Grazing animals bad, undisturbed grass good. That’s how we
personally thought regeneration worked, five years ago. And we
were not alone. You could be forgiven for thinking that any and
all grazing animals (particularly of the introduced kind) have
no role whatsoever to play in regenerating pastures, soils and
land, simply because we know how much damage badly-managed
grazing and animal management can do. And we as a society do
love a good bit of polarity, especially when it comes to nature.
Perhaps it’s our quest for simplicity. At the same time, we
inherently know that an ecosystem cannot be simplified down to a
set of polar opposites. However we frequently farm the land and
expect it to give back without much thought or consideration for
the complexity within the pastures, the biological
relationships, the edge effects, the soil. The results of this
approach speak for themselves – widespread desertification,
aridity, loss of topsoil, salinification and the introduction of
a catastrophe of chemicals and hor