Wildfires Don't Have
a Goats of a Chance

© 2001 Wendy Dager

Despite their reputation, goats don't really eat tin cans.

But, oh, how they love weeds. And shrubs and forbs and grasses.

With proper control, goats and other animals with voracious appetites for greenery can be used to scale back the threat of wildfires, including those that could be rampant during the upcoming windy season in Southern California.

Often egged on by dry Santa Ana winds, 6,000 wildfires per year wreak havoc in California. Among the worst in history was the 1999 fire season when 273,000 acres and 300 homes were destroyed at a cost of $500 million. Such statistics are expected to worsen as the number of fires increases due to the rapid expansion of housing developments, which sprout ever closer to locations that are vulnerable to fire.

One of the hardest hit areas in the last decade was Oakland Hills, when a 1991 fire claimed more than 2,400 homes. Determined to keep it from happening again, the local government sought out alternatives to the few available preventive techniques, which include the more conventional herbicides and controlled burns.

Instead, Oakland officials called in a goat rancher, who provided the goateed, bleating, four-footed crew that happily chomped the fire-prone hillsides for two weeks at a hefty $15,000 per job.

"Theres some irony here", said S&S Seeds' Paul Albright. "Not too long ago, the government used to charge goatherders for grazing rights. Now, city governments are paying them to come in with livestock to clear the land."

According to Dr. An Peischel, those prior fees weren't fair at all to the person providing the goats, and, at times, the best management practices for grazing were not used.

"It's a bad precedent that people who live in cities and own land would charge farmers to graze their goats on them", said Peischel. "What happened years ago, is that farmers might abuse the land. They'd graze it improperly because they had to pay a lot of money for it."

Peischel knows what she's talking about. A PhD in Range Livestock Nutrition and a goat farmer for 18 years, she and partner Mike Spaetgens began their business, Goats Unlimited, in Hawaii. Their herd of goats was hired by growers of sugar cane, citrus, coffee, bananas, and papaya to clear land prior to planting, as well as to perform weed control duties between harvests.

Using the Kiko breed of goats, along with livestock guardian dogs to herd them, Peischel and Spaetgens main objective is to enhance land productivity.

"If you want your land well taken care of, then you better find a good rancher that's going to be a steward to your land", said Peischel. "As farmers, we're doing a landowner a service. We're preventing fires on their land and we're enhancing their perennial grasses so we're enhancing watershed management."

Now located in Rackerby, California, an hour-and-a-half north of Sacramento, Goats Unlimited is truly what it says it is: unlimited in the services it performs.

"We do all different kinds of things with the goats", said Peischel. "We do land rejuvenation, erosion control, restoration projects, fire breaks, and fuel load reduction. We provide breeding stock. We make meat sales to organic restaurants in San Francisco and Berkeley. We sell them to folks who have small farms - five, ten, fifteen acres - that want to do land cleaning so that their places don't burn on the urban/wildlife interface. We clear ditches for irrigation companies so that the water flows freely and you dont have a lot of weeds and stuff along the banks."

Currently, the Goats Unlimited herd numbers 700, but each spring it expands to between 1200 and 1300 head. The care and feeding of the goats includes supplementing their diet with something other than that which they cull from the land.

"If you're doing a fire break in an old ponderosa pine forest, there's not much to eat there", said Peischel. "If nutrition is lacking, protein has to be supplemented. Though utilizing livestock to manage land isn't new, goats have been an industry in California for only five years. Their use, however, is becoming more widespread as fire prevention and mitigation practices evolve."

"There are various tools to mitigate or minimize the damage done by fire to grasslands, rangelands, forests, homes and personal property", said Peischel. "Each tool has a specific use and place in management."

Weed abatement tools include the mechanized variety such as bulldozers, masticators and chipping equipment.

Using machines, however, is sometimes hazardous they can spark and cause fire. Which is why, in June of 2001, the city of Sunnyvale, California employed goats to maintain local landfills. According to an article by Gretchen Knaup of the Sunnyvale Sun newspaper, one of the reasons the goats were used was because the many pipes and wells in the landfills were difficult for tractors to get around and there was risk of starting a vehicle fire.

Peischel admits that an employer has to be receptive to the idea of fire control via hooved herbivores.

"We have to find people that want to pay us to do this", she said. "Proper planning, site evaluation and the working of the goats takes time. Contract price depends on the size of the job; if your'e doing fire breaks; how old the goats are; what's the weather; what's the vegetation."

"Each contract", says Peischel, "is individually negotiated, and consists of coordinating a variety of sources, including the local fire patrol, professional fire abatement teams, California Department of Forestry, and others." Regardless of the number of parties involved and the combination of factors that are unique to each job, Peischel emphasizes that the purpose remains how to best utilize the goats to decrease the amount of fuel that may cause a wildfire.

"The aim is to break the continuity of flammable cover, creating defensible space", said Peischel. "Once an area has been brushed by the goats, it can be maintained as a living green belt."

Peischel is pragmatic about her unusual business, but believes the goats are here to stay and that providing them for land management is the career for her.

"If I had to go to work, I don't know what I'd do", she joked. "I just can't imagine having a real job." For more information, visit http://www.goatsunlimited.com or call (530) 679-1430.

Living Systems Land Management uses goats for fire mitigation, habitat restoration, erosion control and vegetation management.
Visit http://www.lslm.com.

Albright Seed is a Division of S&S Seeds.

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