I think one element offered by Savoury needs to be taken on hesitantly: rotational grazing as a fix-it carbon sink. This is trumpeted elsewhere journalistically -- see Cows Save the Planet ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16255159-cows-save-the-planet ) -- and a bone of contention among academics. Each year the scientific study of soil improves greatly and the complexity of the ecological processes is awesome...But we cannot say that grazing can be the primary tool to sequester the carbon emitted worldwide. Sequestration rates are so variable and volatile over time. Although his figures are dated, Simon Fairlie in Meat: A Benign Extravagance ( https://www.booktopia.com.au/meat-simon-fairlie/book/9781856230551.html ) has a good discussion about the statistics involved. We are beginning to understand soil structures and microbiological templates that best sequester greenhouse gases but there is no absolute reliability vis a vis woodland, grassland, and brittle environments...anywhere in anyone's paddock. For instance, back in 2014 -- in was Australian desert areas that sequestered carbon on par with the Amazon. ( https://blog.csiro.au/record-rains-made-australia-a-giant-green-global-carbon-sink/ ) Because of this, besides its gross commodification of Nature, carbon trading is really a scam. Ultimately, the key problem with Savoury's perspective is that it is just another bioengineering method that doesn't tackle the political challenges the environment faces. Even if millions of acres of land worldwide are grazed holistically the overall ecological challenge is still gonna be larger than any number of bovines stomachs. So to sign up to the Cows-save-planet scenario is a huge mistake -- but that attitude is pervasive within the regenerative agriculture movement. Here, among glaziers in Australia a large sector insist that we can still have our fossil fuels cake because farmers can do such a great job burying emissions by just farming a different way. In this sense, Holistic grazing and regen agriculture has also become a shibboleth for conservative agrarian forces among farmers. The other problem is that like so many organic movements the adjustment to holistic framing (and even the name suggests the theme) is a spiritual and personal journey. So you get a ready idealisation -- one that, as John Bellamy Foster points out, resides in these currents as far back as Jan Smutts and Rudolf Steiner. In that sense, the fight for regenerative agriculture must ALSO be a fight for materialism because the shallowness of many of the arguments employed, panders to localism and consumerism. However, the irony is that the sort of human within nature intermesh argued by Marx and Engels -- and broken by commodifying processes like the Metabolic Rift -- is sustained in the outlook of indigenous peoples and some traditional farming systems. Despite the spiritual tradition, we need a scientific handle to explain this that does not fall victim to reductionism -- and reducing carbon sequestration to cows stomachs is still reductionism.
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