Anadolu Meraları - Savory Hub in Turkey

Biga, Turkey

An Overview Of Our Solution

Grasslands are one of the most abused, very poorly managed and underestimated ecosystems. But they are able to provide high-quality food and fiber for the society, livelihood and prosperity for farmers/pastoralists. They are able to offer crucial ecosystem services on water cycles, biodiversity, mitigation and adaptation to Climate Change. Holistic Management provides low-cost solution on regenerating these ecosystems into their potentials while not limiting but boosting economical activity. It has a great advantage for its ability to be implemented on massive scale using properly managed livestock to heal the land and economy, with robust return on investment rates. It includes also supporting work such as creating market incentives, training farmers, involving crowd/consumers to become part of the solution financially.

Who is this solution impacting?

Community Type

Urban

Rural

Organization type

Other

Ecosystem (select all that apply)

Deserts

Grasslands

Urban/Built Environment

Population impacted

15 millions directly, 60 millions indirectly

Size of agricultural area

20 millions hectares

Production quantity

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food (meat and milk especially) and fiber (leather and wool)

People employed

Few Hundreds of thousands at least (no official data available)

Describe your solution

Holistic Management is a decision-making, planning and implementation framework, essential within Regenerative Agriculture umbrella. It helps people, communities and organisations to take context-based decisions without unintended consequences and offers a set of management tools to regenerate lives and land. It is globally known (as seen in founder Allan Savory's TED talk) for its implementation on worlds' grassland through holistic planned grazing. It's an unique methodology that enables livestock to be grazed as a proxy (mimicking) to their wild/herd-behaving ("prey-predator relation" pattern) cousins, while ensuring socially enriching and economically viable production for the farmers/herders. It's not a "single & all-time-fit" formulae, but instead a set of robust and holistic alghorithm that work in all settings and enables to create custom/context-based grazing plans that produces win-win solutions for the producer, consumer and the ecosystem as a whole. It's used in all kind of agricultural settings such as silviopasture and cropland. Customly allocated and closely monitored recovery times for the plants to regrow and appropriate density&frequency of "animal impact" to prevent oxidation and allow healthy decay ensures soil cover, active and strong soil microbiota, strong-rooted and highly diverse flora, rainfall penetration/holding and increasing soil organic matter. Animals are thus used as powerful tools to regenerate the land by leveraging ecosystem cycles.

Describe your implementation

Our work can be categorized in 7 sections: 1) Training farmers (new and existing), 2) Providing technical support to farmers in their specific needs, 3) Creating/planning/organizing pilot and/or basin-scale collaborative grassland management projects with the involvement of local/national authorities and farmers unions, 4) Creating/managing "learning sites" where solutions can be implemented, new knowledge&experience can be gained&shared 5) Capacity building by recruiting & allowing new managers, trainers and experts to become changemakers 6) Social awareness through internet, articles and wide-spread media appareances on grasslands, regenerative agriculture, food security&safety, Climate Change, etc 7) Creating, coordinating, managing marketing strategies, platforms, monitoring systems and collaborations for farmers to reach consumers and food communities that we support Our work is followed with interest and appreciation by farmers, consumers, NGOs&companies, forward-thinking individuals within authorities. This helps to disseminate this new "paradigm" of regenerative agriculture (we're the ones who coined up this concept among others in Turkey). Support of people helped us to create much bigger impact compared to our very limited finances - we started with literally no seed capital 3 years ago, as a two individuals in the end of their 20s, and grew our core team to 6 now - still none under regular payment. This "doing good things from complete scratch in a very limiting context" is seen as a result of 1) our consistency/idealism to bring change, and 2) Holistic Management being a decision framework that works very well even under extreme conditions. As urban-born new farmers ourselves, we had to prove ourself to the farmers that we work all over Turkey: Our hands-on work, communication strategy that is based on first understanding people's needs and challenges and custom/context-based solutions gained the respect and approval of the farmers.

External connections

In the 1st phase, TEMA Foundation provided network support, while Buğday Association closely supported our work through promotion and providing space on IFOAM Conference in 2013 in Istanbul, when we brought Allan Savory to Turkey for a series of events. Local farmers union in "Sarayönü" district in Central Anatolia's brittle and desertifying grasslands invited us to realize a pilot project with local shepherds. The project (2014) created a big impact even in short term and drew the immediate attention of regional authorities and international institutions like FAO with the results it created on land and its ability to involve shepherds/farmers who are known to have strong prejudices against such ideas. We have been invited for public speech, seminars and project development meetings by municipalities (Çankaya district in Ankara, Muğla) and local "agronomists' unions". In the 2nd stage (starting 2016), we are contacted by 1) companies working in food security analysis/monitoring, 2) landowners wanting us to implement in their lands, 3) investment schemes inviting us to go for big scale project implementation in Turkey and neighboring countries. We're now following up these opportunities to create best marginal reaction and leverage points on human resource/capacity building and spreading the implementation. We work support urban food communities to connect with farmers. This year we're also invited to national child doctors' conference to speak on these issues.

What is the environmental or ecological challenge you are targeting with your solution?

Turkey's grasslands are severely degraded. The top soil is less than 20 cm in most areas, soil organic matter averages are below 2%, 64% of the grasslands are desertifying, water holding capacities are in extreme lows. This leads to biodiversity loss of big scale: Turkey is alone home to 9000 plant species (Europe has 12.000 in total), most of them under threat. The same applies to the wild fauna that ultimately depends on green biomass. Soil degradation of scale leads to more water run-off, eroding soil. With Climate Change-boosted weather anomalies, this results in serious droughts and floods at once, following each other in vicious cycles. Loss of soil carbon also means more GHG emissions and loss of soil capacity as a carbon sink

Describe the context in which you are operating

Turkey is in fast and chaotic transition. Many dynamics are constantly changing, and rarely do so in the same directions. Food and agriculture are of central in this process, becoming even more of a focus point everyday. Agricultural methodologies used, demographics and consumer awareness changed dramatically and keep doing so: Rural population saw a decline to 20% of population. Food security and safety, especially in livestock products, are of big debate with the production is shifting to conventional feedlot systems, meat prices increased 260% in 12 years, milk prices are constant for the last 3 years despite the cost increases for the farmers. Consumers of all the socio-economical habitus vividly question the nutrient value and healthiness of food products. In the meanwhile, grasslands and pastures are either poorly managed or idle, which both result in degradation, instead of potential regeneration in most parts, due to lack of "animal impact" and/or presence of overgrazing at once.

This puts "grasslands" into focus of many debates, be it about agriculture, ecology or socio-economical topics. But so far no concrete and holistic "leverage" point is proposed, which may be the reason why our work as the organisation draws so much attention and interest in regional and national scale.

This set of complexe vicious circles means a relatively very challenging context in so many levels, but it also means that the "right" solutions can have tremendous impact and leverage.

How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?

Currently 2 locations where we're able to draw ecological monitoring data. Learning site -Biga 20 ha land under lease, only holistic planned grazing (no seeding or irrigation) that we operate since 2014. Lab analysis of governmental office for 12 month period: increase from 1.07% to 1.48% in soil organic matter in 90 cm depth (in 30 cm depth, the increase: 1.75% to 2.37%). Bare soil surface decreased %35, rainfall runoff decreased dramatically. Biodiversity increased. Green biomass production/carrying capacity increased 75% in 2 years according to our estimates. Sarayönü 40 ha pilot project on Commons. No budget, thus high-level creativity on implementation. No soil organic matter calculation due to unexpected local officer change due to political reasons. Our ecological monitoring and local shepherds observations: decrease of bare soil from %40 to %30, %5 increase in perennials, increased plants vigor and %40 increase in carrying capacity in a total of 3 months implementation.

Language(s)

Turkish

Water

Total available precipitation is a (highly) limiting factor in most places; and this is more of the case with the annual rainfall distribution patterns changing. Thus, making rainfall penetrating into the soil and restored there to enable green growth, instead of surface runoff that also erode soil, is critical. We have realized this with increased soil cover, deeper root system and increased soil organic matter. Our learning site stays green for 3 weeks longer than neighboring lands.

Food Security/Nutrition

We coined up the concepts "pasture raised" and "grassfed" in Turkey for livestock, along with "regenerative". Now we work high-tech labs to introduce BRIX analysis for these products to compare nutrition/trace elements with the conventional products. That's also a step againts GMOs that are so common now in livestock industry. We work in soil microbiology through trainings and open-source knowledge dissemination and hope to further contribute to the food nutrition movement we're part of.

Economic/Sustainable Development

Holistic Management regenerate more income for farmers 1) without extracting from, but by regenerating ecosystems, 2) with low to no need for starting investment. Creating new marketing channels, frames and additional value for regenerative, climate-friendly and high-nutrition livestock products help the producers as well. In Turkish context, up to %85 of livestock production cost is forage/feed; decreasing this through holistic planned grazing is a great advantage for the farmers.

Climate

We benefit climate in 1) mitigation by sequestrating atmospheric carbon into soil as long-term organic matter. In our learning site, we calculated 2000 tonnes of CO2 sequestrated in 1 year, in 20 ha; and 2) adaptation by turning soil into a sponge that can absorb and hold water for longer droughts. The standart calculations show that we can hold up to 100 tonnes/ha more water. That is of crucial importance for expected (and happening) longer, more severe droughts worldwide.

Sustainability

It is an knowledge-intensive solution and aims (in its financial planning module) to best-use of resources for best leverage. That makes it possible to implement even with no seed-funding. On different scales and contexts (where, for instance, human labour is limited), more investment-intensive models are totally possible to increase the efficiency of the implementation (like, consultancy, semi-permanent electrical fencing paddocking, water sources for livestock on different spots, additional side-activity like soil microbiology analysis and injection through special composting/brewing methods). It's self-income generating because it 1) increases the viability of land, 2) decreases the operational costs, 3) add-value on products.

Return on investment

It depends on different dynamics like marketing availability&distance, human resources available to create additional enterprises on same piece of land etc. In our experience, it's possible to realize ROI in less than 2 years in most cases. We have recently developed a feasibility report for a 2.000 ha of Commons land with 3000 sheep herd (that has been cancelled in the last second, again due to current political turmoil in the country) where the ROI was 2.5 years in modest scenario. The increase of land value is another big advantage as it's seen now by the investors worldwide - our fellow Holistic Management colleagues in USA (Grassland LLC) and Australia (SLM) are using it.

Entrant Image

How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?

It's already used and replicated worldwide. Holistic Management is now estimated to be implemented in a total of 40 millions of acres worldwide, from USA to African communities, Australian ranches to Turkish farms. Savory Institute has now 20+ hubs worldwide, working regionally within their own context to spread the implementation of Holistic Management through different and (mostly) innovative incentives. In Turkish case, mid-scale invesment (1-5 millions dollars) can start a basin-scale implementation (10.000+ ha) including all the infrastructure, training, monitoring and follow-up work (excluding buying of livestock). One advantage is that, we're able to do crowdfunding by pre-selling high-quality/regenerative animal product to willing consumers. Our approach is rather to best-use of all the available resource (financial, social, land-wise) for best marginal reaction; thus we're able to work in all level of investments.

YouTube URL

Anadolu Meraları - "The Beginning" (English Subtitles)

Overview