Farmer's Weekly (South Africa)
Learning to protect your natural environment
Many communal rangelands are in a very poor state. Livestock owners need to remedy this urgently, or their communities may suffer severe financial consequences in the long run.
As mentioned before, I am closely involved in a number of programmes assisting communal farmers in the Eastern Cape with holistic land and livestock management.
As part of this, I collaborate with the Savory Institute, which helps us with teaching regenerative farming methods. In one initiative, we train monitors from villages to understand the ‘health’ status of their rangelands.
The monitors use tools, documents and scoresheets to better understand the levels of degradation of grazing rangelands. For example, they are asked to inspect the veld for good and poor grasses, invasive plants, micro life forms in the soil, and the level of biodiversity, such as the existence of valuable insect life.
Other tasks are to examine specific areas, looking at the percentage of bare or capped ground, the health of good grazing grasses, the distance between grass plants, and the general variety of plant life.
WANDERING ANIMALS
In almost every rural community, the condition of its natural environment directly affects how much money people have.
The more a natural environment degrades, the lower the income from farming. It is well known that communal farmers are spending more and more each year on supplementary livestock fodder, and this is making farming increasingly unprofitable for them.
The biggest threat to good grazing is uncontrolled livestock. Wandering animals always choose the best grass; as a result, these plants get no time to regenerate.
When good grasses are grazed all the time, their root systems become weak and eventually the plants die. When they die off in large numbers, the composition of the soil changes, and this often enables low-value plants to increase in number.
As a communal farmer, you should keep a close watch on the good and bad grass plants in your area; you can then gauge if these are increasing or decreasing in number.
An increase in bare patches, soil erosion, woody plants, such as harpuisbos ( Euryops lateriflorus), and unpalatable grasses, such as steekgras, and a lack of insects within and above the soil, all mean that your natural environment is degraded. If this is the case, you and your community need to start working together to reverse the damage.
ROTATIONAL GRAZING
A tried-and-tested method to restore and maintain veld quality is rotational grazing, where fences are used to divide the land up into camps and the animals graze one camp at a time.
The problem, of course, is that fences are often missing in communal areas as they have been stolen or have fallen into disrepair. But there is still a way to practise rotational grazing. Many farmers in communal farming communities employ herders to tend to their livestock. In the absence of fences, these herders could be used to keep livestock in certain areas of village rangelands.
THE BIGGEST THREAT TO VALUABLE GRASS PLANTS IS UNCONTROLLED LIVESTOCK
One way of doing this is to divide the rangeland into quarters using easy-toidentify features in the landscape; livestock should then be kept in one of the quarters for, say, 60 days at a time. After this period is up, the herders should then move the livestock on to the next quarter, where they can again graze for 60 days, and so the rotation will go on. This will allow the quarters not being grazed to rest, and the grass will be able to grow well again.
Herders should make certain that no livestock whatsoever enters the resting quarters, as this will defeat the purpose of the whole exercise.
Yes, all this will take some effort by the community, but as I have already said, failing to preserve your rangelands will cost your community dearly in the years ahead. You will have to buy increasing amounts of feed each winter, requiring an evergreater portion of people’s income.