As you travel south from far West Texas, crossing the Rio Grande, you encounter the huge grasslands of the Northern Mexico area of the Great Chihuahuan Desert. This country is very similar to the Circle Ranch, and has experienced the same degradation from human impact that we see across the desert Southwest.
This beautifully photographed video discusses how cattle, as part of a biodiverse animal community, can restore degraded desert grasslands.
Memorable observations of the Mexican rancheros include the following:
“The more diverse your wildlife, the healthier your ranch and your ecosystem.”
“If we do not change our attitude towards nature, and continue to view it as we always have, instead of looking at it as a whole, we can’t change. We first need to change in order to manage the ecosystem.”
“It is not the number of animals that you have in one spot that damages the pasture: it’s the amount of time those animals are on the pasture.”
“Not knowing how to work with nature is very costly. People prefer to fail conventionally rather than succeed unconventionally.”
Unfortunately, the big picture thinking expressed by the rancheros is absent from the industrial-agriculture practices that the agribusiness-agrochemical giants, agencies and universities promote. Instead of big picture solutions, their agendas, based on the bogus invasive species crisis, consist of destocking, eradications and range poisons: attacking biodiversity in order to ‘save’ biodiversity.
For more on this topic, including inexpensive, common-sense alternatives to this mass destruction – actions that, unlike costly boondoggles actually work – click on the tags below and alongside this post.
