Allan Savory
Holistic Management — a whole-farm decision framework built around herd impact and planned recovery, and the most argued-over method in the field.
The record
- Standing
- foundational work
- Based
- Savory Institute · Boulder, Colorado
- The observation
- As a game and research officer in what is now Zimbabwe and Zambia, that land where animals had been excluded was degrading worse than land grazed by herds and then rested.
- Founded
- The Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe in 1992, with Jody Butterfield, donating a ranch as a learning site; and the Savory Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 2009.
- The framework
- Holistic Management is a decision-making framework rather than a grazing chart; Holistic Planned Grazing is the livestock practice within it.
- Standing in the literature
- Contested. Peer-reviewed reviews and meta-analyses report mixed or absent evidence for the claimed ecological gains when planned grazing is compared with other rotational systems.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Savory’s starting observation came from wildlife management, not agriculture: on African rangeland, ground from which animals had been removed was degrading faster than ground that was grazed hard and then rested. That inverted the standard remedy for desertification, which was to destock.
What he built out of it is broader than a grazing plan. Holistic Management is a decision framework — a way of testing any management choice against a stated whole, social and financial as well as ecological — with planned grazing as one practice inside it. Many ranchers report that the framework changed how they make decisions regardless of the grazing question.
The grazing claims are a different matter and this record does not endorse them. Reviews by Briske and colleagues, and later meta-analyses, find the evidence for the claimed ecological advantages inconsistent or absent when Holistic Planned Grazing is compared with other rotational systems, and note that much of the supporting evidence originates with the Institute or with practitioner accounts. The method is included here because it is genuinely influential and because a register that only listed the uncontested would be a poor record of the field.
Where to read them
- What is Holistic Management? — Savory Institute
- The Science and Methodology of Holistic Planned Grazing (PDF) — Savory Institute The Institute’s own statement of the case.
- Rotational Grazing on Rangelands: Reconciliation of Perception and Experimental Evidence (PDF) — USDA ARS The counter-case, from the rangeland science literature.
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.