The New Eco Moooovement

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Environmentalists have long regarded cows as Public Enemy No. 1 in the American West. They are blamed for everything from degrading public lands and destroying wildlife habitat to wasting energy (it takes five pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef). Even their belching is environmentally incorrect: The methane gas they expel contributes to the greenhouse effect.

But some ranchers and university researchers who are pioneering holistic land management techniques assert that cattle grazing can actually improve the health of grasslands: Cattle hooves till the earth, creating stable soil cover, and grazing can remove old plant material and stimulate the growth of beneficial perennial grasses. As Dan Daggett, author of Beyond the Rangeland Conflict: Toward a West That Works, points out in Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures (Fall 1997), this new research—and its practical application—may hold the keys to saving our vanishing grasslands.

On Tipton's ranch in central Nevada, for example, a desolate 10-acre slope was successfully reseeded by simply scattering hay and allowing their herd to graze and trample and fertilize it. A few months later, a tract that once barely supported tumbleweeds had sprouted thigh-high grass. "Tests revealed that their cow-cultivated mine site had produced more grass than some of their neighbors' irrigated hay fields—and had done it on less than six inches of moisture," Daggett writes.

Former Zimbabwean wildlife manager Allan Savory has taught this cultivation method to thousands of ranchers throughout the West after making similar observations on the savannas of Africa. While the grazing of domestic cattle often leaves the land ruined, migrating herds who feed and leave actually improve the soil.

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