Synopsis
Holistic management is a systems-thinking approach developed by biologist Allan Savory to restore the world’s grassland soils and minimize the damaging effects of climate change and desertification on humans and the natural world. This third edition of Holistic Management Handbook: Regenerating Your Land and Growing Your Profits is the long-awaited companion volume to the classic text Holistic Management, Third Edition. Crafted under the direction of Savory’s longtime collaborator Jody Butterfield, this handbook is the key to developing a comprehensive holistic land plan based on Savory’s principles that will help you to restore health to your land and ensure a stable, sustainable livelihood from its bounty.
This new edition, thoroughly revised, updated, and streamlined, explains the planning procedures described in Holistic Management, and offers step-by-step instructions for running a ranch or farm using a holistic management approach. Butterfield and her coauthors describe how to use the handbook in conjunction with the textbook to tailor a management plan for your unique combination of land, livestock, and finances. Their mantra is “plan, monitor, control, and replan.” Using a four-part approach, the authors walk readers through basic concepts and techniques, help them put a plan onto paper, monitor the results, and adjust the details as needed. Appendixes provide updated worksheets, checklists, planning and monitoring forms, and detailed examples of typical scenarios a user might encounter. The handbook includes a comprehensive glossary of terms.
Ranchers, farmers, pastoralists, social entrepreneurs, government agencies, and NGOs working to address global environmental degradation will find this comprehensive handbook an indispensable guide to putting the holistic management concept into action with tangible results they can take to the bank.
About the Authors
Jody Butterfield cofounded the Savory Institute with her husband Allan Savory and collaborates with him on books, articles, and papers on holistic management approaches to restoring health to the world’s degraded grasslands. She is director of special projects at the Savory Institute.
Sam Bingham grew up in the extremely non-brittle Appalachian high country of western North Carolina but had to come to grips with extreme desertification in the 1970s when, as a young freelance journalist, he signed on to help Navajo teachers produce a school textbook from what they could read in their own land—the 27,000 square mile home of the Navajo Nation out where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico join their four corners. "Allan Savory, fresh out of Africa, made us see our work in a world-spanning context," as Sam tells it. Sam's subsequent association Allan's work, as journalist, ghost writer, consultant, and accredited professional, now spans nearly half a century and a good part of our desertifying world—the Australian Outback, the Asian Steppes, and the African Sahel, as well as the American Southwest and some of Latin America. He lives now on a small farm near his roots in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where four feet of rain fall in a year and calves may go missing in kudzu.
Allan Savory is cofounder and president of the Savory Institute. Born in Zimbabwe and educated as an ecologist with degrees in zoology and botany, Savory has had a decades-long career in African and Middle Eastern government and politics, private consultancy, and teaching. His work in resource management started in the mid-1960s in an effort to find workable solutions ordinary people could implement to restore degraded lands. He and his wife, Jody Butterfield continue those efforts today, reaching a global audience through the efforts of the Savory Institute.
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