Holistic Management within the Chaos - Observing the land through the four ecosystem processes

One of the constant struggles for people who work the land is solving problems. As organic farmers, some may curse our limited access to the prescriptive solutions offered by the agri-industry; we are forced to look deeper and seek out the root cause of problems rather than treat the symptoms. It is not always easy to discover the root cause, and finding advice on specific matters may also be a challenge. So often, we are left to our intuition. Of course, we are never the first ones to encounter or find a solution to a farming problem, but as Patrick Laurie says in his excellent book, Native - Life in a Vanishing Landscape,

“Farming is famously poor at storing unused information, and it doesn’t take long for old knowledge to vanish.”

Learning to read the land like a wise old sage may seem like a mammoth task in our fast-paced lives, but an element of Holistic Management offers an insightful idea to hone that skill. In Holistic Management, the environment is viewed through the four ecosystem processes: the Water Cycle, the Mineral Cycle, Energy Flow and Community Dynamics. All these processes are interconnected and overlapping. For example, a waterlogged compacted soil has a dysfunctional water cycle. As a result, the mineral cycle stagnates, the plant diversity may be diminished, and therefore the energy flow is limited.

It is easy to dismiss or underestimate these processes as a bit basic; after all, we learn about the water and mineral cycles in the Junior Cert Science and Geography curricula. We know that water cycles from the rain to the land, plants, lakes, rivers and sea, evaporating all the time to make more rain ad infinitum. But how often do we observe the landscape or a field and assess if that area is cycling water effectively? Is the landscape we manage functioning as it should or as well as it could? Is the water infiltrating into the soil? Has the soil the capacity to retain enough moisture to grow plants throughout the growing season? Is the water that passes through or over our land clean and free of silt when it enters a watercourse?

Energy flow begins with sunlight and its interface with plants which convert that light into carbohydrates through photosynthesis. That energy is converted into new forms up through the trophic layers of the food web. Energy does not cycle; it just changes into another type of energy, so the best we can do as land managers is to harness as much of that energy as possible by maximising leaf area and time that leaf area is exposed to the sun. 

Again, it sounds pretty basic, but how often do we look at our farms and think, is this place capturing anywhere near its potential solar energy? The fastest way to increase leaf area in a pasture is to let the grass grow taller. If management allows, a diversity of plant species within the pasture will create layers of different height plants and different leaf shapes all evolved to seek out their niche to capture sunlight. A silvopasture takes solar energy capture even further by extending the layers of leaf area on a macro scale both within the tree canopy and at the pasture level.

The mineral cycle is as broad a topic as the periodic table. Sometimes minerals cycle in aeons, in geologic time. When scientists were boring the world’s deepest manmade hole to sample what was below the earth’s crust halfway down, they found fossilised sea creatures four miles deep, pulled or pushed down with shifting tectonic plates. I wonder how long it will take before the calcium in the remains of those creatures will be taken up by a plant again?

In other cases, minerals can cycle quickly. For example, a dock plant growing in pasture sends down its deep taproot, which exudes sugars to attract calcium-rich microbes. Those microbes use those plant-derived sugars as energy to metabolise and extract calcium molecules from the mineral-rich subsoil. When the microbes die, the calcium, now in a plant-available form, is taken up by the dock and used to build healthy plant tissues. A cow nibbles the dock, and the rest of the plant is trampled by its hoof. The worms and other creatures in the soil break the plant matter down, it transforms to humus, and the calcium within is taken up by another plant and cycled again. Perhaps this time by a grass plant which a young deer consumes. The calcium is taken in by the deer and goes towards building its growing bones. The deer eventually dies in the woods and is consumed by a host of scavengers. Its bones are scattered throughout the woods and get covered in a thick layer of leaf fall within the year. Slowly, fungal mycelium mine the calcium from the bones and trade it with a tree root for some sugar. It is taken up into the wood and leaves where the following autumn, some of it falls again to the forest floor and on and on in endless cycling permutations. I find the mind experiment of following a mineral molecule in an ecosystem is a great way to assess and understand if your mineral cycle is healthy or not.

Deep-rooted plants growing in healthy biological soil are the fastest way to cycle minerals; if the plants pass through an animal’s gut or are trampled on the ground, the topsoil is enriched with minerals from deeper in the horizon. For plants to grow deep roots, they must be rested for an adequate period. Plant roots often mirror the above-ground growth. If the grass never gets beyond 6 inches high, the roots will always be shallow - cycling the same nutrients present in the topsoil. Unless that topsoil is excellent, it is likely to lack minerals, especially those prone to leaching, which are often only available deeper in the horizons.

Community Dynamics has to do with the diversity of all living organisms. Not only the diversity of species but also the diversity of age groups within each species. To use the human population as an example, if 99% of the population were over the age of fifty and there was very little reproduction, we would likely be extinct in sixty years. So healthy Community Dynamics of any organism needs an entire spectrum of ages.

If we look at a woodland with a large deer population, young trees don’t survive because of heavy browsing. If only veteran trees remain, in a few centuries, the woodland will be gone. This scenario could happen because the ecosystem is lacking predators to manage the deer population. This idea is mentioned in another article with John Duffy, where he speaks about the now treeless landscape of Donegal. This ecological insight was affirmed when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park in the US. The predator wolves changed the browsing behaviour of the herbivores, and the young trees flourished. Observing and understanding the limited Community Dynamics of woodland like this and changing management in time can save centuries of ecological stagnation.

Although the time spans are much shorter than a woodland, we can apply the same thinking to a pasture. Even in a diverse pasture, repeated topping or tight uniform grazing will keep the field neat, but also it resets the Community Dynamics to a vulnerable state at a single stage of growth. For example, if there is no rain for six weeks after a paddock is mowed or grazed short, that period of limited Community Dynamics could leave that field vulnerable to drought stress, limiting growth.

If we look to nature, this sort of neatness rarely happens. The messy unevenness of nature is designed to be much more resilient in the chaos of natural events. We as farmers and growers also need to manage within that chaos, so finding ways to increase Community Dynamics – by expanding the range of species and age profiles will strengthen the system. 

This increase can be achieved with holistic planned grazing, where the focus is less on even grass utilisation and more on the correct recovery period, which depends on the grass growth rate at the time of year. When grass is growing fast, the livestock is rotated quickly, leaving a lot of grass behind. As grass growth slows down in late summer/early autumn, the rotation is slowed down to ensure adequate time for recovery. Because there is a bank of grass from the previous rotations, there is no shortage of feed for the animals despite leaving them longer in each paddock. Having pasture plants at various growth stages gives the livestock the ability to self-select a balanced diet of high protein leaves with roughage as required. If we consider the mineral cycle discussed above, the taller grasses will also have increased mineralisation and secondary metabolites, all adding to the health of the animals.

Another super example of a practice that increases Community Dynamics in the managed landscape is the wonderful skill of hedge laying. Hedge laying is elegant in so many ways, both aesthetically and functionally. From a Community Dynamics point of view, it is sheer genius. The old stems are partially cut and laid over with enough connective tissue to keep them alive. The clean-cut stool at the base of the cut sends up new shoots that grow through the laid stems, strengthening and renewing the hedge. The same roots are growing both old and new wood at the same time. This technique is a human intervention that is truly symbiotic with nature. Laid hedges maintained across generations can live up to and perhaps longer than 1000 years, whereas the lifespan of a standard hawthorn is around 200 years. Add to this a diversity of hedge species and a bit of untidy wildness in between laying events, and a laid hedge is the ultimate farmland habitat.

Enriching Community Dynamics in the landscape will always be helpful for the farming operation and for the wildlife that comes to take a share of the spoils because when the ecologic processes are enhanced, the whole ecosystem is enhanced.

I recently learned an interesting Irish word from a podcast hosted by writer, scholar, television presenter Manchán Magan – forcamás. Like many Irish words, it takes a couple of paragraphs to fully describe its meaning in English. The dictionary entry for forcamás is pretty cryptic - “The unsteadiness of a stone about to fall, watchfulness”. It is the sort of word that describes a state of being and our interaction with that state.

Manchán describes the Gaelic word as attentiveness or the act of dallying but also elaborates on the dual meaning of unsteadiness; he understands it as the impermanence of everything, the constant chaotic potential of the “stone about to fall”. For a person to develop forcamás is to develop a “watchfulness” of seeing nature and being attentive to the constant poised potential for change.

To allow a place its forcamás is to allow its impermanence and unsteadiness, permitted the freedom not to be neat and perfect, but instead to naturally be messy and a bit uncertain, to gently wallow in the natural process of decay that all of life is undergoing. So much more of nature could thrive in the farmed environment if we dared allow such places of unmanicured wilderness and benign decay. Forcamás is the early Celtic wisdom of the four ecosystem processes distilled into a single word.