I am passionate about Australia’s rangelands. They cover about 75 percent of the land area of this continent – according to a website that I’ve just discovered.
The Australian Burea of Statistics (ABS), from memory, suggests about 60 percent of Australia is rangeland under pastoral lease.
I am not sure how these vast areas should be managed. I know they are changing – always changing.
Some in the rangelands subscribe to a book published by Allan Savoy in 1999 titled ‘Holistic Management’. I can’t get my mind around much of what Savoy writes, but I do think he raises some important issues.
While I have posted some pieces at this blog that promote the use of fire, Savoy has a very different perspective. He suggests,
“The world was not terribly overgrazed before modern humans, despite animal numbers that are unimaginable today, due to the constant movement of large herding herbivores. Constant movement was brought about by one of the defense mechanisms large grazing herbivores developed to coexist with high numbers of pack-hunting and other predators in a functioning whole. Most herding herbivore females do not have horns or other means of defense. Males generally use their horns for dominating other males and defending territory rather than protecting females and young. So to survive, females of herding herbivores seem to have developed similar strategies – drop all young over a very short period to overwhelm predators, and combine in large herds, which predators fear.
What had the bunching into very large herds to do with minimizing overgrazing of plants and maintaining plant and soil health? This is easy to understand if we look at plant physiology research rather than range research, as the Frenchman Andre Voisin (1988) did over 50 years ago.
What Voisin discovered was that overgrazing of plants is a function of time of exposure and re-exposure of plants and not a function of animal numbers. Concentrated herds of grazing animals feeding with their mouths close to the ground, dung and urinate in high concentration and thus are obliged to move off any ground within a short time and not return at least until weathering has cleaned their feed.
No creatures normally will feed on their own feces, or that of closely related species. Such constant movement, involving short periods of plant exposure followed by a longer period during which plant recovery could take place, would have minimized the overgrazing of plants (only individual plants, not whole ranges, can be overgrazed). And in fact this is just what we experience with holistic planned grazing (described in Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making (Savory and Butterfield, 1999), which simulates nature’s grazing of old.
I believe, as we build our knowledge, we will come to understand that just as soil cannot develop without life, so grassland soils could not have developed without grass, and that grass was mostly as animal-dependent as the animals were grass-dependent. Nature only functions in wholes and patterns. With vast numbers of herbivores, as there simply had to be for the world’s grasslands and their soils to have developed, most vegetation would be grazed by year’s end, leaving little combustible material at the time of most frequent lightning.
Today not only is burning by humans more widespread and frequent than probably at any time in history, but I believe lightening fires are more prevalent in grasslands than would have been the case before humans killed off most herbivores. Where rapid biological decay previously prevailed, today we see gradual chemical/physical breakdown providing billions of tons of highly inflammable material over vast areas of rangeland and certain forests in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere. Toward the season of most lightening, much of the land is a tinderbox simply waiting to be ignited. In addition, the more we humans use fire as a tool to maintain grasslands or forests, the more fire-dependent and flammable the vegetation becomes.”
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Probably unrelated but Bon Vivant and raconteur Jack Absolom ventured in an ABC documentary some decades ago that the Aboriginals reckoned that it was the introduction of European grazing animals, (sheep and cattle) which created all the salt pans.
I asked Jack about that when our paths crossed in 1988/9 in Kununurra.
Still waiting for an answer that would meet scientific minima.
Oh and the earth’s surface is covered by water to the extent of ~ 70%, depending on which source one refers.
I am sure that all high country farmers would agree with Mr Savoy in relation to the grazing issue he puts forth.
Fire on the other hand, was not used as a means to ignite multi tonnes of fuel load, but was in fact used in a mosaic manner on terrain that burnt essentially as a trickle burn, with the odd detritus flare up. In other words, the fires lit in such practice, were burning very small amounts of fuel load that in effect ran a very cool fire. This cool burning principle, neither scorched the earth, nor destroyed seed stock, but in effect added the nutrient properties of ash for the coming season after the fire, but kept weed and pests alike at an acceptable bay.
These fires lit in a mosaic pattern in turn provided an inhibiting effect to natural fires from racing away as a high intensity holocaust.
Further, the areas burnt one year, may well have not had another burn for up to 5, or more years later.
Such cool burning inhibits the natual evolutionary process of flora to become fire resistant, not to the contrary.
Combine such cool mosaic burning practises along with sauntering cattle and sheep grazing and the resultant effect will deliver exactly the Snowy Banjo Paterson wrote verse about.
It is only these later years that the fires, natural and intentional, have become so ferocious on such a wild scale. This all because of the mimimal management now forced to be practised, due to legislative constraints brought about by those with power that in reality have no connection to the land in question and hence bring about such legislation on an extremely flawed and dangerous agenda.
The 1939 fires were a perfect example of a natural holocaust of fire, yet many a stockman was and stayed in the mountains with their herds of thousands upon thousands of sheep and cattle, moving them to the cool managed spots for shelter and it was when they left the bush did they realise how wide spread this fire was. Although the size of the 1939 fire was of a scale of the 2003, the intesity of the burn never came close to that of the 2003 and this is a fact that seems to have eluded those that fight historical management pratices.
Jennifer , the grasslands will only change and deteriorate if we change the use and management of them .
South of darwin we stopped burning an open woodland perennial grass cattle paddock and after 4 years it was difficult to muster because of eucalypt regrowth .
The pure stand semi dried off perrenial grasslands were burnt fiercely every year in about april – this produced good green fattening feed and were grazed until short -low stocking rates and high seed spread with a good relatively undisturbed natural seedbed ensured good recovery in the Wet . these two ecosystems appeared sustainable under this type of traditional Aboriginal and traditional grazing management.
I have found cell grazing beneficial in our grazing operation at Brewarrina, NSW.It seems to be more effective in erractic rainfall areas with mineralised soils.It took me me a long time to comprehend and step out of old grazing habits.In dry periods,traditional thinking in the grazing fraternity meant spreading livestock thinly across the landscape but as we are starting to see this system is unsustainable.I think the old drovers new that moving cattle on to fresh country everyday was the way to go.Its taken a while but the scientists have finally cottoned on to the ideas.Its a positive thing like permaculture!