The Power of Traditional Herding & Grazing: Bringing Back Balance
Hoofprints on the Land by Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, a fascinating and lyrical book exploring the deep and ancient working partnerships between people and animals, shows that herding cultures are not a thing of the past but a regenerative model for our future.
The foreword below by Dr. Fred Provenza, author of Nourishment and professor emeritus of Behavioral Ecology, briefly highlights the premise of Hoofprints on the Land and discusses how the practice of pastoralism can benefit both environmental and human health.
The following is an excerpt from Hoofprints on the Land by Ilse Köhler-Rollefson. It has been adapted for the web.
Hoofprints on the Land: A Foreword by Fred Provenza
Homo sapiens have been on Earth for roughly 300,000 years. During most of that time, our ancestors hunted and gathered for nourishment. Only in the past 10,000 years did we transition from hunters and gatherers to pastoralists and small-scale farmers and ranchers.
And only during the past century did we create civilizations dependent upon industrial agriculture, a move some anthropologists claim is the worst mistake our species ever made. That’s in part because we transformed from sunlight- driven ecological economies linked with the landscapes that nourish and sustain us, to economies disconnected from nature and utterly dependent upon fossil fuels.
It’s easy to understand why we embraced fossil fuels when you understand that the energy in a single barrel of oil is equivalent to 10 to 12 years of hard work by a human. Fossil fuels enabled agriculture to evolve from long days of back-breaking work into an industry where machines do most of the work. Globally, we now consume 100 million barrels of oil each day across all human activities.
Fossil fuels enabled human populations to rise precipitously from two million people in 10,000 BCE to a little less than a billion in 1800 to nearly eight billion people today. Our populations expanded exponentially during the twentieth century due to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture.
The Future of Oil and Natural Gas
For better or worse, oil and natural gas are projected to run out by the middle of this century, coal by the end. Prices will soar as fossil fuel abundance decreases. What will become of human populations and economies as the availability of fossil fuels declines?
Which peoples will suffer most due to lack of fossil fuels: Pastoralists sustained mainly by solar economies or people in nations like the United States and the United Kingdom who live almost exclusively on fossil-fuel economies?
The United States population of almost 330 million used almost 20 million barrels of oil each day in 2019, and the United Kingdom’s population of over 67 million used over 1 million barrels a day. And 2019 was an unrepeatable low-use year. The implications are dire, especially for the countries most dependent upon fossil fuels to support their economies and ways of life.
However, this seeming catastrophe is highlighting opportunities to produce foods in ways that nurture soil, water, plants, herbivores and people. Farming, ranching and pastoral ways of life could once again be at the heart of communities, but from soils and plants to livestock and humans, we will need to relearn what it means to be locally co-evolving with nature’s communities. In the process, we will need to transition our relationships with landscapes from egological to eco-logical.
Imagining A New Model
© Katy Gomez
That’s the tale at the heart of Ilse’s book as she beckons us to imagine a different model of food production. Through this wonderful account, she takes us on her personal journey.
Trained as a veterinarian in Germany, she was disillusioned with her work, so she became an anthropologist and travelled to Rajasthan to study the Raika camel nomads.
Her work with pastoralists, as she created a new life, took her to the international stage, highlighting the beauties and values of pastoral ways of life and defending their rights and those of shepherding cultures.
Today, livestock are under attack globally, ostensibly because they adversely affect human and environmental health, with an emphasis on the harmful effects of their emissions of the greenhouse gas methane.
This perspective is rejected in the many papers by scientists from respected universities who paint rosy pictures of a future without livestock.
In a vivid illustration of this mass delusion, some societies are now convincing themselves that ultra-processed plant-based faux meat and dairy is better than the real thing and that nature is a feeble-minded nitwit compared to the ‘time-tested wisdom’ of Silicon Valley technologies.
An Analysis on Herding Cultures
While emphasizing issues with intensive livestock farming, Ilse’s book is about those largely invisible herding cultures that regard farm animals as family rather than objects, and whose relationships with them are based not on exploitation but on reciprocity. Pastoralists engage with livestock in ways that are simultaneously good for animals, people and the planet. They are essential to upholding the web of life on Earth and ensuring its future functioning.
Ilse describes how herding cultures around the world have created an extensive body of knowledge and expertise about managing in partnership with livestock in an ethical way that perceives humans as a part of nature, rather than apart from and in antagonism with the natural communities that nourish and sustain all life. The ethics and practices of working with livestock in nature are antithetical to the view of animals as ‘machines’ from whom profits are to be maximised, and land as a ‘commodity’ from which resources are to be extracted.
The animal science profession prides itself on producing more outputs – eggs, meat, milk – using fewer animals and inputs but with little concern about the downstream costs: diminished plant and animal diversity below and aboveground as monoculture crops are grown to feed livestock; appalling animal welfare; and loss of rural livelihoods.
The machine model – animals as machines and genes as destiny –championed by many animal scientists has a penchant not to engage any of these ‘externalities’ that are caused by the ‘efficient system’ they promote.
This machine model is in stark contrast with the story Ilse tells of the ongoing co-evolution of pastoralists, livestock and environments. Pastoralists appreciate that genes are expressed in ever-changing landscapes and that culture is part of the process. These relationships involve extended families, and pastoralists strive to own portfolios of maternal lines that cover all eventualities.
A ‘breed’ for them is thus never static, ever a work in progress, constantly evolving as environments change. Merely seeking to conserve breeds and genes is yet another example of the reductionist approach that overlooks the importance of biological diversity as a complex phenomenon with genetic, epigenetic and cultural dimensions that link livestock with ever-changing environments.
Moreover, as Ilse points out, the industrial farming systems that produce the crops that support industrial livestock production systems are nearly always in conflict with nature. A farmer begins by clearing the land of native vegetation, and then prepares the soil by ploughing, harrowing and fertilizing. The next step is to seed a monoculture crop that is then protected with several applications of chemical fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and fungicides.
Finally, the crop is harvested and brought back to the barn or to the nearest silo where it is stored for transport to a processing unit that will turn it into ultra-processed foods. And in richer countries these activities are performed by machines that require fossil fuel. Consequently, agriculture is the largest contributor to biodiversity loss and the second largest industrial contributor to climate change.
To produce one calorie of food now requires two calories of fossil fuels for machinery, fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides. We use another eight to twelve calories to process, package, deliver, store and cook modern food. No species can survive long when expending ten to fourteen calories to obtain one calorie of energy.
Linking With the Landscape
Photo by Katy Gomez Catalina
Livestock and pastoralists are linked with landscapes through palates. An attuned palate, which enables creatures to meet needs for nutrients and self-medicate to rectify maladies, evolves from three interrelated processes: flavour-feedback associations, availability of phytochemically rich foods, and learning in utero and early in life to eat nourishing combinations of foods.
These processes occur when wild or domestic herbivores forage on phytochemically rich landscapes, are less common when domestic herbivores forage on monoculture pastures, are close to zero for herbivores in feedlots, and are increasingly rare for people who forage in modern food outlets.
Unlike our ancestors, the palates of many people are no longer linked in healthy ways with fertile landscapes that nourish the foods we eat.
Industrial farming and selection for yield, appearance and transportability diminish the flavour, phytochemical richness and nutritive value of fruits and vegetables for humans. Phytochemically impoverished pastures and feedlot diets can adversely affect the health of livestock and the flavour and nutritive value of meat and dairy for humans.
In contrast, when livestock eat diverse mixtures of plant species, the thousands of phytochemicals that plants produce bolster their health and protect livestock against diseases and pathogens through anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, antiparasitic and immunomodulatory effects.
The benefits to humans from eating phytochemically and biochemically rich meat and dairy accrue as livestock assimilate some plant phytochemicals and convert others into metabolites, all of which become meat, fat and milk that promote human health.
Utilizing Pastoral Knowledge
While the flavours of produce, meat and dairy have become blander, processed foods become ever more desirable as the food industry learns to link synthetic flavours with feedback from energy-rich compounds that obscure nutritional sameness and diminish health. Thus, the roles plants and animals once played in human nutrition have been usurped by processed foods that are altered, fortified and enriched in ways that can adversely affect appetitive states and food preferences.
The need to amend foods would be eliminated by naturally growing phytochemically rich fruits and vegetables, by allowing livestock to forage on phytochemically rich diets, and by creating cultures that know how to combine foods into meals that nourish and satiate.
Indeed, pastoralists are models for how to nourish people, the animals in their care and the diversity of plant and animal life on Earth. They raise and steward resilient breeds in diverse natural environments of immense value, now and in the future, even as we are all increasingly challenged to adapt to higher temperatures and less predictable weather patterns. The ability to adapt cannot be achieved without people who possess the skills and dedication to survive in challenging environments.
Pastoral knowledge will thus be essential as we transition from fossil-fuel based economies to the sun-driven economies that have sustained life for millennia. Beyond these important concerns are perhaps even greater considerations, as Ilse reminds us: ‘When you are in trouble you do not abandon long-standing relationships, you nurture them back to health.’
And as the Global Gathering of Women Pastoralists concludes in the Mera Declaration, ‘…it is by remaining pastoralists that we can be of greatest service to the entire human community.’
— Dr. Fred Provenza, professor emeritus, behavioral ecology, Department of Wildland Resources, Utah State University; author of Nourishment
Recommended Reads
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Hoofprints on the Land
How Traditional Herding and Grazing Can Restore the Soil and Bring Animal Agriculture Back in Balance with the Earth
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