Savory Institute

Regenerating the World's Grasslands

Grasslands cover nearly 1/3 of the Earth’s surface. Impacting every species on the planet yet degrading due to mismanagement, these vast and fragile landscapes play a critical role in ensuring a healthy future for us all.

A proven approach to regeneration

Savory’s core methodology, Holistic Management, is a time-tested framework for decision-making and grazing planning that is adaptable to anyone’s unique situation, while our Ecological Outcome Verification protocol provides the feedback to ensure your management is moving in the right direction.

Holistic Management: Framework for Regenerating Land & Livelihoods

More than just the planned grazing for which we are known, Holistic Management is a decision-making framework for balancing the ecological, financial, and social needs of any complex system and creating truly regenerative outcomes for all involved.

A framework for Managing Complexity

Holistic Management For millennia, large herds of grazing herbivores co-evolved with grasslands. With Holistic Management, we can embrace this symbiotic relationship and use livestock as a key player in regenerating our global grasslands.

How Holistic Management Works

The power to regenerate lands and livelihoods lies not in our practices but in how we manage the ecological, financial, and social dynamics. More than just a grazing system, Holistic Management is a framework for making decisions amidst the ever-changing conditions of the living world.

Specifically, it includes...

• A Decision-Making Framework: For defining your north star, finding alignment amongst decision-makers, and ensuring your actions move you in the right direction.
• Planning Procedures: A set of procedures, specifically for those managing land and livestock, to help you plan in a simple and step-by-step manner.
• The Four Planning Procedures: As the most well-known planning procedure, Holistic Planned Grazing has been helping farmers, ranchers, and pastoralists regenerate their lands for decades. Just as important are the other three planning procedures of land planning, financial planning, and ecological monitoring.

Rooted in the patterns of a whole ecosystem

Working with living systems requires a basic fundamental understanding of ecology. At the root of Holistic Management’s principles are Four Key Insights and four Ecosystem Processes that allow us to better understand and steward the interconnected workings of nature.

Key Insights

In his studies of land degradation, Allan Savory discovered four key patterns that keep grasslands in dynamic equilibrium. Understanding these key insights is critical to understanding how and why Holistic Management works.

Ecosystem Processes

Sunlight converts to grass; dung turns to fertility; rain recharges aquifers; and life begets more life. These cycles of life, as taught in Holistic Management, are critical for ecosystem function.

Let your Holistic Context guide your decisions

As humans, we’re great at reacting to immediate needs and desires, but when it comes to the long-term we tend to veer off track. Your Holistic Context is your north star, keeping you aligned towards what it is you’re truly aiming for in life, both for your quality of life and your surrounding environment.

Managing for a Multitude of Benefits

When regeneration is holistic, you are creating the conditions for whole ecosystem health. Holistic Management brings abundance and resilience to where it is needed most.

Soil Health

As plants convert sunlight into carbohydrates that feed the soil food web, new organic matter is formed and fertility increases. By increasing the amount of actively-photosynthesizing plants, land managers can see tremendous increases in soil health.

Carbon

All living organisms are made of carbon. Through photosynthesis, plants convert excess atmospheric carbon into usable forms that cycle below-ground in service to life. Peer-reviewed studies show that Holistic Planned Grazing can increase soil carbon on average by 3 tons of carbon per hectare per year.

Water

A 1% increase in soil organic matter allows an acre of land to store an additional 20,000 gallons of water. This increased amount of water cycling through a landscape provides a necessary reserve in times of drought, an increased capacity to absorb flash flooding events rather than letting it runoff, and cooler ground temperatures that are more conducive to life.

Biodiversity

Holistic Management teaches that community dynamics, i.e. the continual changes in species diversity and successional stages within biological communities, is a core lens through which we evaluate ecosystem health. Because of this, managing holistically includes a proactive approach towards increasing the complexity of both flora and fauna across a landscape.

Animal Welfare

Herd-forming animals such as livestock are safest and healthiest when allowed to express their natural inclinations on a thriving landscape. Improving pasture productivity creates a nutritious diversity of forage, while moving the herd from one pasture to the next keeps them off fouled land and reduces the need for medications like de-wormers.

Socio-Economic Benefits

Holistic Management brings all parties and decision-makers to the table, giving agency to those often left out and factoring in the needs of the local community as part of the “whole” being managed. In addition, land managers learn to increase carrying capacity, decrease reliance on inputs, and improve margins, all of which contribute to improved profitability of their operation.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Savory Institute's Holistic Management approach offers a comprehensive and adaptive framework for regenerating the world's grasslands. By integrating ecological, financial, and social considerations, this methodology not only enhances soil health, carbon sequestration, water retention, biodiversity, and animal welfare but also delivers significant socio-economic benefits. Embracing Holistic Management is a vital step towards creating a resilient and sustainable future for our planet's grasslands and the communities that depend on them.