Inside Zimbabwe's Shangani Holistic, a 65,000-hectare 'living laboratory', scientists and farmers are exploring how cattle, wildlife and people can coexist on the same land.

If you expect to see a typical commercial cattle ranch at Shangani Holistic in Zimbabwe, you are in for a shock. Instead of neatly fenced, homogenous meadows, you find a 65,000-hectare open savanna where 7,700 commercial cattle graze side-by-side with roughly 3,500 wild animals, including zebras, giraffes, leopards and migrating herds of elephant.

For Dr Elizabeth le Roux, an associate professor at the University of Aarhus, the contrast with European cattle production landscapes - where farmland is often tightly managed and uniform - is stark.

"When I ask my Danish students to go and observe cattle-driven dynamics in Shangani, they expect to find a commercial farm meadow," Le Roux says. "They are blown away by how natural the space is. It is coexistence with a lot of wildlife species, more so than most people from a European perspective realise is possible."

Rangeland dynamics

Owned by the Oppenheimer family, the ranch functions as a large ecological laboratory.

In a wholesale departure from traditional paddocking, the team uses a livestock management strategy that mimics natural movements of roaming buffalo herds. Large stretches of internal fencing have been removed, says resident director Max Makuvise, who manages ranching operations alongside research manager Peter Makumbe....