Allan Savory
Background
Discussed in "The Regenerative Ranching racket": <https://medium.com/@unpopularscience/the-regenerative-ranching-racket-fe6cce917a42>
and "How Big Ag Bankrolled Regenerative Ranching": <https://jacobin.com/2022/03/big-agriculture-funding-regenerative-ranching-amp-grazing-soil-carbon>
American Grassfed Association
On June 23 (year unknown), Allan Savory was one of three featured speakers in the American Grassfed Association (AGA) Ranch Day line-up.[1] The event was held at the Flying B Bar Ranch near Denver, Colorado, which directed attendees to visit the website of the Savory Institute for more information, or to buy tickets.[2]
The Savory Method
According to Allan Savory, scientific evidence against his methods is irrelevant because Holistic Management "cannot be peer-reviewed." He has made this argument several times, perhaps most recently on Twitter in March of 2021[3] in response to scientific evidence showing that the beef supply White Oak Pastures provides for General Mills was heavily greenwashed. [4] White Oak Pastures is a "frontier founder" of the Savory Institute Land to Market program, which falsely advertised WOP's products as "carbon-negative beef."[5]
Coloniality
In a 2015 presentation (introduced by John Fullerton of the Capital Institute)[6], Allan Savory re-iterated his long-held position that Indigenous stewardship is to blame for environmental degradation:
How are we to use livestock to mimic those animals of the past? What do we have to guide us? We have had ten thousand years of pastoralists, whose whole culture is tied to their animals. That is their life. They are extremely knowledgeable about their environment and their connection to the environment, yet the way they handle their livestock—herding them, moving them, bunching them—had led to the formation of the great man-made deserts of antiquity in the Biblical Lands. They had done it slowly over ten thousand years, and when we look at the pastoralists of today still practicing those methods, like the Masai and Samburu in Kenya, the land is still turning to desert under pastoralism.
As the "solution" to this "problem," Savory designed his method of livestock management based on European military planning:
I found what I was looking for in military thinking. For over 300 years in Europe, military leaders fighting battles had to manage extremely complicated circumstances that were changing all the time and had to work out how to come up with the best possible plan right away. Why reinvent the wheel? I looked at how they had done it, and it made sense. They had taken very complicated immediate battlefield situations, divided them into little segments that the mind could cope with one at a time, with each step building on previous steps till they did indeed come up with the best possible plan right away. I’m not going to improve on that. Who’s going to improve on that?
He then promoted this method as infallible:
I designed it, did it, and it worked. It worked immediately because it had 300 years of experience behind it, and I can say to you with all sincerity that I am not aware of a single failure in now over fifty years if people do it this way.
Kiss the Ground
In the regenerative agriculture documentary Kiss the Ground, Allan Savory attributes poverty & violence in the Global South to rising populations & poor land management[7]
Sources
- ↑ http://www.americangrassfed.org/aga-ranch-day-speaker-line-up-announced/
- ↑ https://www.flyingbbar.com/events/
- ↑ https://twitter.com/allanrsavory/status/1368586780790906885?s=21
- ↑ https://plantbaseddata.medium.com/the-failed-attempt-to-greenwash-beef-7dfca9d74333
- ↑ https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/climatecollaborative/mailings/1633/attachments/original/PPT-FINAL-Regenerative_Mapping-min_compressed.pdf?1579205603; p. 41
- ↑ https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/greening-the-desert-holistic-management-in-the-era-of-climate-change/
- ↑ vimeo.com/465503465