At the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development taking place later in June in Brazil, desertification will be a major issue of focus. Conference attendees will ruminate on how to go about solving the problem, but Allan Savory won't be among them.

He already has a solution.

Over the last 50 years, Savory, a Zimbabwean biologist and environmentalist, has been developing what he calls "holistic management" – an approach to livestock farming that is revitalizing parched soils at an incredible rate. "We now have water beginning to appear in places where it hadn't been seen in over 100 years," Savory says of his rangelands that span over 450 million acres globally in places like Zimbabwe and Chile.His work led him to found the Savory Institute, whose numerous accolades include the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award for global humanitarian work.

The key, Savory explains, is using livestock to make rainfall more effective. "These lands had billions of animals on them before humans killed them off," he says. "The only thing in the world that can trample the vegetation, digest the vegetation, put [vegetation] on the surface of the soil as dung, urine and litter to cover the soil to make rainfall more effective – the only thing that can do that is very large numbers of animals. But to the whole world, that's counterintuitive."

It most certainly is. Myriad organizations have long viewed livestock such as goats to be a major threat to vegetation in periods of drought. In 2011, World On Edge, a book published by the Earth Policy Institute in the United States, went so far as to note, "Goats are converting vast stretches of grassland into desert." World Bank biodiversity specialist Tony Whitten, writing in 2009 for the bank about hisefforts to rehabilitate Lake Aibi in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, was even more succinct with a three-word indictment: "I hate goats."

Goats have particularly sharp hooves, which scientists conventionally believe tear up the cryptobiotic crust, the top layer of dried-up soil. This crust is full of bacteria that bind soil particles together; if it's destroyed, it opens the door to erosion and desertification. But Savory's experiences show otherwise. "We had 700 goats in [one] herd, and that is why we've got more grass now," he says. "The more animals you have, the more grass you get."

His logic is grounded in predator-prey principles, lookingat how these dynamics played out before the invention of agriculture. In Zimbabwe's grasslands, herbivores gather in large herds to protect themselves from their natural predators like lions, cheetahs and wild dogs. "The herd is frightening to the predator," explains Savory. "They try to get an animal out of the herd but never attack the herd [directly]. The moment large herbivores concentrate in herds they begin to trample all over vegetation, break soil surfaces and do [essentially] what a gardener would do."

In that context, says Savory, rainfall levels don't matter: "Desertification literally means that available rainfall has become less effective. Lack of effectiveness of rainfall happens when you expose a lot of soil." In this respect, he explains, planting trees to combat desertification is pointless. "[With trees] you have to have rainfall high enough to give solid ground cover, and most desertification areas don't have high enough levels."But with holistically managed livestock, "even when we get a dry year now, the production of grass and shrubs is greater than we can handle."

Savory won't be at Rio+20. Major international conferences, he says, repeatedly encourage "the same failed practices: trying to use technology, trying to plant grass and seed and decrease animal numbers." For Savory, the environment is complex – a context that he's certain will go unnoticed in Brazil. "[I] work to a holistic context, and the consequences that have come out are quite different," he explains. "It's the only low-tech solution that does it all."

Tech Bytes

➲ China's Ministry of Information and Information Technology (MIIT) has unveiled a development plan that will increase the number of Internet users in the country to 800 million by 2015. This figure will include 200 million Web surfers in rural areas, and the plan should provide jobs for 2.3 million people. According to MIIT, 513 million Chinese were online in 2011.

➲ In other MIIT news, Vice Minister Shang Bing has revealed that there are more than 152 million Chinese people using 3G networks. Combined with those still reliant on 2G-outfitted phones, the country's total mobile Internet population is 370 million. More than 1 billion consumers own mobile phones in China.