Could cows heal the West?

Others see it as ranchers finally taking stock of the Western landscape.

“We’ve been trying to make the West into Europe since our ancestors came here,” says George Whitten, a rancher in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. He has been practicing holistic management, with good results, since the mid-1980s. Now, “I think we have to become truly westerners to live within its limits and its bounty,” he says.

Moisture retention is key

With concern mounting over human-induced climate change, how land is managed and whether it emits or traps carbon is an issue of growing concern. Carbon taken from the atmosphere by grasslands during photosynthesis ends up underground, in the plants’ roots. There, microbes metabolize some of that carbon into humus, the fine particles that give topsoil its black coloring. Humus can hold four times its weight in water, greatly enhancing soil’s ability to retain moisture, a bulwark against desertification.

Humus is also a huge carbon sink, says soil scientist Christina Jones, founder of the Australian Soil Carbon Accred­i­ta­tion Scheme, on her website. Grasslands can continually sequester carbon.

Worldwide, soils contain three times more carbon than the atmosphere, Dr. Jones says. That’s more than four times the carbon contained in the world’s vegetation. By her calculations, a mere 0.5 percent increase in soil carbon on only 2 percent of Australia’s farmland would equalize all the nation’s carbon emissions. Degrading grasslands, though, emit carbon. As organic material breaks down, carbon escapes back into the atmosphere. That’s the case across large parts of the American West, Africa, Asia, and Australia where centuries of overgrazing and plowing have caused soils to steadily lose organic material.

“The most meaningful indicator for the health of the land and the long-term wealth of a nation,” says Jones, “is whether soil is being formed or lost.” Livestock can aid in that soil formation.

A lesson from Africa’s nature preserves
“It just so happens that the best management practices for rangelands also promote other goals,” says Jim Thorpe, a Quivira member and owner of a ranch near Newkirk, N.M. “It’s like being a grass farmer, only, instead of [my] growing it, the cows are.”

Land manager Savory, who now lives in Albuquerque, N.M., had his “aha!” moment while managing Rhodesia’s (now Zambia and Zimbabwe’s) fledgling national parks in the 1950s. He was puzzled when wildlife preserves started degrading soon after being put off-limits. The land became bare, packed, and hard, the riverbanks trampled and defoliated. Nearby areas that hosted large numbers of herbivores, carnivores, and even people, meanwhile, remained verdant and healthy.

“I was seeing the healthiest land where there was the healthiest game population,” he says. “But where we’d created reserves, removed people, and stopped hunting, almost immediately, the land became degraded.”

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