206 Agroecology and Sustainability
The length of time that animals graze a particular paddock usually depends upon
the rate of recovery of the forage after grazing and its nutritional value, which
requires farmers or ranchers to become attentive observers of their pastures and all
that is growing there.
A group of farmers wanted to know how they could tell whether the switch to
management intensive rotational grazing was making their farms more sustainable.
In response, the Land Stewardship Project established a biological, social and
financial monitoring project, conducting research on six diversified livestock and
dairy farms that used management intensive rotational grazing. The project team
that worked together for three years included university researchers and state
agency staff in addition to the six farmers and LSP staff. To conduct biological
monitoring, researchers helped the six farmers collect biological, physical and
chemical soil quality data from 60 plots and make observations about pasture veg-
etative species and ground cover. They sampled wells and kept precipitation
records. The farmers learned to survey their land for breeding birds, frogs and
toads, and they helped fisheries scientists survey streams passing through four of
the team farms and through one paired farm to analyse the effects of management
intensive rotational grazing on stream banks and stream invertebrate and fish pop-
ulations.
These farms were seen as natural habitats, not as ecological sacrifice areas. The
farmers wanted to find out if the soil and the water quality in streams on their
farms were improving, just as they wanted to know if their financial bottom lines
were improving by cutting production costs. They were not accepting the ‘inevita-
ble’, that they must get big or get out.
The farmers in the monitoring project, and many others who have been con-
stituents of the Land Stewardship Project, practise holistic management, a decision
making process based on goal setting, planning and monitoring. This process was
developed by Allan Savory, who founded the Center for Holistic Resource Man-
agement in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1984. Land Stewardship Project staff
taught many holistic management courses throughout the Upper Midwest. They
developed a research project to monitor the effectiveness of management decisions
made by the six farmers who had taken the course and were making the switch
from conventional grazing to management intensive rotational grazing.
Holistic management contains four elements that distinguish it from conven-
tional farm management and provide managers with strong incentives to make
environmentally sound decisions. First, as part of the goal-setting process, it directs
managers to develop a long-term vision for how they want the landscape to look
far into the future. Second, the model teaches basic recognition of ecosystem proc-
esses that farms are dependent upon: the water cycle, the mineral cycle, plant suc-
cession and energy flow (Savory, 1998). Farmers strive to understand these processes
and harmonize their farming practices with them. For example, farmers can rely
on nitrogen fixation in legumes and the recycling of nutrients in manure to pro-
vide fertility for fields. Third, holistic management places a high value on biologi-
cal diversity both in crop systems and in areas on the land not used for farming.