What is Holistic Management?

Holistic Management gives us the power to regenerate grasslands from an ecological, economic, and social perspective. While regenerating Earth’s desertifying global grasslands is our mission here at the Savory Institute, Holistic Management is so much more than just grazing.

Holistic Management is a framework for managing complexity. The living world is comprised of beautifully and infinitely complex adaptive living systems – land, animals, people, plants, fungi, and more all interconnected and in relationship – and the way we manage decisions amidst these complex living systems matters.

In this modern, industrial era, we have all been taught from an early age to reduce a problem down to its simplest components. This reductionist thinking works for machines and other “complicated” systems whose individual parts can be fully defined and understood, but when biology enters the picture, so too do randomness and emerging properties. Much to our chagrin, living systems cannot be controlled, only influenced. When managing these complex living systems, we must shift from “control” to “cooperation.”

Whether you are managing a farm, a family, or an organization, Holistic Management provides a framework for making decisions that ensure ecological, social, and financial needs are met, both in the short and long term.

Holistic Management provides a framework for decision-making – rooted in the fundamentals of ecosystem processes – and with a suite of planning procedures that include planned grazing, land planning, financial planning, and ecological monitoring.

The most well-known aspect of Holistic Management is Holistic Planned Grazing (HPG), though they are often mistaken as being one and the same.

While Holistic Management is the overall framework for decision-making, HPG is a planning procedure for charting grazing moves that considers the time that a plant is exposed to a grazing animal so that the plant’s recovery is planned. In short, HPG helps farmers, ranchers, and pastoralists get animals to the right place at the right time with the right behavior and for the right reasons.

In addition to planned grazing, the suite of Holistic Management planning procedures also includes land planning, financial planning, and ecological monitoring.

[B.A.]

These insights from Holistic grazing are so important right now, where governments try to ban meat eating and dairy. Offcourse there is a grey area here, but livestock and cattle is crucial ❤

[arielcarol]

When you are eating grass fed animals, you do not need to eat as much of it to have your nutritional needs met!

[jaymannewell]

If this doesn't have a million likes by may I will be sad.

[rogercoronell]

For evolving and thriving human need to come back to get in synchrony with nature, with our Earth, our Sun and entire Universe! To reach Humanity is up to each one of us.

[realitycheck]

My grandfather and his local neighbors were doing mob grazing and pasture rotations back in the 1930s...my Dad followed and today I am doing likewise.. my daughter is now learning from me.

[JorgeFredyNunez]

Is there the possibility of having audio in Spanish?

[adamfontana]

Such a great and simple idea. I have seen the difference on my little 10 acres.

[jaimehernandezamin]

Hello! Can I translate the video to Spanish, a small chip in from my part.

[peterclark]

The video could have provided an extra minute or so to explain how deep, friable 'cathedral' soils are made and sustained, which can attenuate droughts and flooding by storing rainfall in situ naturally, and by doing so addressing existential concerns such as food security along with the Eden-ification (beauty) of the land used by pastoralists who know they are part of an ecology wherever they are situated. We can leave viewers to work out the nutritional density benefits of herbivore meat (Keto-Carnivore) at a later time.

[moldyketchuphead]

Other than permaculture, I haven't been able to find guidance on how to holistically manage my own 1/2 acre plot. Are there small animals like poultry or others than can be managed on a smaller scale? I think it's great to think big with large scale regenerative agriculture, but I also think individually we can all make a difference as well.

[downbntout]

Pretty video, discusses HM of rangelands well. But Alan Savory intended HM's decision framework to fit all kinds of enterprises, right on up to governments. It's a persistent perception that HM is only about cows.

[b_uppy]

You said every year. Burning occured where the animals failed to graze. *When the grass oxidizes, its unpalatable (also low nutrition).* You do know what oxidation of grass does? (especially since I told you).
The grazing itself is the regenerative act.

The oxidation determined the burn area. '20 acres' is too small to attract the large herds, especially when the surrounding area is in bad shape as well.
We now know how to manage without burning. When farming and ranching, it is mob grazing and alley cropping trees, shrubs, vines and perennials. In urban and residential areas we with trees.
We need to restore the ecosystem that built up the water.

The trees are slowly creeping back in, naturally.
It is necessary because water sources like Oglalla Aquifer are below 20%, due to bad ag practices.

[peterclark]

Only one problem, with 'hoofs break up compaction'? That's always been the most beneficial function of roots, protozoa, fungi, worms, etc.
Some graziers limit the size of their beasts for that specific reason. For those with larger beasts only accelerated rotation can avoid it (more work).
Pastoral care for a planet beckons all on this journey. Reclaim deserts, restore rain distribution, endless, seamless ecosystems nourishing on many levels a loving 'master'.

[kivar]

This is so good, when comes the time that this is normal?

[practicalphilosophy]

Opossums for example eat five thousand harmful flees a year - start with your back yard and the animal friends there by giving them their space and assisting in their harmonious survival.

[b_uppy]

Nice looking, but too simple.
Many corporate conglomerates can use this video to say 'see, we're doing this' and the lack of info would fool consumers lacking knowledge in what constitutes good versus bad.

Thank you for showing the land as savannas instead of grassland alone.
Native Americans messed up when they started burning. It helped them spot prey and predators, but it also meant they had keep burning because they had altered fauna patterns so much that grasses oxidized, and this needed more burning.
It removed critical resources, and now we must work on planting trees so water recharges the aquifers thru the carbon left by trees' tap roots.

[pohkeee]

The irony in an economic system? If you’re going to populate and regenerate the grasslands of the world? You have to have the social and/or monetized, incentive to maintain sufficient ruminant herds. In other words…we must find humane ways to continue meat consumption. Idealized and “ Disney” fairytales are not an ecological consideration to Mother Nature’s balance. We are either working with Earth’s ecological realities, or we are creating more problems. Wisdom isn’t always the warm and fuzzy easy answer.