COWS SAVE THE PLANET
HILDA LABRADA GORE: Cows have gotten a bad rap in recent years. Their flatulence and burps have been cited as contributing to climate change. But what if that’s not the case? What if, in fact, cows are actually helping save the planet? Judith D. Schwartz is a journalist and the author of Cows Save the Planet—and Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth. She explains how cattle and other ruminants are changing the soil for the better, provides details on soil’s micro and macro diversity (including “megafauna” such as earthworms) and reminds us that the very minerals we seek for our own health are found in the soil. Judith, how did you come up with the title of your book?
JUDITH SCHWARTZ: As often happens, the title came upon me. I was actually writing a book about soil. This was a decade ago, when people weren’t talking about soil. Writing a book about soil back at that time was lonely. It was me, my books and my sources. I thought, “Soil is amazing.” No one else was talking about it. I thought, “I can’t call my book Soil Is Important. You Should Care About It and I Will Tell You Why.” I didn’t think that was going to make me many friends. One day, my son had a bunch of books on the floor. I bent down to pick one up. I saw that it was a book by Gary Larson (of Far Side fame) called Cows of Our Planet, and it showed a ring of cows like the shape of the globe. I thought, “Cows of our planet. Cows Save the Planet.” That’s how it happened. From then on, it wouldn’t let me go.
HG: Do you still think it’s true that cows save the planet?
JS: I do, but at this point, I would add an asterisk to that. I would say cows save the planet, but not just cows—all other animals, wildlife, plants and living things. Because the more I explore, report and research, the more I think that biodiversity is the key to life on Earth. Life creates life. Life begets life. Thinking of animals is interesting—because it’s that notion of a four-legged thing that moves that gets people to say, “What? Cows save the planet?”—and it opens things up for people to recognize the extent to which animals create our landscapes. We think about cows and other animals being in the landscape; we think that you have this landscape, and the animals happen to be there, but no, the landscape wouldn’t be what it is were it not for the wildlife. Now we have livestock, but it was their wild antecedents that created landscapes such as the great plains of the U.S., the savannas of Africa and the grasslands of the world. If we look at forests, we look at other wildlife that created those conditions.
HG: Say more about that. What do you mean that they “created” those landscapes?
JS: One thing I have come to learn is that nature, species and collections of species create the conditions under which they thrive. Let’s think about ruminant animals. We have cows now, but in the past and in wild lands, we had all kinds of antelope and buffalo, and in Africa, wildebeest. These creatures were running across the landscape. They created the grasslands. They built the deep-rooted grasses, the rich soil that goes down meters. The roots of the grasses could go down several meters deep, which means that the soils were that deep. That perpetuated the conditions under which these animals thrived. Those ecosystems were created by the behavior and the digestive habits of ruminant animals. I can go into more detail about that.
HG: It reminds me of what Joel Salatin says, “Cattle move, mob and mow.” They, and wildlife, are doing all these things. They are not only using the land but also fertilizing it and making it richer.
JS: They do many things at once. To a large extent, that behavior has to do with their response to predators. The way that I have articulated this is that in nature, plants are managed by plant-eating animals. Those plant-eating animals are managed by predators. These animals are moving. They are not just saying, “There’s a wolf. I think I’m going to get out of the way.” Rather, they see a wolf, they bunch up and flee en masse. That behavior has a lot of implications.
They are trampling seeds into the soil so that a diversity of grasses has a chance to germinate. They are pressing in plant matter—decaying plant matter—so it can be broken down by microbial life and incorporated into the soil. That’s the building of the soil. Their hoofs make imprints, their dung adds nutrients and their urine adds moisture. All of this is happening when they flee very rapidly and intensely.
You might look at a landscape after a herd of antelope has been chased away by a lion. It might look rugged, and everything looks messy. What’s happening is that those actions are kickstarting many ecological processes. In our culture, we think that a tame landscape or vista is healthy and desirable, but no. Nature works in action and disturbance. That’s how all of these processes happen—the cycling of moisture, carbon, nutrients, energy and even information doesn’t happen by having a bunch of animals standing there looking pretty.
HG: It’s not about a bucolic vista where we see the cattle on the hillside. It can be more chaotic than that. What came to mind when you were speaking is forest fires. For years, we have been saying, “Let there never be a fire in this area.” Eventually, nature takes care of itself and presents the right conditions for fires to occur, but maybe there is a reason. Even though to our eyes it seems like it’s ravaging a landscape, it may be a necessary process of pruning. There can be growth in the future.
JS: I agree with you halfway, and I will explain why. There are landscapes that co-evolved with fire. Consider a tree like the eucalyptus tree. Remember I said that species in nature create the conditions under which they thrive? Eucalyptus trees need fire in order to break open their seed pods and for those plants to germinate. In turn, that tree will create the conditions for fire. However, in many environments, fire is a rare thing. In grasslands, you get occasional fires from lightning. What happens is that you get a burn that stimulates certain ecological processes, but it is contained because, in a healthy landscape, you will have a lot of moisture so the fire will not get out of control.
A way that Allan Savory has talked about this is that we know that vegetation needs to be managed. The nutrients in vegetation and biomass need to be cycled. That can be done biochemically through fire. The vegetation burns, and you get ash. That creates the conditions for pioneer species to grow, and you get that cycle happening again and again, or that cycling can occur through biology. That is through the guts or the digestive processes of animals. I would say that now we are out of balance, in that we have much more vegetation being cycled biochemically, whereas our landscapes, health, well-being and biodiversity would be better served if the balance were shifted toward biological cycling.
HG: I want to go back to the animals. We blame cattle for climate change. If they used to run wild, mob, move and mow, maybe that was part of the secret. Now we are out of balance because we are keeping them locked up in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Is that why people are blaming them for climate change— because in those conditions it’s not ripe for enriching the soil or their health or our health?
JS: Yes. When you confine animals, you have taken away the processes that you see in a more spread-out scenario. Ordinarily, you would have resources; the animals would create and give waste, which would be a resource for nature. Everything from the dung beetles, which would bury the dung to the microbial life. These processes build the soil and create the conditions for all kinds of soil life to thrive, enhancing the conditions for a diversity of vegetation to grow. It’s taking what could be a resource and turning it into a pollutant. Those conditions are not good for anybody. It becomes a problem. It’s understandable that people respond and say,
“This isn’t good.” However, going that step further and saying “Cows are bad” is a leap that doesn’t quite make sense. People want to blame something but blaming cattle for our many ecological problems is a symptom of our collective disconnection from the land, because when people are in ongoing relation to the land, then they are observing how animals are affecting the landscape. The more we observe, the more we understand, and the more insights we have to better manage our landscapes.
I want to bring up the fire question, which put me in mind of another animal that often gets blamed for problems. I’m talking about donkeys in Australia. In Australia, donkeys were brought in as pack animals. When the people who arrived from the West were developing the Outback, they had lots of donkeys carrying things. The donkeys helped people as they were homesteading. Then, mechanized transport became available, and people didn’t need the donkeys anymore. They let them go. Many people know that among the many attributes of donkeys is that they live a long time, upwards of forty years. We had all these donkeys running around the Outback creating bands and family groups. That’s the situation in many of the rural areas in Australia, such as Western Australia, which is a vast province and state. They said, “There are all these donkeys. Donkeys aren’t like kangaroos, bandicoots or any of these other animals. They are not native. They are causing problems. They are running around and knocking over people’s fences. We must get rid of them.” That was the narrative about donkeys—that they had to get rid of them.
But a farmer named Chris Hagler thought differently; I have interviewed him extensively. He and his family manage an area of land the size of Singapore, the size of the five boroughs of New York. It’s huge. Their goal or the purpose of their outfit is to restore the landscape. That’s it. They were using cattle in all the right ways, using holistic management and holistic plan grazing, and they were making tremendous progress. They were restoring the land. The main challenge they had was fire.
Kimberley in Western Australia is a very rough and rugged area. There’s fire all the time. At any moment in Kimberley, some area is burning. They were using cattle to control the vegetation, bring moisture and nutrients, add carbon to the soil and things that minimize the intensity and frequency of fire. Then these donkeys showed up and Chris said, “That’s interesting. The donkeys go where the cattle won’t go. They can be part of our fire crew.” His father found ways of using helicopters to herd the donkeys. This was all fabulous except for one thing. The government had already decided the donkeys were pests. This has been going on for years. The donkeys get a reprieve, and then the government says, “We forgot about your donkeys. We want you to get rid of them.” “Wait a second. We are making great progress, and we have had fewer fires, and the fires have been less intense.” This continues.
A little bit more about the donkeys, because this is relevant to this whole question of animals. Scientists have been researching, and they are finding out yet more about how donkeys help that landscape. First of all, they dig wells, and in digging wells they get water for themselves, but also for other wildlife. The way that they move their hoofs, they kick up the dirt and they move the leaves around, which creates favorable conditions for many of the small marsupials that have been struggling. Then there’s this wonderful scientist named Arian Wallach who talks about invisible megafauna and was involved in donkey research in Australia. Because the donkeys aren’t native, most scientists are not paying attention to how the donkeys’ behavior has an impact on the land. Many of these species are looked upon as if they don’t belong, but they are performing ecological functions that have not been accomplished for thousands of years since the end of the Late Pleistocene in Australia when they lost their megafauna.
HG: Tell us a little bit about undergrazing or resting the land too much. Can you address that?
JS: I have been to Zimbabwe. I spent eight days with biologist Allan Savory (known for developing the Holistic Management model for livestock in which animals’ actions and behavior promote ecological restoration) and Jody, his wife. I could see that the land was wonderful. Allan is a master tracker. He can read the landscape like no one else I have ever seen. That was wonderful because I could see from many angles evidence of the improvement of the land thanks to managed grazing. An example was the extent of flooding. He took us to the parkland where you could see from the debris that was up on branches, the floodwaters were several meters high in the rainy season because it wasn’t being held on the land; whereas at Dimbangombe at the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, the debris was only up to our knees. When someone can show you this and you understand in a visceral way, it stays with you. I remember he turned to the jeep that we were using and said, “On parkland, the water would have been higher than this vehicle.” I have also had several opportunities to go to other game parks in southern Africa because my husband is from South Africa.
The more I learned, the more I could see the suffering of the land. That includes undergrazing. One way to think about undergrazing is that it’s a suboptimal disturbance, or it doesn’t have enough animal impact. All the ways that the actions of the animals can enhance the landscape—by cycling moisture, nutrients, carbon and energy—when there’s not enough animal impact, then it’s much more stagnant. You do not get that cycling. One result is that the vegetation doesn’t get pressed into and become incorporated into the soil. That in itself is huge because then you have decaying and drying out plant matter sitting on top of the ground. That has several consequences. It’s blocking the sun from any new vegetation that’s trying to grow. It’s also dried out. If there’s a fire, it’s going into flames. It’s keeping everything stagnant, so important cycling doesn’t occur.
Then the soil beneath gets dried out. When the soil gets dried out, then you start losing the life in the soil. As that plant matter decays, it is also throwing carbon up into the atmosphere because it’s getting broken down again, like Allan says, biochemically. It’s oxidizing. Fire is one form of oxidation, and the breaking down of biomass without it being incorporated into life forms is another.
HG: You mentioned water and how the soil is rich on Allan’s property and that it can retain the water. When soil is undisturbed, I imagine you would get a lot of runoff because the soil can’t hold the water.
JS: You are losing more soil and then you get bare soil. Bare soil absorbs heat. When you have plants on soil, those plants are cycling moisture. They are transpiring, and that’s a cooling mechanism, whereas when you have solar energy and sunlight beaming down on bare soil, it heats up. Above a certain temperature—something like one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, which is not that hard for bare soil to get to—you start losing microbes. Microorganisms start dying. What I’m describing is the process of desertification.
HG: The less healthy the soil is, the less healthy we are as a planet. If we try to grow crops on that degenerated soil, they’re not going to have the same nutritional value because there’s less organic matter in the soil.
JS: What often happens is, to make up for the
lack of life in the soil, that processing is outsourced. We outsource those processes to chemicals. We are pumping chemicals into the soil to try to get something that looks like a crop. Many crop seeds are engineered to be able to grow in spite of those conditions, as with Roundup crops that are designed to withstand the onslaught of those chemicals.
HG: Years ago (and they are probably still doing it), people noticed poor conditions in some of the slaughterhouses—feces were getting mixed into the ground beef. Instead of cleaning up the slaughterhouses, they started irradiating the meat to get rid of the effect of the feces! When you talk about chemical input, it’s like we are detached from nature. We have messed this up, so let’s add this poison on top of it. We are making a continual stacked-up mess.
JS: I remember a revelation I had when I was researching Cows Save the Planet. I was talking to a farmer who made the observation that the nutrients—magnesium, calcium and all the minerals that are in his children’s multivitamins—are what’s in the soil. When we test our soil to see whether it’s in good condition to give us healthy crops, it’s interesting to think about the parallels between the body of the Earth and our physical bodies.
HG: You mentioned carbon, and I think we need to sequester more carbon again because we are disconnected from nature. Regenerative farming does exactly that. What are we talking about here, and what are other ways to sequester carbon that could benefit the planet?
JS: That’s where I came into the whole topic of soil. It was pointed out that over time, more carbon has gone into the atmosphere from disturbing and mistreating the soil compared to the burning of fossil fuels. Over time, that has been a huge source of carbon in the atmosphere, and it still is. At first, I was thinking more in a linear sense like, “Let’s get carbon in the soil.” I started to explore how that was done. As time has gone on, I see that the drawing down of carbon into the soil needn’t be the goal in and of itself as much as it is a byproduct of working in harmony with nature, because that is what nature does. I fear sometimes that if carbon sequestration is looked at as a goal in and of itself, then sometimes we end up missing some of the other aspects of good regenerative farming approaches such as managing biodiversity.
HG: It reminds me of when we teach children to do well on the test. They may get an “A,” but did they absorb the information, learn other skills about teamwork and curiosity? If we are focused on one goal only, we might be missing other things in the process.
JS: Sometimes, with the goal of a healthy Earth, we get caught up in “getting an A” on the test of sequestering carbon. The extreme version of that is to bury carbon, to put it all in a box underground. Whereas if you look at the whole system, you want that carbon in life forms. We want more life, and carbon is the embodiment of that life.
HG: You say in the subtitle of Cows Save the Planet that it’s an “improbable” way to heal the soil and the planet and that there are other “improbable” ways. What are some of the improbable ways to heal the soil and the planet?
JS: It’s a funny question because it doesn’t feel improbable anymore; that reflected my sense of awe and surprise at how central soil is to getting back in balance with nature. I was still in a state of awe. An example is biodiversity. It was such a surprise to realize that biodiversity starts in the soil. Back then, “biodiversity” would have meant that we need to have polar bears, penguins and a variety of animals. We do, but we create the conditions for enhanced biodiversity by beginning in the soil and recognizing that 95 percent of land-based biodiversity is in the soil. There are species there we don’t even know, that haven’t even been identified.
We keep learning more, and much of what we are learning now is also about the fungal life in the soil and how central that is to sequestering carbon. It’s not just that one function of sequestering carbon, but rather what that means. It’s not an end in itself, but mycorrhizal fungi, the root-centered fungal networks, are moving that carbon around to serve all the plants and life in the soil. I remember being awed by the biodiversity in the soil and noticing how soil scientists talk about “soil megafauna.” That amused me to think of an earthworm as megafauna from the standpoint of the soil. When talking about these tiny creatures, an earthworm might look like an elephant to a microbe.
HG: You suggest that healing the soil can address much more than what we perceive as “climate change.” What are some of the other tough issues that can be affected by regenerating the soil?
JS: You mentioned our health. Because the food that we eat can only be as healthful as the soil in which it has grown; then the animals that we consume can only be as healthy as the soil that has nourished them through the grasses that the animals eat. Good health starts in the soil.
HG: To get specific, let’s say a chicken eats the earthworm and the earthworm ate some microbe. Let’s say that the first microbe wasn’t in the best situation because we have added all these chemicals. That little microbe isn’t that great. The earthworm isn’t feeling that great because it ate that, then the chicken eats the earthworm, then we eat the chicken. It’s going to have a ripple effect on us.
JS: The way that it would play out is that the chemicals would throw off the balance of microbial life in the soil. For example, for certain microbes, you might have overgrowth, and then for other microbes, you might have fewer of them. You might have fewer earthworms surviving, or maybe the bugs that the chickens eat would be less healthy; or, whereas the chickens are used to having a balanced diet of bugs, they might have only one bug.
HG: As we wrap up, I like to ask guests if people could do only one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend?
JS: Be in tune with your body, with what your body needs. So much in our food system is hijacking our sense of taste and energy that it leads us to crave fast energy rather than more sustaining energy. Also, pay attention to your body in the landscape; spend time outdoors in nature in a way where you are paying attention to where you are and giving yourself a chance to feel at home there. That, in itself, enhances not only my sense of well-being but my clarity about what I need. We are creatures of the land and we evolved in the context of our landscapes. Often, we forget that, because we are inside or we are rushed. We have so much to learn and benefit from by paying attention to our surroundings and allowing ourselves to find a home there.
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This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Winter 2023
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