This video is an excerpt of Prince Charles’ speech, highlighting comments about Allan Savory.
Prince Charles - HRH the Prince of Wales - cited our founder and president Allan Savory as an example of a forward thinker in global efforts to combine sustainability and agriculture in an August 2012 speech to the IUCN World Conservation Congress. In the 10 minute video presentation to the conference he made these comments about Allan and his work:
“I have been particularly fascinated, for example, by the work of a remarkable man called Allan Savory, in Zimbabwe and other semi arid areas, who has argued for years against the prevailing expert view that is the simple numbers of cattle that drive overgrazing and cause fertile land to become desert. On the contrary, as he has since shown so graphically, the land needs the presence of feeding animals and their droppings for the cycle to be complete, so that soils and grassland areas stay productive. Such that, if you take grazers off the land and lock them away in vast feedlots, the land dies.”
“Ultimately, his form of farming is one that mimics nature by managing domestic livestock to behave more like the migratory wild herbivores that co-evolved with these arid savannas, and thus, does not separate conservation of the land, from the process of farming it.”
“It is this kind of nature based approach to finding solutions, that needs to be fostered.”