This book is designed as a practical companion for people who actually manage land and any others who want to know what responsibility for land really means. Most of all, however, it is written for the ranchers and farmers who make a living directly from the earth. Upon them rests the fate of everyone else.
The companion book to this one, Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making, by Allan Savory with Jody Butterfield, attempts to clear the view from theory toward practice. This handbook looks the other way—from practice toward theory. In fact, however, the theory and the practice evolved together and are still evolving. The two books cover much of the same ground but from different perspectives. You need both. Don’t risk resources on the information in this book without reading the textbook, and don’t manage your operation from the advice in the textbook without mastering the details explained here.
People attending Holistic Management training sessions hear early and often this warning: Never think of Holistic Management as a management “system”!
Easier said than done.
Although each of the four planning and monitoring procedures covered in this book takes a systematic approach to the management of your land, livestock, and finances, built into them is the realization that no land, family, economy, marketplace, or weather is the same year after year. The word “plan” becomes a twenty-four-letter word: “plan-monitor-control-replan.”
And that’s what can save you as you encounter the inevitable problems—a hiccup in the futures market, a prize cow that tears up fences, an in-law who destroys pickup trucks, drought. In the beginning, too many managers scrap the planning, monitoring, controlling, and replanning when things go wrong. It’s easier to beg off and say, “Oh, well, at least we’ve got more herd effect than before!”
No. The last of the old way always beats the first of the new. The first musket couldn’t match the best crossbow. The first automobile trailed a good horse. Your first plans may be so far from reality that going back to seat-of-the-pants management appears to make a lot more sense than replanning. Sam Bingham tells a story that illustrates the point:
I remember a woman in a Navajo adult education class who would not learn to use a ruler. When asked to draw a line through the center of a page, she produced a slash across one corner. “Oh, that’s the way it came out with the ruler,” she said. “Well, what about without the ruler?” I asked, knowing that as an expert weaver, her native gift for geometry far outstripped mine.
She squinted a second at the paper, then drew a line freehand that missed the mark by a millimeter top and bottom. Damn good, but I could still top that with a ruler, despite my inborn lack of talent. So, too, with the planning procedures of Holistic Management. Learn them, and you will soon beat raw intuition every time.
Financial planning, grazing planning, biological monitoring, and land planning cannot begin, however, without a good grip on some fundamental concepts and a clear idea of your specific priorities. Only after laying that groundwork can you begin the step-by-step process of generating a plan or, in the case of monitoring, documenting environmental change.
This book is therefore divided into four major parts, each with two sections. The first section in each part covers basic concepts and technique. The second section is the step-by-step procedure for getting your plan down on paper, monitoring it, and adjusting it; or, in the case of biological monitoring, recording changes on the land and interpreting the results. In part 4, “Holistic Land Planning,” the fundamental structure of basics followed by steps breaks down a bit because land planning is not bound to the strict annual cycle that governs finances, livestock, forage, and crops. Nevertheless, the ultimate objective—getting a comprehensive plan on paper—holds.
One final note. The figures used in the examples in this book will be realistic to some but not to others because prices and costs vary so much the world over. Some figures do come from actual examples; others are merely imagined. Never assume that any figures can be translated to your own operation. You will always need to work them out for yourself.
Don’t use this book until you have familiarized yourself thoroughly with the theory and science of Holistic Management. Read Holistic Management first, and if possible attend a training course, make contact with someone who has, or seek assistance from a Savory Institute Associate Consultant.