I believe the term refers to looking at things as a whole. I don't suppose it rules out anything although I assume most 'holistic teachers' would not be reaching for the Roundup too often. But it's thinking about what you are about to do and how that effects everything else. So when you look at a field and think 'crap, there's a bit a dock problem in there', your solution is not always to reach for the thing that will solve that single problem, perhaps at the expense of something else.
So farmer A will reach for the bottle and go and whack them with poison and then deal with the consequences of that. The holistic guy might consider that docks are not all bad and have some use in small numbers. So maybe if he could pen up a couple hundred hens or broilers on that patch, they would eat the seeds, chickens guts being able to destroy them completely, probably eat a lot of leaf too, knocking back the plant, lay many eggs a day or provide meat and add rocket fuel to the soil for whatever we want to grow next.
I know which scenario I prefer but I guess it's easier to jump in a big tractor, put on some rock music and moan about lack of profits down the pub later on.
So farmer A will reach for the bottle and go and whack them with poison and then deal with the consequences of that. The holistic guy might consider that docks are not all bad and have some use in small numbers. So maybe if he could pen up a couple hundred hens or broilers on that patch, they would eat the seeds, chickens guts being able to destroy them completely, probably eat a lot of leaf too, knocking back the plant, lay many eggs a day or provide meat and add rocket fuel to the soil for whatever we want to grow next.
I know which scenario I prefer but I guess it's easier to jump in a big tractor, put on some rock music and moan about lack of profits down the pub later on.