By Buz Kloot
On Monday the 15th of July this year (2024), Joe Dickie and I got to talk to Dr. Fred Provenza (Professor Emeritus, Dept. Wildland Resources, Utah State University) from his home in Ennis, Montana as part of our podcast series. Getting to know Fred in the last two months has been a journey in and of itself and I thought I’d share a few insights with you and hopefully this whets your appetite for when we release the podcast.
While I don’t consider myself a prodigious reader, I did find that two books this year profoundly affected the way I viewed the world. The first was I saw Satan Fall like Lightning by René Girard, and the other was Nourishment by Fred Provenza. This is the story of how I first got to read Provenza’s amazing book.
For the longest time, I would often hear my friend Michael Hall, formerly an NRCS grazing specialist, say “Fred Provenza said….” As a guy who was coming to grips with soil health in row crop land, I never bothered to find out who Fred Provenza was. After I fell in love with the prairie and started to see livestock as one of the answers to restoring degraded land, names outside of my South Dakota contacts like Allan Savory, Stan Parsons, Dallas Mount, Terry McCosker and Fred Provenza started to attract my attention.
Since I was only one degree of separation from Provenza, I took a chance and asked Michael if he’d provide a letter of introduction to Fred so we could ask for a podcast interview. Mike graciously, and eventually did this, sending an email to Fred and copying me in. Well, Fred’s celebrity to me was on par with Tom Brady or Eric Clapton, so my expectation of a response was low. But to my great surprise, Fred responded the next day “… Buz, wonderful to meet you. Michael told me many wonderful stories about you. I’m happy to do a podcast with you. I am happy to talk about whatever you consider to be most appropriate for your audience.” Well, don’t you know, I was both shocked and delighted.
This was a couple of months ago in late May, and I thought “hoo boy, better be prepared for this podcast, I don’t want to blow it with the behavioral ecology guru!” To prepare, I ordered his book Nourishment and borrowed the audiobook of the same title from the library – I listened to the audiobook (an abridged version of the book itself) and devoured the book as well. I expected to find a tome about grazing and shepherding livestock, and I got that in spades, but in such an engaging way – Fred loves stories! What I didn’t expect was the application of so much of what he learned from foraging behavior and how he applied that to ecology, sociology, human health and even metaphysical musings. I was amazed at the way Fred weaves such a wonderful story that links humankind’s relationship to soil, water, plants and animals to the spiritual world. It truly just blew my mind.
As I read through Nourishment and listened to the audiobook, Fred and I struck up a running email conversation. Once again, I didn’t think a rock star like Fred would have the time to converse with me, but he did. Next week, I’d like to share a little more about our correspondence that led up to the podcast interview.
In the meantime, I’d like to share some links that I explored and that I’d highly recommend:
Utah State University: The Web of Life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjUgX91VZpk
Grassfed Exchange 2022 'Fred Provenza: Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKOVsimD5HI
2023 Soil Revolution Conference: Managing Landscapes for Health: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAktpQwf3sY
Regenerative Agriculture Podcast: Regenerating Landscapes With Livestock and Diverse Forages:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c7JFx7WyWA
Books:
Nourishment by Fred Provenza
The Art & Science of Shepherding - by Michel Meuret (Editor), Fred Provenza (Editor)
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