Can Sheep Restore Patagonia's grasslands?
Patagonia Inc. is buying its merino wool from ranches that aim to restore degraded land in Argentina with livestock, a controversial concept
"Sustainability is a joke in comparison to the premise of regeneration." Joshua Finch, Daily Kos
Patagonia's unique and complex grasslands are among the most damaged in the world, and roughly 20m acres have been abandoned.
As a scientist, Pablo Borrelli has spent his entire career working on desertification--both as a research fellow at Argentina's National Institute of Agricultural Technology and as a trainer and consultant evaluating and planning grasslands for sustainability. But despite his recommendations that farmers reduce their livestock, their land had continued to deteriorate and they were left with less to sell.
"We were completely stagnant with the old paradigm," he says. "The farmers wanted new ideas."
In 2007, Borrelli and Ricardo Fenton, co-founders of an Argentine company that manages and develops a network of wool producers, met early practitioners of "holistic management and planned grazing," or HM. They used the process --developed by controversial Zimbabwean and rancher Allan Savory--to heal grassland, eventually doubling the number of animals they grazed.
The next year, in 2008, they started using HM at Estancia Monte Dinero, Fenton's 65,000-acre family estate. Within two years, Borrelli says, they saw more positive changes in the grassland than they had seen in the previous 10. New plants were covering the bare ground, increasing biodiversity, including many more plants considered rare--in some cases, plants that had not been seen there for 30 years.
Thus encouraged, their company Ovis XXI created standards to certify sustainable grazing and branded its wool as sustainably harvested. Then, as Borrelli introduced HM to more ranchers, they looked for a customer.
This fall, Patagonia Inc., the high-end Ventura, California-based outdoor clothing company that has long worked to minimize its negative environmental impact, began selling about 50 items made with the Ovis XXI brand. Rather than engaging in mere "responsible" sourcing, in which it tries not to hurt the environment, this is part of an effort to actually restore the environment. Patagonia and Ovis XXI partnered with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to create the Grassland Regeneration and Sustainability Standard (GRASS), a set of land management protocols and conservation goals to certify results.
But the whole concept of HM remains controversial. Ecologists blame livestock for degrading the world's grasslands: some 70% of Amazon forest is now used for grazing--and 20% of pastures are degraded through overgrazing, according to a 2006 report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
Meanwhile, Savory contends that herbivores like cattle and sheep can actually restore these lands. (His TED talk, How to Green the World's Deserts and Reverse Climate Change, has been viewed by more than 1.6 million people since it was posted to the Internet in March.) "Mimic nature," he exhorts.
By that, he means emulate the behavior of wild animals of eras gone by. Chased by predators, they fertilized the plains with their dung as they roamed broad swaths of land in tightly knit herds. The migrating trampling of their hooves breaks up the surface of the land, he claims, so it can absorb rain like a sponge. In the modern world, this is done via electric fences, which might split a pasture into, say 12 or 16 partitions, in which animals graze for a few days at a time.
Savory was influenced by French pastoralist Andre Voisin, who, upon observing his cattle in Normandy, noted that if they were left in the same space for more than a couple of days, they over-grazed the plants they liked and under-grazed the others. So he advocated "following the grass", or carefully rotating livestock in different paddocks to eat grass at the optimum time in its growth, for the optimum amount of time.
Savory, who brought Voisin's ideas first to Africa and then to other semi-arid and arid climates, argues that animals left alone in one place for extended periods of time chew their favorite grasses down to the roots, killing them and causing erosion. Ultimately, he says, overgrazing is not about the number of animals on a fixed amount of land, but the amount of time the plants are exposed to grazing and the amount of recovery time in between.
The evidence, though, is inconclusive. In 2008, David Briske, professor of ecology and ecosystem management at Texas A&M University, and his colleagues published a report called Rotational Grazing on Rangelands: Reconciliation and Experimental Evidence. In this broad study, they found no evidence for the ecological benefits of rotational grazing. There's only anecdotal evidence; no scientific data, they said.
Briske, who calls Savory's TED talk "over the top," says HM shares similarities with what is generally known as "adaptive management," a concept developed by Canadian ecologist Crawley Stanley Holling in the 80s. "That's widely accepted as being valuable, and we are looking for more effective ways to implement it," he says. "But HM is tied closely to intensive rotational grazing, and there is no evidence that as you go more intensive that it's necessarily better. [Savory's] results are counter to general ecological principles."
Even so, Briske says that grazing, properly managed, can speed up the mineralization process that heals the land.
Daniela Ibarra-Howell, co-founder and CEO of the Boulder, Colorado-based non-profit Savory Institute and an early practitioner of HM with her husband Jim, says HM is not just rotational grazing, but a design technique and decision-making process for planning around many, many variables including ecological ones--where, for example, the birds are hatching, where poisonous plants are at certain times of the year, where water restrictions are.
"In many cases, just doing the planning will allow a rancher to tap into unrealized potential of his/her land, and can immediately increase stocking rates," she says. "With time, ecosystem processes are made more effective, plants increase in number and diversity, soil is covered and fed, and carbon sequestered making rainfall more effective, etc resulting in an increase in the land's carrying capacity [and thus an even higher stocking rate.]"
But the ability to increase stocking rates is "very, very contextual," she notes. "It depends on the nature of the land, the initial stocking rate, the weather, the infrastructure, the timeframe and myriad other considerations that are very unique to each whole."
GRASS is a revised version of Ovis XXI's initial sustainability standard--one that took the three partners a year to agree to. Half of the 52 farms certified last year are using HM. But the standard is focused on results; it doesn't prescribe a specific ranching method. Instead each ranch must have an approved management plan accounting for things like the effect of grazing on wildlife and water quality, along with annual assessments and monitoring confirmed by external on-the-ground and satellite audits. And it includes an overlay of TNC's conservation goals, which are results-oriented.
"This is a ranching project--not a nature preserve," says TNC senior ecologist Chris Pague. "So how do we get conservation out of these guys doing good grass management? I don't know what it was like 5000 years ago with millions of guanaco and rheas running down there. But what I can say is: Will that grouse bird be OK? Let's be sure, and make it part of your ranch plan."
Ranches are scored based on a rangeland health index incorporating about fifteen biological indicators including things like wind erosion, the vitality of shrubs and key species, and percentage of vegetative cover. Each relates to ecological processes and correlates with key environmental services provided by grasslands such as soil stabilization and biodiversity--not just plants, but also micro-and mega fauna and wildlife, above and below ground and in the water. Scores for each biological indicator, which are cumulative, are weighted based on its importance relative to environmental outcomes. Total potential scores range from -130 to +130, with negative values indicating deterioration.
To make evaluations, the scores are compared to those of "reference areas"--sites in each of Patagonia's 13 ecosystems that are meant to identify the healthiest biological activity.
Although three-quarters of the farms certified last year had negative scores, the goal is a positive score. Farms in recovery, with a score of at least five, are identified as the Ovis XXI Restore Brand. Full accreditation requires a positive score of 15, which means that the land's ecological status is healthy. The highest score last year was 45.
"We are measuring indicators, and if those indicators are moving in the right direction, we have confidence that direction is grossly correct," Pague says. "Borrelli's commitment and willingness to adapt until the agreed-upon outcomes are achieved is contagious. Their kids are out there monitoring grasses with them. The kids are at the workshops. These people are excited that things can be different."
In fact, there are already farms beginning to perform better than the reference areas, which were chosen because they had been left alone and "rested" for a long time. Says Borrelli: "We say very seriously that we are building future reference areas."
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A version of this story was published at The Guardian on Dec. 23, 2013. You can view it here:
www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/patagonia-sheep-grass-ranch-savory/
