Turns Out Grazing Cattle Turn Deserts Green

There is a lot of desert on planet Earth

Cows, buffalo, sheep, goats, and other grazing animals can restore it if they are allowed to graze the way they did before they were domesticated.

We’re told desertification is only happening in arid areas of the world.

If you look into the soil of much of the remaining grassland, you’ll see that it’s bare and covered with a crust of algae, leading to increased runoff and evaporation.

Livestock: often seen as the problem is actually the solution

The United States has deserts as badly as anything in Africa and there had been no livestock allowed in the parks for over 70 years

But look at the projects where cattle had been removed from prairie land to stop desertification and found they had accomplished the opposite.

It turns out that it isn't grazing animals themselves that are the problem, it was the way they were grazing.

Livestock can over-graze one area after the next, because of sedentary farmers that rarely allow them to move.

Over the past 50-years, well-intentioned environmentalists have only made the problem worse by over-correcting and removing grazing animals from “protected” lands altogether.

The solution is to let the animals out to graze on even more land.

Grasslands were created, over millions of years, by very large herds of grazing animals. That is the one thing that we have been denying those lands under the misguided attempt to protect them.

Large herds used to move across the contentment as they grazed. They did this to keep away from predictors, to follow the weather and the water, plus to find new, fresh food.

As these herds moved they also urinated and defecated, adding nutrients to the soil. CO2 and O2 are most important of all.

This is what helped keep grasslands from become desert and it would restore deserts to grasslands again.

So if we want a more fertile Earth with more grass and even trees, we should not stop livestock from grazing, we actually need more of it.