A PAIR of Australians have taken an idea developed in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to the United Kingdom and presented it in a competition that is canvassing solutions to global warming and climate change.
Tony Lovell and Bruce Ward of Soil Carbon Australia told a high-level panel assembled by Britain’s Guardian newspaper that soil carbon generated through changed grazing management practices is a valid solution to global warming.
Their message carried some clout. Of the 20 presentations delivered in The Manchester Report competition, the “regenerating grasslands” idea was selected as one of the top 10 and is currently third in a poll that asks the public to rate their favourite solutions.
Above it, one and two in the public poll, are:
• Concentrate massive solar power generation capacity in the world’s deserts.
• Switch the fuel for nuclear reactors from uranium to safer, more abundant thorium.
Mr Lovell said the idea of regenerating grasslands through the short graze-long rest principles developed by Allan Savory, founder of the Holistic Management decision-making framework, tended to be absent from most discussions of global warming.
“In Australia, we have 20 million hectares of cropping and 440 million hectares of grazing land, but the focus tends to be on the cropping,” Mr Lovell said.
“It’s a case of the tail wagging the dog.”
Globally, two billion people depend on pastoralism—more than depend on rainforests, Mr Lovell said—suggesting that massive areas of land could be given regenerative treatment.
Allan Savory developed his ideas while working as a game ranger on the African savannah, where the grasslands support herds of millions of animals.
He noticed that, unlike domestic grazing, the vast African herds constantly moved across the landscape, heavily grazing an area, trampling the remaining dry matter into the ground, liberally fertilising the soil with urine and manure, and then rapidly moving on.
Plants were subsequently able to make a full recovery, rebuilding from organic matter deposited in the soil and filling the soil with roots as they grew, before the next intensive grazing came through.
Despite early objections that the Australian landscape never carried vast herds, years of experimentation by landholders has shown that the same principles, called rotational, cell or planned grazing, are under the right management effective at building pasture density and biodiversity across all Australian environments.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the boost in productivity farmers often report must also be accompanied by an increase in soil carbon levels, but scientific validation is still scant.
Bruce Ward acknowledged that more scientific analysis is needed, but noted that the word “measurement” had stalled progress on soil carbon for too long.
“No-one tries to ‘measure’ every piece of timber in a forest to calculate how much carbon it might contain,” he said. “They make an assessment from models.”
“To try and measure every particle of carbon on the soil is inconsistent, to say the least.”
As a starting point, he favours a system like that operated by the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which awards carbon credits for certain management practices within broad land and climatic zones.
The CCX system delivers a low return to farmers because of its broad-brush approach, but Mr Ward said the idea has got thousands of North American farmers thinking about sequestering soil carbon as part of their everyday management.
That incentive is still absent from the Australian global warming debate.
According to Mr Lovell, “While we’re waiting for a great response to climate change, we’re not working on a good response, like grassland regeneration."
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