Grazing animals like goats, cows, and sheep can destroy an ecosystem in an incredibly fast pace, leaving only behind small brushes and no vegetation. As a result, the soil becomes poorer in plants, and with no plants and roots once the rain comes the water instead of getting trapped in the soil simply evaporates or washes away leaving the land dry and with no minerals.

This problem may seem somewhat distant to most of us but is destroying areas were hundreds of millions of people live and survive.

The desertification happens in many places, from North Africa to Asia, North and South America, Southern Europe, all these places suffer from the destruction of habitats.

When hope arrives:

To rebalance the ecosystem is the objective of permaculture, and for decades now people are proving how to fight back desertification using grazing animals in a sustainable way, not just improving the ecosystems, but the lives of those who live in it (animals included).

The method is simple, you mimic nature, just like a herd of buffalos in America or the African herbivorous like the zebra they are constantly on the move and grazing, never in the same place because of things like predation, as a result of the herds constant moving the land as time to recover and once the animals leave the place the weeds will be much smaller, but they will still remain in place and when the animals do return, the weeds they feed upon will be green and tall again!

The regrow method is as old as animals, unfortunately, people tend to move animals where there are weeds for animals to graze and will keep the animals there until there are no weeds left, the land gets depleted every year until the land is left dry and with no pasture for the animals.
When the movement of the animals is controlled with electric fencing some areas will have time to rest, and depending on the place in a few months or years the land will slowly recover and the green will gain over the sands!

It´s hard for me to explain in any further detail, but I will leave some videos that you guys will for sure find interesting, this is real life examples, from Africa, Asia and North America!

I hope you appreciated, tomorrow I will post about a company that uses permaculture in the desert of Egypt since the decade of 1980 and is having an incredible success!

Peace, Carlos