Development Corner

Healthy Land. Healthy Food. Healthy Lives. a publication of Holistic Management International 5941 Jefferson St. NE, Suite B Albuquerque, NM 87109 USA

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DEVELOPMENT CORNER Over Two Decades with Holistic Management

BY WAYNE KNIGHT

As a young boy I remember my farming parents discussing rangeland with old guys. They argued about the reason for brush encroachment and pulled at old grass tufts. On bare patches of soil they chipped at the crust and talked about animal’s hooves breaking the surface, chipping it and planting seeds in where the animals trod. They talked about fencing and water supply to achieve animal density. These “old guys” were Allan Savory and Stan Parsons. They made a big impression.

With my studies completed, I visited and worked on U.S. ranches to learn about high-density grazing in a different environment. I was eventually called back to the family farm. Once back home, I thought I knew all there was to know about high-density grazing. My dad, who let me bump my head hard, gave me the space to really mess things up. I lumped herds together to achieve density, threw in the heifers for good measure, and didn’t think about bull numbers or cattle condition. I was determined to fix the ranch’s ecology, and density grazing was the answer. Any experienced rancher will realize the outcome—thin cattle, poor conception rates and poor cash flow. A wreck from a whole lot of enthusiasm and arrogance, and not a stitch of holism.

In 1998 my father encouraged me to attend a Holistic Management training with Dick and Judy Richardson. My then fiancé, Hilary, attended with me. Much of the theory covered in the training was familiar, but the planning and holistic goalsetting and decision making were very exciting new methods and concepts. We were very excited about the first module of training and looked forward to the following training sessions.

At the time our country, South Africa, was a fledgling democracy. With the turbulence came financial risks. My father had bought an additional farm to spread drought risk. Interest rates shot up to 26% in 1997. We were hemorrhaging financially. I had wrecked the cash flow with cattle density and grazing mistakes, and we were battling to make payments. With all the stress came conflict. My father and I fought as we defended our personal ideas before we used our combined holistic goal and applied the decision-making questions. With the holistic goal and decision-making process, we achieved breakthrough. We were able to make tough decisions far more effectively. Instead of defending positions, we were seeking the best solution to the defined problem. It may seem trivial to read about it, but this change of focus made a huge difference to our ability to think creatively and collaboratively. With the holistic financial planning training and a dose of creativity, we were able to slash expenses by cutting back to only essential expenses. We surprised ourselves! We didn’t think it was possible to cut what we did without negatively affecting the businesses. The combination of the decision-making process and the “mechanism” to focus on collaboration, rather than defending individual ideas, was extremely powerful! Holistic Management is the reason we are still on Hilary and Wayne Knight the land today. Our business, through using Holistic Management thinking and planning, together with our support from our community of Holistic Management practitioners has been extremely rewarding. Learning, sharing and observing and experiencing the power of Holistic Management has been extremely rewarding, too. I have particularly enjoyed how my conviction that Holistic Management made sense during our early years of having faith in the processes, has been backed up by research and observations of success in varied climatic and latitudinal environments across the world. Likewise, it is reassuring to see the growth in the understanding of soil micro-organisms that matches Savory’s early observations, that the management of the soil’s surface is critical to the health of an ecosystem. There is now so much wonderful research to back up our experience and observation. Working examples of the power of symbiosis and mutually beneficial relationships between plants, microbes, grazing animals, predators and humans are now numerous and comprehensive in supporting the holistic success of the application

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