Savory’s plan was based on biomimicry—grazing livestock the same way wild herbivores graze. Borrowing some lessons from his time in the British Army, he devised a technique that called for controlling herds’ movements with military precision. He used electric fencing to divide the land into small paddocks and then pulled all the livestock together into just one such paddock. Then he allowed the animals a day or two to eat everything they possibly could before releasing them into the next paddock. By that time, the first paddock had been churned into lumps of soil, dung, and freshly exposed growth buds. And so the herd would move, from paddock to paddock, devouring and fertilizing each patch of land as it went. By the time the animals had moved through the last paddock, they would be ready for market. Each paddock would then have an entire season—roughly 180 days, depending on how the rains fell that year—to recover.

Savory’s plan was based on biomimicry—grazing livestock the same way wild herbivores graze.

The concept was not entirely new. Rotational grazing—where animals are allowed to graze on a small section of pasture for a few days before being moved to another section—was first introduced by scientists of the 18th century and has since gained widespread acceptance by ranchers around the world. But so far, the technique had done little to restore plant biodiversity or stop the transformation of grassland into desert.

Savory says that the most widely used rotational grazing methods focus too heavily on limiting the number of animals allowed to graze and not enough on the amount of time they spend grazing any given patch of land.

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Overgrazing, he says, is a function of time, not numbers. In fact, he says, high stock densities are actually better for the land because they reduce animal selectivity (that is, hungry animals crowded together will eat whatever they can get their teeth on, including the less sweet-tasting varieties of grass that would normally be left to overtake the pasture) and thus help preserve biodiversity. “The results we are seeing at our center today are because of a 400% increase in the number of animals we graze, not despite it,” he says. “I have to make that point to almost every scientist and rancher that passes through.”

In 1960s Zimbabwe, degraded land gave way to starving people and civil unrest. Amid this turmoil, Savory and his wife were exiled, along with hundreds of others whom the government decided were activists or political dissidents. They took their work to the United States, where they found a surprisingly similar state of land-use affairs. Government agencies and land-grant colleges around the country scoffed at the idea of increasing the number of livestock as a means to combating desertification. But as individual ranchers caught wind of Savory’s work, they began seeking him out.