Planned Grazing

From the Editor: I first attended Alan Savory and Stan Parson’s “Rancher School” in Albuquerque, NM in the early 1980s. Since that time, and throughout my academic career, I have advocated, taught and practiced the principles of the “Savory Grazing Method (or SGM)” as it was called in those days.

Only a short time after I completed the school, Alan and Stan decided to dissolve their partnership and go their separate ways. Alan founded Holistic Management International and Stan the Ranching for Profit School.

SGM (now Holistic Management) is a “method” and "methods" cannot be patented. As a result, the names the principles are presented under have proliferated. Although the fundamental ecological principles have not changed since those early days, we now have managed grazing, planned grazing, mob grazing, management intensive grazing, and perhaps a half-dozen others. (In fact, for some small degree of distinction, we choose to call what we do “Managing the Ranch as a Business with Restoration Grazing.”) Never-the-less, to this day I still find myself referring to it as “The Savory Grazing Method” in honor of the brilliant man from whose mind these ideas sprung.

This guide is a detailed book review of sorts, but perhaps it would be more accurately described as an abstract that condenses 864 pages of detail into 189 pages of concentrated information. First, "Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making" by Alan Savory with Jody Butterfield and "Holistic Management Handbook: Healthy Land, Healthy Profits by Jody Butterfield, Sam Bingam and Allan Savory" were condensed and summarized. Then, the summaries were complied into one with the result being organized into a logical sequence.

In no way is it intended to be a substitute for the original works. They are both highly recommended and readily available from Land & Livestock International, Inc., Holistic Management International, Amazon.com and many other sources.

Suggested uses might include:

•lesson plan guidelines for educators
•a study guide for students and
•a field guide and quick reference manual for practitioners

The material is organized into nine “Lessons:”

Lesson 1: Introduction
Lesson 2: The Strategic Goal
Lesson 3: The Four Fundamental Ecosystem Processes
Lesson 4: Tools for Ecosystem Management
Lesson 5: Management Guidelines
Lesson 6: Infrastructure Planning
Lesson 7: Grazing Planning
Lesson 8: Financial Planning
Lesson 9: Monitoring and Control

In sum: the primary objective was to capture the essence of the two works in as few words as possible and in a language understandable by the reasonably intelligent person without formal education in natural resource or business management.

My hope is to make these logical, common sense ideas available to a wider audience and, thereby, make a small contribution to the conservation of the world’s natural resources. If I have succeeded, that would be my only small claim to originality because the ideas are from the minds and the pens of Allan Savory, Jody Butterfield and Sam Bingham. The errors are mine.