Australia's farms could act like vacuum cleaners sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and burying it in the ground, according to Australian farmer and educator Brian Wehlburg.
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Mr Wehlburg gave training sessions on holistic management to two groups, totaling 41 property owners and agricultural employees, at Cootamundra last week.
The potential for agriculture to play a key role in cutting atmospheric carbon was not a focus of Mr Wehlburg's presentations, but he says it's a very real benefit of holistic agriculture.
"The main purpose of our courses is to help farmers sustain themselves, their families and their communities," Mr Wehlburg told the Herald.
"Every farm is different, and every farmer is different, so we look at the basic principles of the water cycle, the mineral cycle, solar energy flow and community dynamics - but it all comes back to covering the soils.
"There's no argument as to whether it should be 60 or 70% - it should be 100% of the soil, covered 100% of the time - that's the key.
"All life is carbon based, so desertification and biodiversity loss and climate change are all about carbon moving from one area to another."
Mr Wehlburg is co-founder of Inside Outside Management, an educational company established in 2004.
Originally from Zimbabwe, he was managing a game farm there when he learned about holistic management from Allan Savory, an international champion of these techniques.
Mr Savory, a manager of national parks in Africa, made the revolutionary discovery that hard-hooved cattle can actually improve grassland health, rather than destroying it, and delivered a TED talk that has been viewed millions of times.
Mr Savory went on to the United States, while Mr Wehlburg came to Central Queensland about 20 years ago where he helped manage cattle stations introducing the technique of keeping cattle constantly moving from paddock to paddock, mimicking African wildebeest herds.
"We've got properties now with almost 200 paddocks running good herds of up to 4,000 animals," he said.
"They only stay in a particular paddock for maybe five or six days days a year, which means it's getting grazed for five or six days with lots of dung and urine spread over the area and the grass then has 360 days to grow and breed butterflies and all that good stuff.
"It's happening in a lot of properties, for example at Holbrook but in Queensland too where we're running several thousand head in a single mob and one of the interesting things is that farmers are all recording better time management.
"Where before they'd spend most of a day in their ute checking waters and might only see 10% of their stock today they'll go for three hours and check one water and see 90% of their animals."
Michael Gooden, Regional Agricultural Landcare Facilitator with Riverina Local Land Services, said holistic management has attracted its fair share of criticism for lack of scientific proof.
"But the reality is that a lot of the science is still struggling to catch up with the complexity of the ecosystem.
"The thing that has come true is the outcomes of managers who are doing it and are getting outcomes that I've heard some soil scientists say are impossible.
"Land managers are very happy with the results, even though they are outside what would have been predicted using the old way of looking at things."
Mr Gooden said Riverina LLS was keen on supporting courses such as those given last week in Cootamundra, especially as they could help foster local management groups.
"There's a lot of evidence now that peer-to-peer learning is very effective," he said.
"It's a really good avenue for innovation to occur on a farm, because if it's a farmer talking to a farmer they're a lot more likely to listen than if it's a scientist in a white lab coat telling them that if they do something they'll get better results.
"A course like holistic management is pretty challenging in terms of going against a lot of traditional beliefs so you often need some support with training and post-training to make the big changes that are required."