What is desertification and why should we all be worried about it? Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert, and it is not only happening in arid, third-world countries; it is happening anywhere where there is too much bare ground.

Desertification occurs as a result of overgrazing by livestock, mostly cattle, sheep and goats, which gives off methane and leaves the soil bare. Or so we were all led to believe anyway…

Intense research over many years has revealed that where animals grazed, ferocious pack-hunting predators also flourished, making the herds grow bigger. This means that there is more dung and urine covering the food that the animals are grazing, so they have to keep moving, and it is this movement that actually prevents the overgrazing of plants, and the periodic trampling of the herds actually ensures good cover of the soil.

During the dry season, the grass that is above ground must decay biologically before the next growing season; if this does not happen, the grassland and the soil begin to die. If this does not happen, it begins to oxidise, which is an extremely slow process which smothers and kills grasses and leads to a shift to woody vegetation and bare soil, releasing carbon.

Scientists have believed for many years that burning grassland is good because it removes the dead material and it allows the plants to grow. Unfortunately though, this burning also releases carbon and other pollutants that are more damaging than pollution from 6,000 cars, actually causing desertification and climate change.

The only way to fight desertification and climate change, thereby ensuring that the rain actually sinks into the ground and plants grow, is to re-introduce grazing in large herds and mimicking nature in the way they travel, which also means holding the herds overnight in certain areas so that they actually prepare the crop fields, which has been shown to increases in crop yield dramatically.

Holistic management and planned grazing of larger herds does address all of nature’s complexity and our social, environmental, economic complexity. This type of management has proven itself in various countries, including in Zimbabwe and in the very arid Karoo in South Africa, where massive tracts of land have been reclaimed from desertification and where the vegetation, livestock and people are thriving.

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