The global food system faces a major challenge in providing enough food for the world’s largest human population, which already exceeds 8 billion people. Achieving this becomes even more complicated when one also reduces reliance on fossil fuels, which have fueled a high-input, high-impact agricultural system over the last century.
In the livestock sector, it is important to distinguish the more industrial systems, which are very problematic, from the more extensive practices linked to the territory and the mobility of the animals. The latter are credited with extensive land use and high greenhouse gas emissions, but in fact such impacts are positive as they mimic the natural action of wild herbivores. That these have been extremely abundant over the past million years shows that mobile grazing can produce similar amounts of animal-derived food as today, but in a much more sustainable way.
Deciding which areas to graze, which forage crops are best suited to a particular herd situation, or when it is time to move to other pastures are decisions pastoral peoples have been making for millennia.
The adaptation of these principles to modern conditions has led to the emergence of regenerative agriculture. Livestock exposed to mobile practices play a key role in this, providing fertilizer that can regenerate soil, restore its fertility and sequester carbon from the atmosphere. These benefits have resulted in an enthusiastic community adopting it, which is quite a novelty in a rural world in deep crisis. However, its practice is based on adaptive decision-making, which means deciding on the density of livestock and, based on a constant assessment of the condition of the grass, determining whether it is time to move them to another location. This decision-making is inherently complex and difficult to communicate, making it difficult for a wider audience to adopt regenerative practices.
Traditional grazing can help. Their traditional knowledge is complex, based on the integration of diverse information from different disciplines, and has faced the same challenges as regenerative practices for millennia. Deciding which areas to graze, what forage crops are best for a particular herd situation, or when it’s time to move to other pastures are decisions that pastoral peoples have made for millennia and have refined through practice, error, and insight. . It is knowledge that is passed from generation to generation, but that does not mean that it cannot be systematized, catalogued, and made available to society.
In a recent scientific publication – conducted by a team of 13 scientists [incluido el autor de este artículo] and pastoralists from nine countries on three continents – from 716 identified plants, 35 indicators used in grazing systems to describe forage species were identified. Each of these indices describes issues relevant to animal husbandry, such as botanical traits, livestock behavior during grazing, and the effects of these plants on animal body condition and health.
There are novel applications in primary production and food systems that can benefit greatly from learning from the Global South
In addition, when using this type of knowledge, ten common principles emerge, such as how plants interact with livestock, identifying preferred or avoided plant species, considering different livestock species, or planning movements at different times. scaled to optimize use of available plant resources. A theme so common in agronomy, such as the palatability of plants, does not feature in this compendium of indicators, as traditional shepherds believed it to be a trait that varies with place and time, reflecting these dynamic relationships between plants and animals brings.
It is striking that despite the wide variety of pastoral cultures populating habitats from the tropics to boreal tundra and from wetlands to deserts, common elements occur. It confirms the principle in the study of traditional ecological knowledge that the universal is expressed in the local, since the logic of ecological functionality is common to all these systems, and underlines its usefulness for understanding adaptive management.
This study thus underlines the importance of learning from the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples and local populations. There are novel applications in primary production and food systems that can benefit greatly from learning from the Global South and the traditional knowledge that persists in the Global North. Sophistication and utility are not exclusively a question of the new, as there is much to adopt and adapt for use in the territory whose persistence over millennia tells us much about its sustainability, from which we have so much to learn right now.
Pablo Manzano Baena He is an Ikerbasque Fellow at the Basque Center for Climate Change (BC3) and a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki.
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