Hal, I agree 100% and wish there were more emphasis on restoring grasslands and their soils. It is not only the western hemisphere. I work in East Africa, where truly vast regions of former grassland have been turned into rock desert by overgrazing just in the last century. As you say, the same is true of the Mediterranean and Middle East, but there it happened much longer ago, and I would guess that central Asia has also been desertified by livestock. Plus our Southwest and much of Mexico, and probably large chunks of Australia in the last few centuries.