Greener Pasture on Your Side of the Fence: Better Farming Voisin Management-Intensive Grazing (4th Edition)

Book Description

This book explains in detail why and how to use management intensive grazing, and what to expect from its use for most kinds of livestock. I provide many examples to illustrate fine points, including producing milk, beef, and lamb on pasture alone, nutrient cycling, grounding energizers, recovery periods, economics, and much more. I present everything that I learned during 17 years of using Voisin management on my own farm, and answer all questions that have been asked me during conferences and farm visits with farmers. This book shows a way to increase your farm's profitability and reduce its labor demand -- thereby improving your quality of life -- while properly and responsibly caring for the land and the plants and animals that live on it.

Customer Reviews:

Murphy teach us the basics, once again........2007-01-11

Murphy's book is a comprehensive review of Voisin Grass Productivity book complemented with his own experience in Vermont.
I read it and found it very helpful in my search for milk production productivity and profits in my dairy farm in the Coffee area of Colombia.
I am still looking for books or experiences with Voisin rational grazing in the Tropics, where we use mainly grass to feed our cows outside and have followed feed companies advise on supplementing grains and feedstuffs, without questioning prices of grass, milk, corn silage and supplemental feeds.
If Murphy worked with the Voisin system in Brasil it would be great to have his experience written in a second book for Latin America.

Exelente libro para el manejo del pastoreo.......2007-01-10

Una muy completa y acertada visión del ecosistema pastizal y su profunda relación con una alta y sustentable productividad, contiene mucho conocimiento practico de como son las cosas en el campo.

Rational vs Rotational - This concept could change your farming life forever..........2005-08-28

Challenge your thinking and change your ways. Your pastures will thrive, your animals will be healthier and you'll have more time to lay in the hammock instead of throwing hay bales around. Andre Voisin, a French farmer, biologist and chemist--as well as a teacher at the Institute of Veterinary Medicine in Paris, designed a system that he calls "rational grazing" (as opposed to the generic term "rotational grazing"). Rational grazing takes into account the needs of the animal and plant, rather than the animal alone. The term "rational grazing" can mean two things: the thinking way of grazing management, or a system for rationing out the forage. Interested? Then read the book!

Greener Pasture on Your Side of the Fence: Better Farming Vo.......2002-12-24

Loved this book - although I have only one horse and can not do some of the intensive grazing techniques, I do have a better understanding about maintaining the pastures. This has been very useful and will enable me to get together with the neigbors and do several horses on the pastures in rotation. We will all have more edible forage for the horses.

Has what it takes!.......2001-12-06

I'm reading this book for the third time - there's just too much info to digest in one reading. We are just starting with cattle and are using this book as our bible. It not only explains the many advantages of raising animals using managment intensive grazing (more profit, environmentally friendly, humane, better nutrition, ease of animal handling), it goes into great detail on HOW to do it. My husband used the chapter on fencing to select products that have received many positive comments from visitors to the farm. I especially enjoyed reading about pasture plant diversity and how cattle "harvest" it. Our cattle look (and taste) great, much to the shock of long-time cattle farmers in our community who are surprised that two greenhorns like us can do so well. We attribute our success to this book and highly recommend it.

Day Range Poultry: Every Chicken Owner's Guide to Grazing Gardens and Improving Pastures

Average customer rating:

Not for homestead or backyard flock owners
Great for the Bigger Operation
Good for business, more than I needed
This fowl book hits a home run!

Day Range Poultry: Every Chicken Owner's Guide to Grazing Gardens and Improving Pastures
Andy Lee , and Patricia Foreman
Manufacturer: Good Earth Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Chicken Tractor: The Permaculture Guide to Happy Hens and Healthy Soil
Pastured Poultry Profits
All Flesh Is Grass: Pleasures & Promises Of Pasture Farming
Success With Baby Chicks: A Complete Guide to Hatchery Selection, Mail-Order Chicks, Day-Old Chick Care, Brooding, Brooder Plans, Feeding, and Housing
Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens: Care / Feeding / Facilities

ASIN: 0962464872

Book Description

From the best selling authors of Chicken Tractor, you will discover how easy and profitable it is to sell chickens, eggs, and turkey raised in gardens or on pastures. You don't need a lot of land or a large investment.

• Make top dollars rasing poultry.
• Raise Thanksgiving turkeys for yourself and others.
• Build and regenerate soils using natural fertilizer deposited directly from your poultry onto yoru soil.
• Learn the secrets to incubation, hatchery management and brooding.
• Process poultry cheaply, humanely and profitably.
• Sell eggs and meat with that old-fashioned flavor and homegrown goodness.

Learn about the revolutionary day range system of raising poultry on pasture that is low maintenance with high profits..

Customer Reviews:

Not for homestead or backyard flock owners.......2007-05-20

This is a great book for commercial chicken operations. This book is not much use for the small flock owner. For small flock or backyard flock owners I recommend "The Chicken Tractor" by the same authors..

Great for the Bigger Operation.......2007-03-16

This is a well written book with plenty of info on tested methods as well as the latest thinking and market-wise advise. It is mostly applicable to the larger scale operatons, though. I wanted something for a small number of chickens--one or two dozen--and so found this less useful. I should have bought a different book because of the scale of my needs, but that is not the book's fault.

Good for business, more than I needed.......2006-08-03

This is an excellent book. I just recently started raising chickens and was disappointed at the information available at the local library. I purchased Chickens In Your Backyard: A Beginner's Guide , Day Range Poultry: Every Chicken Owner's Guide to Grazing Gardens and Improving Pastures , and Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens: Care / Feeding / Facilities . Recent reading at the library about pasture raising livestock got me interested in this title. The volume they discuss is a little more than I was interested in, but that is not the fault of the book. It is well written, an easy read, and comprehensive in the amount of information it contains. The only thing I could add to Claudia Campbell's comments is that information is also included in business organization, strategies and marketing. If you go into poultry on this scale, it has to make a profit to be sustainable. I agree this book is a complete resource.

As for my ambitions, I found Chickens In Your Backyard: A Beginner's Guide an excellent introductory text and Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens: Care / Feeding / Facilities adequate for my needs. Both these books have ample reviews and I could not add to them. We live in a small rural area and the library depends on local donations. Chickens In Your Backyard and Day Range Poultry will be donated to the library. Storey's will be kept as a reference.

This fowl book hits a home run!.......2005-03-04

I just finished Day Range Poultry and am thoroughly impressed. They not only tell you what Day Range is, but compare it to other methods of raising birds listing the pros and cons of each. If you want to start raising birds, especially large numbers of birds, everything is here, in detail. How to set up a Day Range system for broilers, layers, and turkeys, including shelters, what worked and what didn't for them, feeds and feeding, protection from predators fencing and moving about the pasture for optimum manure spreading.
They talk a lot about designing a rotation system using pastured poultry with crops and other species to optimize your potentional profits. Everything is geared to optimizing the use of the land without high $ input while at the same time maintaining healthy, happy animals and increasing land fertility. They also include a section on incubating eggs with a troubleshooting chart when things go wrong. The section on processing is complete, from choosing equipment to the actual processing of your birds for home or for sale. You don't need another book to get started, all the info needed is here, with an extensive resource guide. I would highly recomend this book to anyone who is serious about rasing poultry for themselves or as a small home based business.

Average customer rating:

Grazing Management, 2nd Edition
John F. Vallentine
Manufacturer: Academic Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Similar Items:

Range Management: Principles and Practices, Fifth Edition
Greener Pasture on Your Side of the Fence: Better Farming Voisin Management-Intensive Grazing (4th Edition)
Grass Productivity (Conservation Classics)
Grasses: An Identification Guide (Sponsored by the Roger Tory Peterson Institute)
Beef Production Management and Decisions (5th Edition)

ASIN: 0127100016

Book Description

Grazing animals need to be managed in order to accommodate desired results in terms of animal, plant, land and economic responses. Grazing Management, 2nd Edition integrates principles and management techniques that apply to all grazing lands and to all grazing animals. This comprehensive volume provides authoritative review on a wide range of relevant topics: animal nutrition and nutritional balance when fed on different sorts of grazing lands; seasonal variation and limits placed on ecosystems by grazing; the effects of grazing on grazing lands; the various sorts of grazing behaviors; selecting plants and managing grazing lands, as well as many other important topics bearing upon the methods, practises and procedures for properly managing grazing lands and animals.

* Animal nutrition and nutritional balance when fed on different sorts of grazing lands
* Seasonal variation and limits placed on ecosystems by grazing
* The effects of grazing on grazing lands
* The various sorts of grazing behaviours
* Selecting plants and managing grazing lands

Average customer rating:

If you only have one book on raising grass-feed cattle this is the one to have
OMG

Grass-Fed Cattle
Julius Ruechel
Manufacturer: Storey Publishing, LLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Storey's Guide to Raising Beef Cattle: Health/Handling/Breeding
Getting Started with Beef & Dairy Cattle (Getting Started With)
Pasture Perfect: The Far-Reaching Benefits of Choosing Meat, Eggs, and Dairy Products from Grass-Fed Animals
How To Raise Cattle: Everything You Need To Know (Everything You Need to Know)
Small Scale Livestock Farming: A Grass-Based Approach for Health, Sustainability, and Profit

ASIN: 1580176054

Book Description

With grass-fed beef popping up on menus across North America, and more small-farm owners venturing into this growth area, the time is right for a comprehensive book on how to raise, manage, and market grass-fed cattle.

Grass-Fed Cattle, the newest addition to Storey’s library of best-selling livestock books, covers every aspect of raising and care, including herd selection, breeding, yearly cycles, cultivating and maintaining healthy soil and grass, fencing and pasture rotation, winter grazing, pests and diseases, and necessary equipment.

Author Julius Ruechel, who has been raising beef cattle on his family’s farm since his start as a 4-H member, packs this handbook with everything a farmer needs to know, regardless of herd size and acreage. His advice and systems are applicable to the smallest backyard hobby farms as well as the largest commercial herds and ranches.

In addition to essential farming information, Ruechel devotes a major section of the book to marketing. He discusses niche market opportunities, scheduling the selling and buying of cattle for the greatest profit, finishing the beef and arranging for slaughter, labeling, dynamic marketing, and financial planning and record keeping. He also includes chapters specially addressed to the conventional farmer who is transitioning to natural production, the farmer who is considering leasing or buying land, and the farmer who wishes to pursue organic certification.

The first book of its kind, Grass-Fed Cattle is an indispensable, authoritative reference for anyone interested in raising cattle or looking for a profitable farm venture.

Customer Reviews:

If you only have one book on raising grass-feed cattle this is the one to have.......2007-07-18

I've read everything on raising grass-fed cattle from Allan Nation and Jim Garrish to Joel Salatin and I have to say, this is the most comprehensive guide to setting up a grass-fed beef business I've found.

You can only fully appreciate this book if you are actually trying to raise grass-fed animals. Each time I run into a difficulty with my herd or the land my cattle are grazing, I find sound guidance to the problem in this book. For instance, the section on managing the calving season on pasture (a topic I haven't seen mentioned in other books) seems particularly brilliant to me after having spent a day looking for a hidden calf.

If you are just setting up a grass-fed business this is the book to have. Julius Ruechel guides you in putting the pieces of land, vegetation, water, animals, and seasons together with human management to create a system that reflects and capitalizes on the synergistic complexity of nature while fully respecting all of her living components.

The only caution I would add is that it is a big continent, and no book can fully reflect the variations in climate, terrain, and scale found here. So you will need to adapt some of the advice to reflect your local conditions.

I have been reading these reader reviews for years, but this is the first book that has inspired me enough to write a review, so if you are reading Mr. Ruechel, please accept my thanks. I only wish your book had been out when I first entered this business.

OMG.......2007-07-07

This book sat way to long on my shelf. Once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. Sometimes it takes someone outside of the industry to be able to step back and see what's wrong. Put your farm back in synch with nature and see your problems reduced and your profit increase. This book is the most well rounded book on every subject I've found. Also great worksheets to make your business plan.

Organic Dairy Farming: A Resource for Farmers

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Organic Dairy Farming: A Resource for Farmers

Manufacturer: Orang-utan Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Animal Husbandry | Agricultural Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books

Alternative Treatments for Ruminant Animals
Getting Started with Beef & Dairy Cattle (Getting Started With)
Small Scale Livestock Farming: A Grass-Based Approach for Health, Sustainability, and Profit
Homeopathy for the Herd
The Biological Farmer: A Complete Guide to the Sustainable & Profitable Biological System of Farming

ASIN: 0963798235

Product Description

Written for the transitioning and new organic farmer, Organic Dairy Farming brings together for the first time in a single volume the information to explain everything from organic soil management, calf care and mastitis control to the certification process and marketing for the organic premium. Combining up-to-date advice from 20 experts in a variety of fields, it presents organic concepts and practices in a readable form. The book includes farmer interviews demonstrating how they have successfully applied organic practices on their own farms. Over sixty illustrations, glossary, list of resources and complete index make the book very useable. An essential tool for both the farmer and the agricultural professional.

Grass Productivity (Conservation Classics)

Average customer rating:

Grazing Dairy Cattle

Grass Productivity (Conservation Classics)
Andre Voisin
Manufacturer: Island Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Greener Pasture on Your Side of the Fence: Better Farming Voisin Management-Intensive Grazing (4th Edition)
All Flesh Is Grass: Pleasures & Promises Of Pasture Farming
Salad Bar Beef
Pastured Poultry Profits
Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making

ASIN: 0933280645

Book Description

This is a prodigiously documented textbook of scientific information concerning every aspect of management 'where the cow and grass meet'. Voisin's 'rational grazing' method maximizes productivity in both grass and cattle operations.

Customer Reviews:

Grazing Dairy Cattle.......2007-03-16

An excellent source of information for anyone interested in grazing dairy cows. Best suited for the beginner but valuable observations that everyone grazing cows can benefit from.

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West

Average customer rating:

Science Speaks the Truth in Welfare Ranching
Grazing Public Lands - Decline in Habitat for Native Species
Major Setback for Resource Coalition-Building
Not so great
One Picture Tells 1,000 Lies

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West
George Wuerthner , and Mollie Matteson
Manufacturer: Foundations for Deep Ecology 2
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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American Bison: A Natural History (Organisms and Environments, 6)
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (American Empire Project)

ASIN: 1559639431

Book Description

In the American West, the sky is wide and the mountains are grand. Everything is on a big scale - including the debate over livestock production on the nation's public lands.

For more than a century, ranching and its associated activities (such as the growing of irrigated feed crops) has been the major land use over most of the western states. While many Americans think of cowboys as heroes and the "Wild West" as a place for cattle roundups and rodeos, others see livestock as a scourge upon the land. What is most disturbing to some activists is that ranching activities occur not only on private property but also on public lands - more than 300 million acres of federal, state, and other publicly owned lands are used by private ranching operations. For the most part, the ranching operations pay very low fees to run their livestock on these lands, and also receive numerous government subsidies including range improvements, fencing, and predator control.

Welfare Ranching presents one side of the debate over public lands ranching, offering a graphic look at the negative consequences of livestock production in the arid West. The authors highlight changes in the region that they see as being caused by ranching, and examine what they feel are problems associated with using tax dollars to support environmentally questionable activities. Through photographs and essays, the book shows examples of overgrazing along with what the authors argue are more subtle signs that indicate large - scale ecological disruption. The authors also discuss changes that could be made to help solve some of these problems.

Welfare Ranching gives one view of the cultural and historical causes of the current situation and offers a vision of possible renewal.

Customer Reviews:

Science Speaks the Truth in Welfare Ranching.......2007-02-02

Welfare Ranching provides the data and insight into the public lands livestock industry that has long been needed. Here in the West the damage is seen on hundreds of millions of acres of our public lands. What is amazing is the lack of attention among our public officials at the tremendous cost of this outmoded practice. The lost soil, polluted streams and destroyed wildlife habitat have value in the billions of dollars on an annual basis that so far outweighs any possible economic benefit of livestock production, it is necessary for the public to become educated on this issue so they will pressure our lawmakers and public officials to make and enforce ecologically sound regulations and practices to restore this land. A final note, the soil loss and plant community losses are a loss in carbon storage - this is going to become a critical issue as we at last deal with greenhouse gases. Finally, let's not forget the history of the sheep and cattle industry in their efforts to have our public lands turned over to the States and then sold to ranchers for 10 cents an acre in the 1940's. This continues today with the farm and ranch lobby and their henchmen in congress who constantly are working to undermine environmental protections and have the land sold off to industry.

Grazing Public Lands - Decline in Habitat for Native Species.......2005-05-05

Welfare Ranching is a beautiful book, full of full-color photos and articles by dozens of scientists and concerned biological conservationists regarding the destruction of the American West by cattle ranchers. Wuerthner and Matteson point out that there are 525 million acres of land in the Western United States which are used for livestock grazing. That only eleven percent of U.S. cattle producers are in the west, but their grazing area equals twenty-five percent of the total land area of the lower 48 United States and most of that is public land. These lands are often over-grazed, degraded, and denuded of plants. The water sources are manipulated by the ranchers to provide water for their livestock, thereby removing the water from access by native plants and wildlife. The introduction of livestock into the arid lands of the American west is like introducing an exotic species into a community. The livestock completely undermine and degrade the ecosystem and their presence is linked to the decline in native bird and vegetation populations. It has been noted that by raising domestic animals which demand large quantities of water and forage in a place that is dry, and by favoring slow-moving, heavy, and more or less defenseless livestock in terrain that is rugged, vast, and inhabited by native predators, ranchers have put themselves in a position of constant warfare with the land. Nearly all public lands [in the Western U.S.] that have any forage potential for livestock are leased for grazing. This includes 90% of Bureau of Land Management land, 69% of U.S. Forest Service land and a surprising number of wildlife refuges and national parks. Three hundred million of these acres have the potential for large-scale ecosystem restoration by terminating domestic livestock production on public lands
Bird species need water and vegetation to survive, and many are threatened or driven into extinction by the ubiquitous livestock grazing which destroys their habitat. Birds generally do not respond to the presence of grazing livestock but to the impacts on vegetation as a result of grazing. Breeding Bird Survey data suggest that grassland birds as a group are showing greater population declines than any other avian assemblage in North America. This is attributable to habitat modifications including livestock grazing, fire suppression, prairie dog control, cultivations, and exotic grasses.
Livestock grazing harms native species and promotes alien plant growth. The hundreds of photos in the book, Welfare Ranching, document the denuded, degraded land and polluted, manipulated water sources which result from cattle grazing. Some ranchers suggest that since bison used to naturally live on the grasslands, cattle are a good modern day substitute, but cattle and bison are not similar animals. Bison moved around a lot, effectively grazing on plants only once before moving on, and bison also lived in drier areas and ate drier plants than cattle do; domestic cattle spend most of their time within 400 meters of water. Cattle ranchers also suggest that the grasslands need to be grazed by cattle in order to be healthy, but in a native grassland there is a wide variety of animals that naturally graze in a sustainable way, such as nematodes, grasshoppers, prairie dogs, pronghorn antelope, elk, and bison.
Livestock grazing is the most common land use in western North America. It is difficult to study in a controlled manner as there are not many large areas free of grazing because approximately 70% of the eleven western states is grazed. A study comparing Chaco Culture National Historic Park in northern New Mexico, one of the largest grazing exclosures in the American West, with six grazing sites, found that plant species richness was higher in the protected areas than in the grazed areas (Floyd et al. 2003). Recent paleo-ecological studies on the Colorado Plateau determined that the most severe vegetation changes of the last 5,400 years resulted from livestock grazing during the last two centuries (Cole et al. 1997).
It is apparent that many species of grassland birds, and neo-tropical migratory birds have declined drastically in the past few decades. Much of the research on this subject has found that the decline in bird species is correlated to the decline in habitat and vegetation which is directly linked to grazing livestock on the majority of land area in the western United States. Over half of the grazing is done on publicly owned lands which, due to the time-honored traditions in the West of allowing cattle ranchers full access to any lands they want, and because these ranchers and their grazing interests have been very important in the political and social life of the West for over a century, and because, until recently, grazing on public lands has been an accepted practice with no special attention paid to it, the question of closing off public lands to grazing has become a power struggle and a contentious issue between conservationists, ranchers, the government, and land managers. There is enough documented evidence that grazing has many deleterious effects on the land such as: damaging the soil, polluting the water supply, destroying native vegetation, encouraging alien species, and that ranchers and land managers have altered the ecosystem by: controlling fires, diverting the scarce water supply to cattle use only, and actively killing many native animal species that they consider inconvenient or dangerous to their interests.
It is obvious that livestock grazing on western lands is not a sustainable operation. It is environmentally damaging and causes great loss of biodiversity. It is sustained only through the political influence of cattle ranchers and the ignorance and indifference of the public. The great wave of new research which is being done by conservation biologists and environmentalists will help change this devastating scene in the future when students begin to inform themselves by reading these research papers, and when the popular media brings the desolation and waste to the notice of the people, that their land is being appropriated by private interests who are destroying the environment and profiting at the expense of thousands of plant and animal species each year.
Welfare Ranching, The Subsidized Destruction of the American West, brings these facts to the people in the form of a beautiful well-documented book full of great photographs. Most of the information in this book is taken from scientific articles and journals. How many of us spend our time reading dry scientific journals? If you would like to have a combination of fact and photos, in an interesting to read and understand format with articles published by well-known conservation biologists and others whose main concern is to save our lands and our native plants and animals, then Welfare Ranching is the book to have.

Major Setback for Resource Coalition-Building.......2004-02-02

I found this book while browsing at Cody's in Berkeley last week. It's big. It's colorful. It's angry. And sadly, it's packed full of deception. The problem is that if you live in Staten Island, NY you won't know that you're being decieved unless you've spent a lot of time visiting Nevada's Great Basin and watching the seasons change.

Two examples (among many):
- Lots of close-in photos of range cattle in late-summer condition standing near a water tank with cowpies scattered all over the bone-dry vicinity and not a blade of grass in sight. The fact is that if you zoom-out about 50 yds. you'll see a major difference between the heavily-tracked barren ground surrounding the water trough and the grazing allotment outside of the perimeter. Ditto for a different time of year. The perception is that the entire range is bone-dry, overstocked, and full of cowpies. Not true. The stocking rate on that sort of range is 1 cow for every 250 acres. Lots of room for a cow, her calf, and a few of their cowpies.
- An aerial photo designed to discount the idea of ranching as a natural defense against urban sprawl is taken high above the Gallatin Valley in Montana - the source of urban sprawl would be Bozeman. The photo shows several thousand acres of ranches, mainly irrigated alfalfa farms. The point of the photo is, "well, obviously there's no sprawl here." The problem?Bozeman isn't even captured in the photo! So, the photo is a lie that would make even George Orwell blush.

I'm an environmental activist. I think there's no more important issue facing our time than preventing a head-on collision with ecological catastrophe. So, it disappoints me greatly when a book like this is bankrolled and released by someone like Doug Tompkins, co-founder of Esprit, especially after his success with "Fatal Harvest".

His credibility on this particular issue has been lost. More importantly, much of the hard work of building consensus among stakeholders in public lands coalitions has been vanquished because one green element decided to lie shamelessly to further its agenda of removing livestock from public lands. The hurt feelings and distrust will take years to mend, I'm afraid.

This book should remain on the shelf.

Not so great.......2003-09-26

This book is deceptive -- so readers be wary. A picture of a mountain meadow and something along the lines of: "This is the way it could be" and then a picture of a desert - "this is the way it is." The pictures are taken in two entirely different ecosystems! And yet the editors imply that if cows were not present, picture 2 would look like picture 1. Not true.

Some interesting writing. Too bad, though, that it was framed by deception.

One Picture Tells 1,000 Lies.......2003-07-21

I'm afraid that most readers will only look at the pictures and read the captions and headlines. That's the point. No one sits down and reads through a book like this, so the message is as broad, blatant, and one-sided as a billboard. It is meant to seduce anyone who gives it a superficial glance. Leaf through it casually and discover that cattle are bad for just about anything you care to name. Are they good for anything at all? No. This is propaganda at its best (or worst).
"Welfare Ranching" is filled with pictures that are captioned to manipulate, rather than instruct. For every lush "cattle-free" area shown in the book, a barren area-just as "free"-could easily be found. The same is true of pictures showing cows on dry, dusty land. The photos are carefully chosen to show a single perspective.
On page 275 is a photo captioned "Campground full of cow manure, Nevada." It shows a flattish clearing dotted with sage and grass and a few old, dry cow pies. In the background are tall brush and trees with the hint of a mountain in the distance. It could be Nevada. Someone might camp there, if they chose to. It could also be someone's back pasture. Page 45 is a full page picture of "Severely eroded land." OK. What eroded it? We are meant to believe it was cattle, but even the author won't stick that label on. A horrifying photo of a cow carcass in a river occupies page 193. It probably smells as bad as the deer carcasses I used to find in the creek behind my grandmother's Connecticut farm.
The footnotes are probably not meant to be read, either. Otherwise, why would the author cite himself so often? Can a serious, reasonable argument against cattle ranching can be made by someone whose reference is a book called "The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory?" The chapter on the health implications of meat consumption is written by the author of "The Vegetarian Way." The chapter on livestock raising from a global perspective is co-authored by an "environmental activist" advocate for wolf recovery and a math professor who authored "Judaism and Vegetarianism."
The "factual" parts of the book are a clever mixture of half-truths, excerpts out of context, skewed statistics and a grab-bag of factoids winkled out of scientific papers to fit the situation. For instance, on page 13 the author states that "ranching and associated activities provide very few jobs...most ranch operations...are not highly profitable...ranch families depend on [outside] jobs (to) help keep the ranch financially afloat." On page 15 the author argues that ranchers dominate Western politics because: "low salaries [of public office] rule out participation by people without other sources of income. Yet ranchers...having the financial latitude to engage in off-ranch pursuits-are able to hold office with less sacrifice than the work would require of others." The statement is made that "Vermont produces more beef than all the public lands in Nevada." USDA statistics show 500,000 head of cattle in Nevada in 2002, 285,000 in Vermont. Nevada has fewest cattle of any western state except Alaska.
Then there are all those questionable critters that cows are accused of threatening. There are snails the size of a pinhead, cave bugs and tiny fish. I couldn't help wondering how many insects and reptiles survived the sprawl of Phoenix or Seattle? Shouldn't we get those people "off the land" too? Abundant dinosaurs roamed where Los Angeles is now. Maybe we should try to "restore" them? There's more than a hint of wanting to "play God" in all this fervor over weeds and worms.
As for the cows, a "shift away from animal foods is not only an important individual choice, but also imperative for the well-being of humanity, and the ecological systems of the earth." (page 285)
"Welfare Ranching" is not simply a vegetarian tract. There is an underlying, more sinister agenda-The Wildlands Project. That includes a wide swath of land from the tip of South America to Northernmost Canada that is to be free of all human activity. The author of this extreme fantasy is Reed Noss, cited more than half a dozen times in the footnotes. Buried in the text are lines like this: "The majority of the West is directly or indirectly influenced by livestock production, either as rangeland, as cultivated land or pasture growing feed for livestock, or as delimited reserves of nature where naturally migrating wildlife are persecuted the instant they step outside the boundaries people have imposed on them." (page xiv) So, if you take away the rangeland, cultivated land and pasture, "migrating wildlife" will no longer have those boundaries.
In case anyone misses the point, in the next sentence the author adds the "hundreds of millions of acres of farmland in the Midwest" to the "total physical and ecological footprint of livestock production." When all that Midwest farmland is out of production, there will be room for all the westerners evicted from the Wildlands Project to live. (What they will eat might be a problem.)
"There is no single conservation opportunity for rewilding...300 million acres as ending livestock grazing on all public lands." (page 324). Rewilding is the agenda. Concluding with "Our Vision" the author says: "We dream of a landscape where bison, pronghorn antelope, wolves, and grizzlies are free to roam...in which landscape-scale ecological processes can operate with a minimum of human interference. The elimination of livestock production from our public lands will set us on that pathway."
It's not just a "pathway." The Wildlands Project calls for one half of the land area of the 48 states to be encompassed in core wilderness reserves and inner corridor zones (essentially extensions of core reserves) within the next few decades. What's left over is where people can live-within the boundaries set by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

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Grazing Ecology and Forest History
F. W. M. Vera
Manufacturer: CABI
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0851994423

Book Description

It is widely held that a climax of vegetation of closed forest systems covered the lowlands of Central and Western Europe before humans intervened in prehistoric times to develop pastoral agriculture. If this intervention had not taken place, it would still be there and so if left, the grassland vegetation we see today would revert to its natural closed forest state, although with a reduced number of wild species. This book challenges this view, using examples from pollen analyses and studies on tree species such as oak and hazel. It tests the hypothesis that species composition, structure and succession of vegetation was governed by herbivores and that the Central and Western European lowlands were covered in grasslands, scrub, solitary tress and groves surrounded by cover and border vegetation. Comparative information from North America is also included.

Intensive Grazing Management: Forage, Animals, Men, Profits

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Intensive Grazing Management: Forage, Animals, Men, Profits
Burt Smith , Pingsun Leong , and George Love
Manufacturer: Graziers Hui
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Greener Pasture on Your Side of the Fence: Better Farming Voisin Management-Intensive Grazing (4th Edition)

ASIN: 0966270401

The Ecology and Management of Grazing Systems

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The Ecology and Management of Grazing Systems

Manufacturer: CABI
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0851993028

Book Description

The understanding and management of land resources used by grazing animals are of major importance to ecologists and agricultural and environmental scientists. This book fills a major gap in the market by synthesizing a range of perspectives on grazing systems, drawn from plant science, animal science and ecology. It outlines the principles of herbage growth and competition, of animal nutrition and grazing behavior, and of the interactions of plant and animal factors that are central to an understanding of grazing systems. Chapters on the management of grazing systems cover both intensive and extensive systems (including rangelands) from all major agroecological zones of the world. The book is written by leading authorities from the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Israel and France. It represents a major contribution to the literature for advanced students and research workers concerned with plant science (especially grasslands), animal science (especially ruminants) and natural and agricultural ecosystems.

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