Holistic Management is our holy grail
Like many other parts in the world Portugal is moving towards a desert landscape, mainly because of human activity. By studying, monitoring and living on the land we found out that desertification is the big driving force behind climate change. You might think that droughts cause dry lands. But in fact, it’s the other way around. The hopeful message is that this process can be reversed. There’s many ways of doing this but for us the most realistic way has become very clear. After eight years of trying out nature restoring activities at A Quinta, there is one sticking out: holistic management. An animal and land management practice that mimics nature to benefit both grazing stock and biodiversity.
Graziers across the world have discovered that they can increase production of their herds while also improving water and mineral cycles of environments under a holistic management regime. Pioneered by Allan Savory more than 40 years ago, it offers land stewards a way to make grazing, land management and financial decisions that positively impact land health and productivity. This type of grazing management is now considered to be the single most beneficial technique for restoring both small profits and biodiversity to independent grazing operations like ours.
THE DIFFERENCE
On the right from the road the land has been holistically managed. Left is ungrazed land turning towards desert. Both lands have their water retention systems in place, yet on the right we are building soil and on the left we are losing land through erosion.
Holistic grazing embraces and honors the complexity of nature, and uses nature’s models of wild herds crossing the plains, pushed by predators, to bring practical approaches to land management, and restoration. Especially the use of different herds and animal species brings a multitude of advantages from naturally balanced parasite control to all plant species being eaten and a variety of nutrients entering the ground. We implement this planned grazing system with flocks of our sheep, cows from the neighbors and we even have our own chicken grazing system.
So far the results of our experiments have been very promising. After one year of grazing sessions we have seen desertified land becoming green again and the process of soil building ignited. Now our goal is to get as many flocks and herds as possible on our land. As you can see on the picture below the land on the left of the road (dry land) was grazed in the summer of 2019 and soil building is already taking place (light green patch) a couple of months later. On the right of the road (moist land) our sheep just started grazing unused land.
“Ultimately, the only wealth that can sustain any community, economy or nation is derived from the photosynthetic process—green plants growing on regenerating soil.”