Dimbangombe Ranch Holistic Planned Grazing — Measured Gains and a Community-Scale Reality Check (Zimbabwe)

The Africa Centre for Holistic Management (ACHM) is a Zimbabwean non-profit on the 4,600-hectare Dimbangombe property near Victoria Falls, donated in 1994 as a demonstration and training site for Holistic Planned Grazing. Multi-species herds are moved through unfenced paddocks under a grazing plan redrawn twice yearly to concentrate hoof action, dung and rest.

Between 2001 and 2009, fixed-point transects recorded a 31% decrease in bare ground, a 56% increase in litter cover, a 12% increase in perennial grass plants, a 21% decrease in undesirable annual grasses, and a 17% decrease in soil movement on the demonstration ranch. A parallel mobile-kraal innovation was reported to more than quadruple (4.4x) maize yields on treated community plots in 2008-2009.

Community-replication monitoring, started 2006 in four neighbouring Hwange communal villages, showed no improvement in watershed health by 2009: too few households combined animals into a single disciplined herd. Independent scientific literature (a peer-reviewed critical review of Savory's method, and Sierra Club, 2017) found holistic grazing's advantages over conventional grazing are inconsistent and not established by controlled, replicated research at the scale publicly claimed, even though component practices are grounded in mainstream rangeland ecology.