Bountiful Africa

2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Winner, Operation Hope. Allan Savory and Holistic Management Africa have shown the world that poverty and hunger are aided by empowering people with the knowledge and skills to produce their own food on their own land. Watch the video below to see how ruminants on land, managed properly, produce not only healthy food systems, but sustainable economies and vibrant biodiversity. Then, compare that to the devastation of big agribusiness.

"Allan Savory's project, titled "Operation Hope," is an ongoing effort to reverse the desertification that is spreading across the world's savannas and grasslands like a disease. It is rapidly changing farmland into deserts.

What makes the effort unusual for Savory, a biologist, is his use of what he called "the most universally condemned tool in the world" -- livestock. Farming is perhaps the oldest means by which humans have affected the world's climate.

The destruction of healthy soil by compaction, overgrazing and toxic levels of manure that poison the earth and emit climate-warming methane are some of the reasons raising livestock has traditionally been discouraged as an environmentally conscious farming technique.

But Savory was not impressed by environmentalists' arguments, nor by the efforts of commercial seed companies to engineer genetically modified crops to be drought-resistant. "Any scientist can grow green plants with technology," he said. What was unsustainable was "to be growing more green plants on soil that is failing us."

The technique Savory devised does not simply rotate the herds from one nearby plot of land to another but couples their migration with military precision."  NY Times, read the full article here