do it.

What role, then, should technology serve? Technology should be used to pick up the tasks that humans would normally do. This is obvious. After all, this is what technology normally does. But more importantly, technology should be used to support, intensify, and accelerate those natural processes. After all, technology cannot ever be truly regenerative. Only nature can do that.

I believe that if we use technology to support and accelerate natural processes, in turn using the result to build urban ecosystems, we can turn suburbia into a ridiculously productive wonderland. And I believe that those who pioneer this process will bring themselves enough prosperity that others will take notice and want to participate. The benefits of this are multi-fold and include things like carbon sequestration, restoring healthy water cycles, reductions in air pollution, increase in habitat for urban wildlife, a booming local food community, and so much more. I will talk more about what this might look like and how we get there over the next several blog posts. And yes, the intellectual property I am working will be a big part of that. Just be patient with me. I'll tell you all about it as soon as I can.

Why Small-Scale Regenerative Agriculture is so Important

For the last several months, I have been throwing down a whole lot of information. Thank you, loyal readers, for sticking with me. I am going somewhere with this. There are a great number of techniques that can be used to repair our degrading ecosystem, and do so while providing a comfortable living for those doing the repairs. But people need to understand how this all needs to work. We live in a society that is separated to a great extent from nature. In order to fix what needs to be fixed, we need to first bring people back to nature, to help them understand it and learn how to heal it.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. As I mention regularly, this is an engineering blog. I do my best to use engineering problem solving techniques. And the first and foremost among those is this: if you wish to solve a problem, you first have to define the problem. So, what is the problem we are facing? And I don’t mean global warming, degrading farm land, or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Those are symptoms. What is the problem? Let me offer my viewpoint on this.

The problem, as I see it, is an ultimate flaw with the changes made during the Industrial Revolution. Bear with me here. See, prior to the Industrial Revolution, some 90% of humanity lived a pastoral existence on small family farms. When the Industrial Revolution hit, it needed two things to function and grow: it needed workers, and it needed consumers. It is basic supply and demand. So farmers were encouraged, and sometimes forced, to leave their land and move to the cities. They were promised a better life and more prosperity. For the most part, that prosperity was finally realized during the 50s with an expansion of the middle class.

But it proved to be short-lived. As an economy grows, it builds wealth, actually creates it. For the last 15 years, those gains have largely gone to the elite and the middle class has seen no appreciable increase in earnings. Prices have continued to rise, though, so the difference between the two has caused a contraction of the middle class, with millions of people watching their standard of living decrease with little hope of reversing the slide. 

There is also a more insidious problem. The Industrial Revolution taught us that we could be separated from the land and that even our food production could be automated. The consequences have been disastrous. Ultimately, humans are biological beings and are intimately connected to the environment we live in in ways we are just beginning to understand. Land needs to be managed or the biological processes that keep it alive degrade. 

Industrial agriculture is a great example. If you take farmland with excellent soil containing lots of soil carbon and add synthetic fertilizers, the production goes through the roof. Profits increase wildly. But the reason it becomes so productive is that the synthetic fertilizers increase soil biological activity and they use all that stored soil carbon as a foodsource, burning through it in as little as a few years, or maybe a few decades at the outside. It is a perfect example of short term profit at the expense of long term viability.

So here we are. The profits that can be extracted have been. The rich are richer than they have ever been in the history of the world. They are trying harder and harder to find ways to increase profits. Wages have stagnated to the point that large swathes of humanity are barely making it paycheck-to-paycheck. Our environment is forfeit. We are looking at the looming threat of technological unemployment as more companies try to further cut expenses by automating as many tasks as possible. The outlook is bleak.

Or is it? Maybe this is exactly what we needed right now. See, momentum is the biggest obstacle to change. As long as everything is going along great, people won’t make changes. Comfort is hard to compete with. But discomfort and uncertainty, well, that has people craving change. Heck, a presidential candidate used it as his campaign slogan a couple of years back. The trick is for people to get to a very difficult realization: that they are on their own. As long as you rely on those in power for your livelihood, you are subject their whims and have little control. But when you decide to take control of your own life, that’s where the magic happens.

The question is, how? We live in an urban, and largely suburban, landscape. We like our connected, technological lifestyle. Who wants to give that up to move back to the country and pursue a homestead lifestyle? Well, lots of people, actually, but I am talking to the rest of us here. How can we live our modern lifestyle and still pursue some measure of self-sufficiency. Personally, I think that small-scale regenerative agriculture is the key here.

Small-scale regenerative agriculture is the perfect solution for the predicament we have ourselves in. It solves the problems on pretty much every level. There have been a number of significant advances since the last time we were an agrarian society. And I don’t mean in the technology of the tractors currently tearing up vast swaths of farmland. Things like organic farming (if you think this one is ancient, you probably don’t understand it), aquaponics, and mycoculture have all come a long, long way in the last 200 years or so. Technology can be employed in ways never dreamed of even 30 years ago. With careful layout and design, more food than ever can be grown in a smaller space all while regenerating the environment.

So what can small scale regenerative agriculture do to solve the problems at hand today? Let’s tackle them one by one and see.

Climate Change/Environmental Degradation

This one is probably the easiest to justify. Regenerative agriculture is, by definition, regenerative. This means reducing monoculture, increasing environmental diversity, and building soil. The simple process of building soil means adding carbon to the soil, a process also called Carbon Farming. With enough practitioners of this practice, significant amounts of carbon could be sequestered into the soils of the earth. Plus, the restoration of life to soil helps mitigate pollution and further increases environmental diversity, which will breathe life into ecosystems beyond the farming operation.

Stagnating Wages

In a household budget, there are two sides to the flow of money: income and expenses. Most people are struggling through increases in expenses while their wages have virtually stagnated for decades. It can be very frustrating to find more and more ways to cut expenses just to make ends meet. Introducing solar dollars to the household budget can breathe new life into the flow of money. With new methods and technologies, this can happen with only minimal additional effort on the part of the homeowner, but can result in a much tastier and healthier diet.

Technological Unemployment

As most are aware, machines are going to be taking all the jobs. I have heard projections as high as 60% of jobs will be lost over the next 20 years to automation. Personally, I think this move is highly shortsighted. While there will be a huge savings in production costs, that doesn’t really help if everyone is unemployed and can’t afford to buy gadgets at the new low cost. Regardless of how bad this move will allow companies to shoot themselves in the foot, it is coming. So, what can be done about it?

Simply put, people are going to have to become more self-sufficient. They will need to stop relying on employers for their livelihood. This used to be the way nearly everyone lived before the Industrial Revolution and they did so by living primarily off of solar dollars. Sustainable agriculture allows a return to this paradigm, allowing individuals to reduce or eliminate reliance on employers.

Urban Malaise

I read a comment recently that I thought was spot-on: You don’t hate Mondays. You hate capitalism. Maybe it is capitalism. Maybe it is our lack of connection to the natural world. Maybe it is a lack of meaning in our lives. Maybe it is knowing that we spend our days toiling away to build value for someone else. Maybe it is pollution. Whatever the cause, a general feeling of malaise, discontent, unhappiness, and restlessness are prevalent in our society. Small-scale regenerative agriculture hits pretty much all of those causes head-on. You are building value for yourself on your own land. You are working with and regenerating nature. I don’t think it is that hard to understand why gardeners are a happy lot.

Nutrition

As the nutrients are increasingly extracted from farmland, our food loses its nutritional value. We become disconnected from the nutrient cycle. By regenerating our own land and building nutrient-rich soil, we increase the nutrient content of the foods we eat. And by doing that small-scale, we reconnect ourselves to our own nutrient cycle.

Health

Gardening is a great way to keep active. There is definitely work involved. This can help with fitness and flexibility. Reconnecting our bodies to the natural nutrient cycle will also help as our bodies will be getting all the nutrient-rich foods they need.

The best part of all this is that we don’t need to drop our modern lifestyle to realize all these benefits. Technology can play a big part in reducing the labor on gardening while still improving output. Universal availability of the internet means you can still ply your trade or profession by working part time online throughout the week to bring in additional income. We really can have the best of both worlds.

So, tell me, what did I miss? Are there other ways small-scale urban agriculture can change the world?

Holistic Management Concepts – Solar Dollars

Maturing solar dollars in home made mineral dollars

Holistic Management is an interesting set of concepts, techniques and methodologies. While the application is typically used to make ranches profitable and regenerative, it actually has broad applicability. Many of the other concepts have great potential beyond the ranch. Of these, perhaps my favorite is the concept of solar dollars.

According to Holistic Management, there are three kinds of wealth: mineral dollars, solar dollars, and paper dollars. Paper dollars are the easiest to understand. That is the actual money we are all familiar with. Mineral dollars are resources you have, like water, soil, rock, maybe even gold if you are lucky enough to have a gold mine on your property. Some mineral dollars are renewable, like fertile soil and water, while others are not, like that gold mine. Solar dollars, though, are the product of photosynthesis. Fruits, vegetables, wood, stuff like that. You use your mineral dollars to create your solar dollars.

This seems like a pretty simple concept. So why, of all the important concepts of Holistic Management, did I pick this one to expound on? This concept is really important when it comes to the application of everything else I am talking about. See, where this concept really becomes important is in the area of resource conversion.

Harvesting solar dollars (pollarding) to create more solar
dollars and more mineral dollars

Resource conversion is the conversion of one form of dollar into another. For example, you can buy a bag of composted steer manure with your paper dollars to help build your mineral dollars in the form of soil. You can then use that investment in mineral dollars to create solar dollars in the form of fruit from your fruit trees. Then you can pollard the fruit trees, harvesting solar dollars in another form. You can then chip them and convert them to another form of solar dollars: mushrooms. When the sawdust block is finished producing mushrooms, you can compost it and create mineral dollars in the form of improved soil.

The thing is, there are hundreds of ways to create and utilize solar and mineral dollars. It is really up to you to determine what is the best way to use them on your property. The important thing to realize is that these things have value, and not just some pie-in-the-sky theoretical value. In some cases, they give you a product to sell, and in others they prevent you from having to spend your hard-earned paper dollars, and in yet others, they give you a measure of resiliency.

Take a look around at your yard. What are you doing to preserve and earn solar dollars? Are you composting? Are you maximizing the production potential of the land you have through food forests? What can you do better? Remember, there is more than one way to earn income.

Holistic Management Concepts - Animal Impact

These guys right here

As those of you who are frequent readers of my blog probably know, my hobby is engineering with biological systems. In everything I do, I do my best to be holistic. Each organism in an ecosystem has a job and the whole works as a whole when all of the necessary pieces are where they are supposed to be and doing the job they evolved to do. The problem with the modern world is that our ecosystems are so degraded that the animals are often absent completely or at the least rarely seen in natural systems. As such, it is so easy to forget that they are an integral part and are often seen as pests or otherwise harmful. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Animals are an integral part of the nutrient cycling function of a healthy ecosystem. The tricky part, though is to manage the animals. It's important to choose the right animals (or encourage the right ones to come to you) and help them have the right impact.

There is no place this axiom is more true than in a brittle ecosystem. The inconsistency of moisture in an area that has distinct rainy and non-rainy seasons means that the organic matter (typically perennial bunching grasses) cannot break down into its component nutrients when exposed to open air like it does in a non-brittle environment, one with constant exposure to moisture. But the cycling of nutrients is critical for any ecosystem to function. It is how each and every organism functions within the ecosystem. For the plant, the fungus, the bacteria, and the animal each, it is their food source.

In a brittle environment, the dead grasses still need to be removed so the plants have room to grow at the beginning of the next rainy season. As any gardener knows, the best thing for all that grass is to finely chop it, compost it in a warm, moist environment, and deposit the finished compost back on the ground where it can be worked into the soil. Being a bit of a mad scientist, I propose we automate the process. Let’s make the composting unit mobile, something that moves around  and continually collects the grasses. I think I will call this new invention a “cow.”

This is basically how a ruminant works. They are mobile organic matter collection and composting units. They provide the moisture needed to break the plant matter down and keep the food web going. Remember, those grade school science books downplayed the importance of poop in the nutrient cycling of an ecosystem. In reality so many more nutrients are cycled through dung than through dead bodies.

Ecosystems develop through an intricate process called “evolution.” Often, evolution picks some minor function, one often overlooked, and makes it an integral part of the whole. This is absolutely true with the animal impact on a grassland. Yes, the cow eats the grass, but they miss a lot. They dung and urinate all over everything and tend to not eat the contaminated vegetation. But all of the vegetation needs to be lowered to ground level.

Also, bare ground is pretty much the biggest problem in a brittle environment. As ground sits bare (nothing growing from it and no plant litter covering it), there is nothing to replenish the soil carbon content and it just bakes in the sun. Bare soil loses its carbon content eventually and forms a hydrophobic (water repelling) crust. This crust matures over time, becoming more and more effective at repelling what rain comes to it. As the environment further degrades, the soil crust forms a permanent crust, grows a sad layer of algae and gets protection in a state park from people who can’t tell the difference between a healthy ecosystem and a biological response to extreme environmental degradation.

In order to keep the grassland healthy, the soil crust needs to be broken regularly and the uneaten litter scattered over the surface, along with a healthy dose of dung and urine applied. But this process breaks down when the cattle spread out across the landscape, grazing peacefully. The hooves naturally break the crust, but not when they step gingerly. The weight of the animals crushes the dead clumps of grass and scatters the remnants across the bare soil, but not when they walk carefully between the grasses. The piles of dung help fertilize, but not when they are twenty or thirty feet apart.

See, the ecosystem doesn’t respond specifically as a single block. Each clump of grass responds to the pressures and stimuli it is subjected to. Grass is overgrazed a clump at a time. Grass is undergrazed a clump at a time. And the two can be right next to each other. When cows are allowed to live a leisurely, spread out life with plenty of room to wander and plenty of time to pick and choose what they eat, they do exactly that.

It is the natural system of predator and prey that brings the whole thing together. In the wild, the great herds of ungulates are subjected to the predation of pack hunting predators like lions and wolves. The herds bunch together for safety. But in bunching, they eat huge amounts of food and leave behind huge amounts of dung and urine. In the excitement of being bunched and worrying about predators, they aren’t careful about where they step and trample the bunches of grass and break up the soil crust.

See, it is only the original system that works completely to maintain the grassland ecosystem. The herds have to be big enough that they can eat or spoil the food, then move on before the grass starts growing back. They have to be bunched and excited to disturb the ground just right to get the benefits.

The problem is that those great herds are largely gone, as are their pack hunting predators. But if the land dies without them, what are we going to do?

It turns out that Allan Savory has worked out a way to mimic the impact of the animals and built a whole system around it. The system is called Holistic Management. It uses smaller paddock sizes to mimic the bunching and manage the time spent grazing. It even turns out that the excitement and trampling can be mimicked without the stress of predators. Ivan Aguirre, a rancher in Mexico, uses mesquite hulls, the parts filtered out after the milling of mesquite pods, as a treat. Mesquite pods are naturally sweet and the cows get so excited about their treat (a waste product, really), that they trample everything to get to the hulls.

Unfortunately, it is likely that the great herds are gone forever. However, with enough dedicated people and the will to make a difference, we have the tools to restore the grasslands of the world to some of the most productive ecosystems in the world.