Can cows make it rain? ☔️🌾🐄

(re)greening the largest desert in North America

Author

Mitch Hinrichs
June 07, 2024

Read Time: 4 minutes

Low, infrequent rainfall characterizes desert climates around the world. However inhospitable and brittle, these same deserts present unique opportunities for regenerative transformation.

Worldwide, deserts have spread and “sprouted up” from overgrazing and mismanagement, but now, livestock are restoring their vitality.

Human Folly & Global Desertification

Arable land worldwide has been degrading at an accelerated rate. Almost half of our food production occurs in dryland areas with low or variable rainfall, and more than 2 billion people live in these environments.

Grasslands and rangelands make up half of the dryland areas in the world. Traditionally, these environments were used to raise livestock, but they are recently being converted into crop production. The rangelands are home to more than 50% of the world's livestock population.

Grasslands once covered about 40 percent of the United States, but only 5 percent remains due to cultivation crops or urban development. Some of these grasslands extend southwest to southeastern Arizona, southern New Mexico, and western Texas, where the Chihuahuan Desert creeps up into the United States from Mexico, where the majority of this biodiverse ecosystem is.

Deserts Weren’t Always Deserted

According to accounts of Spanish explorers in the 1600-1700s, the lush grass of the Chihuahuan Desert used to be “belly high to a horse.” North America’s largest desert produced grasses at densities and heights we would deem nearly impossible when scouting these brittle and arid regions today.

Less than two hundred years later, due to livestock overgrazing, oil and gas drilling, and agricultural cultivation, only 15% of the grasslands of the Chihuahuan Desert remain intact.

Historically, this ecoregion was once the only place where grizzly bears, wolves, and jaguars could be found in the same locality. This ecosystem must have been rich and productive to house such an array of predators, even with annual rainfall less than 10 inches.

Accounts of desertification like this are found throughout the world, and the story rhymes— livestock overgrazing, industrial and urban development, and agricultural cultivation. But past actions do not define future fate.

Alejandro Carillo’s Regenerative Ranching Journey

Alejandro Carillo’s adventures in Mexico’s Chihuahuan desert started young. In the winter, his dad would bring him along to hunt mule deer. He would spend the summers on desert cattle ranches doing roundups and riding the range.

These early experiences set the foundations, becoming aware of the emerging frustrations and challenges that ranching in the desert presents, such as the decline in the carrying capacity of the land and the increasing inputs ranchers required to make a living.

In 2004, Alejandro returned to his family’s ranch to help his dad. A couple of years later, by luck or fortune, he met his regenerative mentors, who lived close by and practiced Holistic Management on their ranches.

The film “To Which We Belong” documents his and his father’s interpersonal journey and the regenerative transformation of their family’s ranch.

How Cattle Regenerate Deserts

High Density, High Impact

Alejandro had three separate cattle herds before adopting holistic management. Combining all herds into one herd to graze together across the landscapes concentrated their impact, manure, and urine.

Moving Cattle Frequently & Adaptively

They move the herd multiple times daily to new forage. They assess each paddock's forage quality to determine how long to graze it. This adaptive decision-making per paddock basis allows for the right amount of impact.

Allowing Land to Rest Properly

When Alejandro started implementing adaptive grazing, some of the pastures were over-grazed and some were over-rested. Rest periods for previously grazed pastures were extended to 12 months between grazing events.

Fencing and Access to Water

There is permanent fencing and water around the ranch to ensure that cattle, no matter where they are have water. There are 21 reservoirs at higher elevations to allow for gravity water flow downhill to smaller 38 troughs. Each reservoir stores up to 40,000 gallons and each trough holds 2,500 gallons.

This water storage also has become a huge draw for wildlife, providing more watering options for deer, birds, and other species of the Chihuahuan Desert.

Stimulating Soil Biology

The herd's bunching causes a concentration of urine and manure, which stimulates soil biology. Combined with rest, the soil can cycle those nutrients, germinate the existing latent seed bank, and begin to cover the bare soil.

The awakened soil food web also increases the nutrition and quality of the grasses that grow, reducing mortality rates and the need to supplement feed throughout the year, while allowing the ranch to carry more head per acre.

Desertification is a Choice

The Carillo’s family ranch is living proof that desertification is a choice. It’s a choice to allow it to happen and it’s a choice to regenreate it.

Regenerating the Chihuahua Desert

The results speak for themselves.

  • Water infiltration is 18-20” per hour versus their neighbors 2”.

  • The ranch has tripled their stocking rates, from 200 to 600 without increasing the amount of acres they graze.

  • Acres per cow ranged from 150 acres and now the acres required per cow is 42 acres.

  • Cows required supplemental feed from March through July of each year, but now none is given, as the herds are on pasture the entire year.

  • Mortality rates dropped from 10% to 1%.

  • Net revenue of the ranch has increased 350% with triple the cow numbers and a lower unit cost of production.

They also witnessed that the cattle herds were more trusting and easier to work with due to the frequent and predictable moves. They’ve noticed that they don’t have to “herd” the cattle, just lead them to the next paddock.

And now the ranch requires less labor to operate even though cattle are moved twice daily, making it much more profitable than before.

Can Regenerative Agriculture Restore the Rain?

There is emerging evidence that plant microbes can influence precipitation. This phenomena is referred to as “bio-precipitation.”

Alejandro has carefully documented the formation of storm clouds over his ranch where little-to-no storm clouds form over his neighbor’s ranches.

Now it’s easy to want regenerative agriculture to solve all of the environmental problems humanity is facing, but it’s much more difficult to deny what has happened and occurs on land that has regenerated.

The only question remains, shall we regenerate?

Featured image courtesy of Mystic Artists from the film To Which We Belong, of Alejandro Carillo, taken at Las Damas Ranch, Chihuahua, Mexico.

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