Holistic Management: Development & Holistic Decision-Making Framework

Holistic Management, in particular Holistic Planned Grazing, came to the attention of many when its creator Allan Savory did a talk on it at the TED Conference in 2013.

Allan explains how livestock grazing is often demonised as being a major factor behind climate change and desertification but this is incorrect, livestock is not the problem, it is part of the solution. It is our mismanagement of resources and how we graze livestock that is the issue.  

The Four Key Insights For Grassland

During his career as an ecologist in Africa, Allan saw how through the removal of people and grazing animals, including extermination of 40,000 elephants, in National Parks that the former opinion was incorrect because desertification in fact increased in these areas. This finding was also mirrored in many areas in the United States where stock had been excluded.  

Through observations and reflections, Allan, working with others, developed what was termed the four key insights, patterns, that keep grassland in good health, prevent desertification and promote productivity:  

• Nature functions in wholes 
• The brittleness scale 
• Predator-prey connection 
• Plant and soil recovery time 

The brittleness scale (1-10) reflects how well humidity is distributed through the year and how quickly vegetation breaks down. The level of brittleness (1 – evergreen tropical rain forest, 10 – true desert) impacts how an environment responds to influences and management such as grazing.  

What Allan observed in brittle environments was that over-grazing by livestock leads to bare ground, poor water retention and desertification. However equally removing grazing altogether also leads to desertification. This is because in such dry environments, biological decay doesn’t occur without grazing animals, but leads instead to oxidation of dead material in the absence of biological decay. This, in turn leads to deterioration in plant communities and bare ground emerges.  

A Shift Away From Continuous Grazing 

The solution they found was to shift away from continuous grazing to a grazing system that mimics herds of migratory ruminants. This means, periods of short duration high stock density grazing, followed by long rest periods between grazing to allow full plant root recovery. With the animal’s saliva, urine and faeces stimulating biological breakdown of plant matter and greater herd impact creating a strong trampling effect leading to better ground cover and returning organic matter to the soil.  

Allan however recognised that a grazing strategy alone was not sufficient to tackle natures complexity, or the social, environmental and economic complexity required to keep the human population on the land.  

From this observation emerged the development of the Holistic Management Decision Making Framework and the four planning and monitoring procedures for land managers of Holistic-Financial Planning; Planned Grazing, Ecological Monitoring; Land Planning. We’ll discuss these further in the rest of this four part series.  

Holistic Decision-Making Framework

As outlined above, Holistic Management is more than just a grazing system, it is a decision-making framework that allows the user, farmers and land managers to simultaneously address the social, environmental, and economic complexities at play to develop soundness in both the short and long term.  

The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts 

The first key insight found during the development of the Holistic Management method was that nature functions in wholes and patterns, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. Relationships exist between different aspects of the whole meaning removing or altering one aspect will inadvertently impact another, often negatively.  

The Holistic Management Framework, shown in Table 1, moves away from Reductionist Management where decisions are based on only one or few factors to solve short term needs or problems to instead understanding that as above the world functions in wholes and that actions do not happen in isolation.  

Under Holistic Management, before moving to decision making and actions, we must first establish our ‘Whole Under Management’ and ‘Holistic Context’, these are then referred to during decision making to ensure that the social, environmental, and economic factors are all accounted for.  

Table 1. Holistic Management Framework: Savory Institute 

Source: https://savory.global/ebooks/ 

Defining Your ‘Whole Under Management’

Defining your Whole Under Management is to clarify what you are managing. Each of us is responsible for managing at least one whole, ourselves, but there may be several larger wholes such as a family, a farm or a business.  

In clarifying the whole, three key things must be identified: 

• The decision makers – identifying those directly involved in the management of the whole. 

• The resource base -this includes physical and human resources:  
• Land, buildings, equipment and other assets on which you will generate revenue or derive support,  

• The people who influence or are influenced by your management.  

• The money available or that you can generate from the resource base.  

Knowing who and what your whole includes helps determine who makes management decisions, who merely influences the decisions made and it helps put boundaries around what you will or will not manage.  

By referring back to the Whole Under Management when making decisions this ensures that actions are not taken that may impact, for example, the land or people without this being considered. It makes you more aware and thoughtful when making decisions but also more aware of resources available that can be utilised for better management decisions.  

A free introductory eBook, The Foundations of Holistic Management, is available through the Savory Institute website for those who would like to learn more: Savory Institute - Free eBook  

Daniel Stout, SAC Consulting