WITH more than 60 per cent of Queensland now officially drought-declared, it's never been more important to acknowledge the effects of overgrazing and desertification, a workshop has been told.
Speaking at a series of workshops organised by RegenAG and Milkwood Permaculture, organisations that implement and convene regenerative agriculture educational events around Australia, Holistic management advocate Allan Savory gave a rousing presentation on how producers must begin to reverse the impact on the land and oceans and, in turn, reverse climate change.
For more than 40 years, Mr Savory has been pioneering a holistic approach to farm management, offering land stewards a way to make grazing, land management and financial decisions that positively impact land health and productivity.
Based on a decision making framework, holistic management results in ecologically regenerative, economically viable and socially sound management of the world's grasslands.
Co-founding director of RegenAG Kym Kruse said it was an honour to have someone of Mr Savory's standing in the agricultural community make themselves available for the series of seminars.
"It's so important to have workshops and days like this and it's great that we were able to bring Allan and his message to the major cities and also that people made the effort to travel to be here," Mr Kruse said.
"It was great to see so many people from all different backgrounds coming along and opening up to the possibility of reversing the effects of desertification on their properties and implementing some of Allan's techniques and strategies."
Mr Kruse said holistic management taught people how to think and plan holistically. For regenerating the land, holistic management educated about the relationship between large herds of wild herbivores and the grasslands, and then helped people develop strategies for managing herds of domestic livestock to mimic those wild herds in order to heal the land.
"This is based on four key principles that highlight the symbiotic relationship between large herds of grazing animals, their predators and the grasslands," he said.
Mr Kruse said holistic management embraced and honoured the complexity of nature, and used nature's models to bring practical approaches to land management, and restoration.
He said implementing holisitic management on-property took some time but urged land owners to stick with it.
"You have to be patient because the economic, environmental and social benefits are enormous.
"Graziers across the world have discovered that they can improve production of their herds while improving water and mineral cycles of environments under a holistic management regime," Mr Kruse said.
Mr Savory spoke to more than 1500 people across Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne during his tour.
"People are coming to understand that management needs to be holistic and we need to embrace social, environmental and economic complexity," Mr Savory said. "We cannot be reductionist without producing unintended consequences."
Mr Savory said it was important for everyone to understand the significance of agriculture in their everyday lives.
"Poor land means poor people and this can produce a string of social problems which are, simply put, just symptoms of land degradation," he said.
"There are barriers to addressing these problems but once we acknowledge them, we can begin to tackle them."
Mr Savory said agriculture was most commonly thought of specifically as 'crop production' but it incorporated far more than this.
"Agriculture is the production of food and fibre from the world's land and waters - it's forestry, fishery, ocean and crops. We're finding problems arising from agriculture producing more eroding soil than food, global desertification, biodiversity loss and climate change," Mr Savory said.
"In the city, in my experience, there's very little concern about where agriculture is heading.
"People don't realise they can't have anything without it - it's the entire basis of civilisation and we must respect that. Holistic management is profoundly simple - but not easy.
"It's not easy because it's a new way of thinking and to change our behaviour is never easy - but it is certain that we can use livestock to reverse land degradation."
