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If holistic management was a cooking pot, it would be a thoroughly traditional one with three legs – financial, ecological and social.
The idea is based on the recognition that crops and livestock are part of a larger system i.e. the farm. This, in turn, is part of a series of larger systems which eventually make up the global ecosystem. As practitioners try to manage their parts of the system, they keep in mind how they are affected by other parts of the system, and how the others might affect them. Holistic management also stresses the importance of the people involved in the farm, and the importance of shared goals.
On the planet, the Karoo has one the highest plant biodiversities. But it is also overgrazed and the veld severely diminished. Holistic management is one way Karoo farmers can regenerate the land in a sustainable way – with animals doing the work.
For instance, farmers attempt to manage livestock in such a way that the animals simulate the grazing patterns of native herding ungulates, to the benefit of the land. The key to this approach lies in time and timing of grazing, not numbers of grazers – many farmers find they need to increase their herd numbers, not decrease them, to achieve beneficial animal impact.
But holistic management is not just a grazing system. It assumes that farmers manage. For example, resting overgrazed land is not "letting nature do it" – it is making an active choice of a management tool that has known consequences (known, that is, if practitioners become conscious of them). Consequently, holistic management is not a system – it’s an ongoing process.
Karoo farmer Sholto Kroon is a committed practitioner of holistic resource management and his farm has been managed holistically since 1975. "By farming with nature, instead of against nature, we can return to a state of natural balance," he says. "In this balance, each animal relies on all the others to survive, and the state of the veld is carefully balanced by the state of the plants it supports." In other words, holistic management gets all the cycles of nature working again, a process which allows the land to regenerate.
Sholto’s farm, Klipdrift, which lies 35 kilometres outside Graaff-Reinet, produces beef, mutton, wool and mohair.
Sholto claims "This environment is pristine." He sprayed his cattle for ticks only once, during his first year of holistic farming. Since then he has used Aloe ferox to reduce ticks. Sholto Kroon is not a garrulous man. But he positively babbles when his lifelong passion is under discussion.
"Holistic management is not a recipe," he cautions, "and it can cause a huge problem if not controlled and monitored because it’s a helluva powerful tool. I get so excited when it rains – it’s an amazing feeling to see the veld return to its natural state because of something I managed."
He pauses to collect his thoughts, and says: "Holistic management is not the only way to regenerate land. But it’s the most pro-active way." |
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