To: Greg or e who wrote (27692 ) 6/26/2012 10:30:25 PM From: 2MAR$ 1 Recommendation Read Replies (4) | Respond to Two words... Goat farts. In such a degraded environment, cattle and sheep do not fare well. But goats – being particularly hardy ruminants – forage on the shrubs. Goats are especially hard on the soil because their sharp hoofs pulverise the protective crust of soil that is formed by rainfall and that naturally checks wind erosion. These livestock have grazed the countryside bare of its rainfall-retaining vegetation, contributing to the massive flooding that ravaged Pakistan in the summer of 2010. http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=28228223 If Nigeria’s human population and livestock herds continue growing as they are today, the associated land degradation will eventually undermine herding and farming. A second giant dustbowl is developing in northern and western China, western Mongolia, and central Asia. After economic reforms in 1978 shifted the responsibility for farming from large, state-organised production teams to individual farm families, China’s livestock populations spiralled upward. The number of goats continues to grow as the land is stripped of vegetation and winds help remove the soil to convert rangelands into desert.
