RESILIENT LAND, COMMUNITIES, & ECONOMIES

MANAGEMENT MUST BE HOLISTIC

Holistic Management restores grasslands. Healthy grasslands lead to carbon sequestration, drought resilience, food security, and financially viable communities. At Savory, we believe the solution to these pressing world issues is that management of our land, livestock, and people must be holistic.

By The Numbers

Hubs

Hectares of Land Managed Holistically

Land Managers Trained

Top 100 Most-Watched TED Talks

Fight Desertification & Reverse Climate Change

“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And it’s happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it.

Holistic Planned Grazing

Holistic Planned Grazing is the practice of charting grazing moves that consider the time that a plant is exposed to a grazing animal so that the plant’s recovery is planned.

Holistic Planned Grazing accounts for the needs of land, plants, animals, and people.

The process aims to strategically mimic Nature and it is built on thorough planning and constant monitoring and re-planning.

Ecological, environmental, and human factors that influence the grazing plan are charted.

This facilitates healthy eco-system processes: water cycles, mineral cycle, community dynamics, and energy flow.

Moisture and minerals are carried down into the soil by dung beetles and other organisms.

As the herd grazes according to the plan, dung, urine, and old plant matter are trampled into the ground.

This provides a clear picture of where livestock need to be and when, and this determines how the manager plans their moves.

About

HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT

Allan Savory initially developed Holistic Management to halt the spread of desertification and the human impoverishment that always resulted.

Livestock had long been blamed for creating deserts, but Savory realized it was how those livestock were managed that was the problem, and it was the management that had to change.

Savory developed a method for planning livestock grazing that enabled pastoralists to simulate the effects wild herds once produced on the land, and the results were dramatic. But more than grazing planning had to change in order to transform whole landscapes and keep them healthy. Holistic Management arose from that insight.

Savory developed a new framework for management that enables people to make decisions that satisfy immediate needs without jeopardizing their future well-being or that of others.

Although rooted in a quest to stop the spread of deserts, Holistic Management and its underlying framework, can also be used to better manage any situation that involves a web of social, economic, and environmental complexity.