Cattle Grazing by Maasai Not Harmful to National Park, Research Argues

Sep 11, 2024

Bilal Butt knows how it sounds. The associate professor of sustainability and development at the University of Michigan understands that arguing to let cattle graze in a national park offends the sensibilities.

However, his team's research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and generations of knowledge from the Indigenous Maasai people of Kenya back it up.

The Maasai's pastoral practices had almost no discernible positive or negative effect on the ecological well-being of the Maasai Mara National Reserve.

This is an important context for land that welcomes tourists while excluding Indigenous farmers, sometimes violently, said Butt, who works at U-M's School for Environment and Sustainability, or SEAS. He hopes his team's work will help reshape how people think about who gets to use land, for what, and where the beliefs that we use to answer those questions come from.

"There's this idea that seeing cows in the 'wilderness' is unnatural," Butt said. "But what's more unnatural: the people on safari in their 4-wheel drive Land Cruisers or cows eating grass?"

The Maasai Mara National Reserve was established to protect wildlife, yet it has seen populations shrink among its large, iconic herbivores, including zebras, impalas and elephants, over the last few decades.

Researchers and conservationists identified the Maasai practice of grazing their cattle on the protected land as a driver of those declines. Butt, however, has questioned the contexts under which these claims are made.

Throughout his education and training, he had seen how prevailing conservation theories and practices omitted the ancestral knowledge of people who had lived on the land long before the reserve was established in 1961.

"The more I learned, the more I came to reject what I was hearing," Butt said. "The knowledge wasn't coming from the people who lived here. It was coming from the Global North with very little knowledge of how the Maasai raise livestock and interact with the environment."

Butt and his team have been working to help assert this neglected knowledge's place in conservation science and policy. Too much of that has relied on interpreting experiments designed to approximate the real world at the expense of studying what was happening, he said.

"People always say the livestock are bad, but where is this idea coming from? It's coming from research that doesn't accurately understand how Indigenous people and their livestock interact with the landscape," Butt said. "We wanted to do something that was based in their lived reality."

For their latest publication, Butt and Wenjing Xu, who was a postdoctoral researcher at SEAS, focused on measuring and quantifying the impact of the Maasai's cattle grazing practices.

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Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.