In the late 1960s, when a bad drought destroyed all the grazing lands in Afghanistan and the eastern provinces of Iran, Yazdani invested much of his money in buying, at a small fraction of their full price, thousands of lean and sickly sheep. When the full force of the drought was known, there was a rapid rise in the price of sheep. “I had paid twenty tooman for a sheep, and it was now worth four hundred tooman.” He had managed to keep most of his sheep alive by transferring them to more hospitable climes or by purchasing feed for them from other localities.