- You know the word scapegoat? (laughs) (music) There's a reason we get
blamed for everything. (laughs) (music) Goats are living. They are a living
bundle of energy. - They are so perfectly
designed to eat the brush and thorny stuff
because they just go... - They butt heads and
play king on the mountain - There's a lot of byproducts
and things that the goats are doing besides just eating
vegetation or weed control. - [Lani] This is a fun,
joyful, alive energy that is doing the
work on the land. - A lot of people will
come out here and just sit and watch the goats for hours. - So it's bringing everything
to life and there's a joy that comes with it
but you can't get that with a mowing machine. You can't get it with chemicals. - So the goats are
doing 15 things at once. - [Narrator] Goats Eat Weeds
on this Farm to Fork Wyoming. - [Announcer] Production
on Farm to Fork Wyoming is made possible with
the generous support of viewers like you. Thank you. (rooster crows) - A lot of these weeds are here because this land was stressed. When this, I'm guessing this
housing development came in and they, you know,
they kind of rescaped and restructured this land
and so when it was disturbed, you know, mother nature's
band aid, it's annuals and it's biannuals and
the succession of plants. - Our business is goat weed
grazing and our purpose is to improve the soil. So, that way, you can
actually control weeds. - You know, so we're after just
improving the soil quality. A lot of people get hung
up on what's above ground, as the symptoms, and then they
want a sprayer or something to kill what's above ground
and we're focused on promoting life in the soil to allow the
native desired plants to grow. - [Narrator] Man has
waged war on weeds since the beginning of agriculture. Some weeds are put on
the noxious weed list, outlawed and targeted
with chemical sprays. - The description of
what a noxious weed is, is it's a non native,
very aggressive plant. - [Narrator] Leafy spurge,
Russian knapweed and kochia have made countless
acres unpalatable to cattle, horses and wildlife. - Unfortunately,
people have sprayed so many herbicides
that kochia's resistant to about every
chemical known to man. - [Narrator] For these
contract goat herders, the trick is not to win
the noxious weed battle with herbicides, but to
participate in what nature is trying to accomplish. - [Greg] You have good soil,
you're gunna have good grass. It's pretty much
impossible not to. - [Narrator] Recognizing the
importance of the animal, plant, soil connection,
these goat herders work to convert weeds into something
that feeds the soil life. - The goats just happen
to eat the weeds, but, you know, they manage
the cows, the sheep, the deer, whatever you happen to be on
there, I mean, that's required to have a good, healthy
range, land and soil is to actually graze it. - [Narrator] So they
bring in goats to eat the invasive plant the cattle,
horses and wildlife will not. - So these are Cashmere goats. They, evolution wise,
come from the top of the Himalaya mountains
but a lot of weeds come from Eurasia so, you
know, they have a connection that cattle and
horses don't have. These have the enzymes and
bacteria that they can utilize all these insane plants that
cattle and horses can't. - [Narrator] So the
goal is to augment nature's restoration process. - When you have a
disturbance to any ground and, it could be a natural
disturbance, like right now the floods, hurricane,
drought, fire, that causes the ground to be bare, mother
nature is gunna rush in and protect that. She sees that there's a
wound, like I get a scab. That's to protect my
surface and keep my boundary of my skin intact and,
so, mother nature does the same thing
and who does that? Our annual weeds. That's their job so they rush in so you have cheatgrass
here, kochia, sunflowers, lamb's quarters, tumble
weeds, Russian thistle, halogeton, all of
those annual weeds. That is their job in plant
succession is to rush in and cover that wound
and protect the surface and hold your water in. Next, if you don't do
anything, you're gunna see biannual plants,
weeds, which would be all of the thistles
except Canada thistle. Common mullein,
houndstongue, dyer's woad. Takes two years for
it to make a seed and get that root going down
so it's starting to build soil structure and
bring other things up. So that's the biannual. You have bare ground,
annual, biannual, then you start to
see perennials. Often you'll see the
perennial weeds first. Leafy spurge, Russian
knapweed, bindweed, dalmation toadflax, all of
those that are a big problem. Canada thistle,
you'll see those. And then you'll see grass
and then, and this is like, doing nothing, so, in a dry
environment like Wyoming, this could be 400 years
for this to progress but it's the natural progression
and then you see brush and then you see trees. - [Narrator] It is the plant
world's way of bringing trace minerals up to the
surface where the biology in the soil needs it. - Some of these other noxious
weeds we have in the area, one of the reasons they can
survive so well is they have a tremendous root
system and they can go so much further down
than those normal grasses and normal vegetation
does that they can reach way down there and
so they'll pull up the nutrients that the
other grasses can't get to. - So, all of these
plant, you know, they have different purposes
and different skills. The Astragalus species,
which are vetches, are the only plant that can
bring selenium up from the soil. The only plant. So they all do their
thing and all the roots go to different depths. Russian knapweed and the
knapweeds pull up a lot of zinc. - So, by either trampling
them on the ground or on the surface, and
then trampling them and putting that nutrients
back into the topsoil, or by an animal eating
that vegetation, you know, as the whole nutrient
cycle starts over with nutrients that nobody
else is able to get to. - Goats like Russian knapweed
so you have two choices if you have a herd
of cattle or horses and you have a whole
bunch of Russian knapweed. One is you kill it all or go
get something that eats it... (laughs) and use it. It's a natural resource,
why not use it? All I do is recycle it. - Come on nanny,
nanny, nanny, nannies! - [Narrator] Greg and
Carolina are actually raising meat goats on leafy
spurge, which is one of the worst weed
problems rancher's face in the Devil's Tower area. - If there's spurge,
they'll eat the spurge before the thistle. Totally addicted to it and
it doesn't take them long. You don't have to teach
them to eat leafy spurge. As soon as they take a
bite, it just sends a signal to their brain, like,
okay, this is what we want. - [Narrator] Sending
yearly goats to market is how they're able to make
a profit as contract grazers. - [Greg] Yeah, they
gotta do well, I mean, majority of our income
comes from selling the meat. You know, we get very
little for grazing contract. - [Narrator] At 20% protein, spurge is a high quality forage. - [Greg] They gain great on it. - [Carolina] Oh,
yeah, they gain. - [Greg] Yeah! - [Carolina] But
it's a high protein. - They do well on spurge. - 20% protein or something. - [Narrator] And these animals
are incredibly adaptable. - [Carolina] We like a Spanish
goat with lots of cashmere for the winter cause we don't
have a barn or anything. This is a, you know, we're
totally a range outfit. No farm or barn for the goats
to go into in the winter. We supplement with hay but
they still graze, you know, and they live off brush
and pine trees and junipers and we do all that
kind of clean up which they're really
good at and they love it. - [Greg] Just cut down a
tree, let them clean it up and then haul it out. - As soon as they hear
a chainsaw they just... - Yeah, you know. - They just come
running like "ahhh!" - Depending on how
much snow we have. - Forget the alfalfa
hay, pine trees! - Yeah, yeah we can call
'em with the chainsaw. It's pretty bad. - [Narrator] While Devil's
Tower Goats relies on ranch contracts to raise
their goats for market, Goat Green LLC has developed
the same Spanish goat breed to work everything from
open range to city lots. - We're out in production
agriculture, you know? We're a service
contracted business. We're not worried
about putting weight on these animals for
slaughter, you know? We want ours skinny and hungry and a little bit wild, you know? We don't want tame,
very heavy, fat goats. Very difficult for
our border collie to herd a tame goat, you know? They just stand
there and look at 'em and, you know, I
want ours to be wild and when I bring the
border collie in here to herd 'em, they understand
that they need to go. - This herd right now, these
babies are six months old and they've been on a
truck maybe twelve times, they've worked in four states
and they've been on 15 jobs. They're not even six months
old, so, this is their life. Now, some of the older ones in
here have maybe in on a truck 500 times and
worked in 15 states and eaten many, many,
many different plants, so, one of the
value of this herd because I don't kill 'em for
slaughter, is their knowledge and their training and their
ability to eat everything. For instance, poison hemlock,
even though these babies have never been on poison
hemlock, the mothers have and the gut system can
process these poisonous plants that these goats have eaten
over my last 22 years. The herd has a memory,
the gut has a memory and the behavior has a memory. Now, the mama goats here
were right here last year. The goats in Cheyenne,
we've been there, they have a memory and
they know that town. - We've had the city
of Cheyenne contract off and on for about 20 years. So, there's two creeks
that run through town. One is Crow Creek,
one is Dry Creek. We have very narrow
sets here in Cheyenne because of the creek,
so, it's kind of... Can be a bit dangerous
when something spooks them or scares them like
that motorcycle there or a helicopter because
there's an air force base here in Cheyenne, so, if
something spooks them, they have nowhere to run. It's so narrow. So, that's an issue that we
deal with here in Cheyenne. Right along the street, the
highways, the bike paths... - Goats know where the water
is, they know the plants, they know the traffic,
they know the people, they know everything. They know the predators. - Also the people
along the bike path and loose dogs are
our biggest issues. - So once the goats are
trained, they are very, very valuable to be alive
and have that memory. - [Narrator] And they perform
many functions at one time. - They're doin' weed control,
fire fuel mitigation, flood mitigation,
bank stabilization. Goats will come down to
get a drink and shave off some of those steep banks
that you see over here and get some of the
seeding and vegetation along those banks so those
banks don't erode any further and create more erosion
and steeper banks. And so we focus along the
creeks where they can't get machinery down into, near
the banks and then, you know, they can't spray herbicides
or pesticides near the water. - This isn't necessarily a
fire fuel mitigation job. We just came from one
of those, and so you... You know, everything is time
management with the goats. They're just a grazing
tool in order to, you know, help the land,
whatever you're trying to do. So, the previous contract
with the fire fuel mitigation, you know, we're reducing
all that vegetation below, you know, they'll jump up and eat so it's about
eight feet and below. So we'll reduce all
that vegetation down
there which is how the fire travels and then
we recycle all the nutrients above ground, we're
recycling into the ground, which is 100% organic matter. It's, you know,
there's no viable seed that goes through
a goat's system. It's like, .001% chance and
it's because of their narrow, triangular mouths and they
chew, like, in a lateral jaw movement, sickle,
kind of like a sickle and that destroys and crushes
those seeds and so then when it through in their
rumen, it's when it passes through their system, you're
left with a small pellet that is completely, you
know, ground up, chewed up and there's no
viable seed in there. And we try to time it so
that we graze those seeds and, you know, all of the
flowers above ground of, on the stem and that
way it, you know, depletes that plant and
they can't reproduce. - [Narrator] And for ranchers
running cattle, horses and even sheep, goats
fill a very special niche. - The goats eat very,
very little grasses and it's also, sort of like
an instant result, right? You see it, like, oh,
wow, you were here? There's still all that feed
but the spurge is gone. So, a lot of ranchers
have realized, well, this might be better
than spraying. We've pretty much tried to
overgraze the leafy spurge that goats come through,
they aerate the soil, they fertilize it. After we come through
cleaning up the spurge, the other grasses have
a chance to compete and maybe out
compete the spurge. The challenge with goats
is that you can't just turn them out because, you know, if a fence doesn't hold
water, it doesn't hold a goat. So you have to stay with them and you get the best
results, we find. I mean, you can leave
them in the electric fence and move the fence, but, I
think the goats are better for the landscape and for... And it's better
for them to move. They love to walk. They cover miles. They love to climb, they go
to places up in the rim rock where there is spurge
where nobody else would go. - [Narrator] Where fence
grazing is impractical on a large ranch, it's
essential in the city limits. - Yeah, fencing, it's,
it's funny, you know, herding the goats is
actually easy, you know? Or a lot easier than this. Fencing the goats is
difficult but you can't get such targeted grazing,
usually, without fencing and also, you know, 90%
of what the fence is for is to keep predators
and people out, rather than the goats in. - [Narrator] And predators
are always an issue. - Mountain lions. - Well, yeah, we have most
problems with mountain lions. - But the coyotes... - The coyotes, bob cats,
foxes when the kids are young and, of course, the birds. We do have some golden eagles
and bald eagles in the area. Especially more in the spring. - [Narrator] The predator
challenge is a little different in the city. - See, so this is one of
the risk mitigation here is kids riding by yellin',
throwing firecrackers and stuff in at the goats
and that'll spook them out, push over the fence and
they run out into the road and that's, this is the problem working in the city right there and off leash dogs is
the biggest problem. - [Narrator] Herding
dogs can be a liability in a city setting, but
they're indispensable out on the ranch. - So we use two different dogs. We have the herding
dog that helps us herd and we have the guardian
dogs and they don't herd but they protect the herd and that's mostly instinctive. It's pretty amazing that
these dogs are with the herd 24/7 and really protect
them and not kill them. So, when they see a
vulture or anything, they know the
distinction and they know that that's a threat,
while if a duck flies over, they don't even look up
and same with snakes. I mean, and they see a snake,
they know it's a threat and, of course, you
know, mountain lions, and everything else, coyotes. They know it's a threat and
they're very, very brave. They go out and they announce
the presence with the barking which helps keep the predators
at bay most of the time. - [Narrator] Under
some circumstances Donny also uses a guardian dog. - And then occasionally,
we'll have an akbash... Is what we run as
a herd protector. - [Narrator] But neither
operation succeeds without it's herd dogs. - The weeds are smarter
than the good plants, if you're gunna look
at it that judgmentally and the only thing smarter
than a weed is a goat but the only thing smarter
than a goat is a border collie. (laughs) - We use purebred border
collies and they're the key to the whole operation,
is a good dog. You have to have a good dog
to run a business like this. Goats are herd animals, so instinctively
they stick together. Cattle, sheep, they'll
kind of stray out, go off on their own. I can use one dog per
thousand head of goats. You know, me, one well
trained, well trained dog and, you know, you say a
thousand, fifteen hundred head, that's enough to run them. You have a very difficult
time doing that with cattle. I love working with the
dogs and the border collies. They're a magnificent animal
that are so intelligent. It's a pleasure to work
with them everyday. - But that's why
I have all this... You know, I have all
these intelligent goats and then the dogs to that
and, really, my only job is to feed the dogs
and open the door, camper door, so that
they can go to work. (laughs) Sign the contracts. (laughs) - [Narrator] So this
orchestration of animals is the herders way
to work with nature. - So, it's a different paradigm. Chasing symptoms would have
you go out trying to kill this thistle and that
kochia and that every year. Well, look what happens. You go back to bare ground. Well, now succession has
to start all over again. When you use chemical
herbicide, you're coming in to try and kill something
and the first thing you do is kill the fungi in the soil and to have a healthy grassland, you must have fungi
bacteria ratio of one to one in the soil. When you spray,
you kill the fungi. It goes heavy load bacteria,
which is weed problem. Look at the kochia here,
that's overload of the bacteria in the soil and
people can't see that. - This approach where
you say well, it's here, let's find a balance
and make sure that all, everything gets a
chance to be there. - [Narrator] Today, most land
managers integrate mowing and herbicides for weed
control but grazing goats is becoming more
and more common. - We've been working
towards restoring lands for 20 years now and
in an urban setting with the city of Fort
Collins, what we've seen is that it's difficult
in smaller landscapes to really replicate the
impacts and the grazing and the ecological processes
that historically happened and so while we approach
restoration with reseeding and mowing and all the
real classical integrated pest management type
approaches, the one that's hard to really replicate
is the grazing. - Also, you know, irrigating
up above the banks. They're split hoofed,
light weight animals, so they till the soil
as opposed to compact it and that allows a lot of
the moisture and nutrients and fertilization, you know, for these native species
and plants to grow. - [Narrator] There is
no machine or chemical that can replicate what
animals do so elegantly. - If we're feeding the
microbes underground, we're building that
fungi bacteria ratio and bringing it into balance. All the microbes are being fed. This is getting broken down
and turned back to carbon and nitrogen and sulfer
and put back down. See, when it's
standing up like this, this does the soil no good. Has to be soil contact
and trampled in. So the hoof action of the
goats is a very big deal. So they recycle
everything right in place. - In this dry climate,
unless there's something breaking down all
that plant material, it is just deposited on
the surface and over time, it doesn't break down
quickly and so we don't get the sun exposure on the
soil and so that limits for production and the
diversity of grass production that we'd like to see. - That's what I do with these
goats, is, hurry up and eat all of these weeds,
recycle them in the gut, and then put 'em right
back on the ground as pure organic fertilizer
and there's some right there and that is a perfect,
organic bunch of nutrients, so, if you could, with your
perfectly calibrated eyes, see that recycled whatever
they're eating behind us, you would see carbon,
nitrogen, sulfur, boron, magnesium, calcium. You would see those nutrients. So those are nutrients
put right back in. - And, so, we can, in some
areas, bring cattle in as we do at Soapstone
and Bobcat Ridge but in these real
small, urban areas, we're much more limited
in the types of animals that we could use to graze
and, it's great to have someone like Lani that we can,
that we can reach out to and have her come in
and provide the service. - [Narrator] The eventual
goal is to bring about a self sustaining plant system. - And every land owner's
different in what they want. - [Narrator] In
restoration projects, like the Cattail Course Natural
Area here in For Collins, seeding grassland companion
plants might be a benefit. - We don't have any
legumes in here. Legumes are broad leaves
that fix nitrogen in the soil and grasses take a lot of
nitrogen, so, let's get some broad leaved plants in
here who are fixing the nitrogen and then we feed the soil such
that the microbes are working underneath to help
them fix more nitrogen and we start building
a living system with all these plants who
are all doing their jobs. I always call the biannual
thistles the prep chefs. They're the prep chefs. Why would you kill
the pref chef? (laughs) He scrubs the vegetables
and cuts them and goes home. The bare ground where you
have that disturbance, it must heal, like your scab. It must heal and
have the nutrition before it can move forward. You can't just
plant grass there. - [Narrator] Though goats
might improve conditions - [Narrator] Though goats
might improve conditions for grass production,
they can still be a tough sell in cattle country. - They definitely have
a stigma, it seems. Especially with cattle ranchers
and we're cattle ranchers by background so when we
were kids and everything, everyone says, you know,
"oh, you know, we don't, there's no goats
allowed on the property" or whatever and the stigma usually comes from, you
know, goats locked up in a yard that jump
on cars and eat paint and things like that, you know? So, yeah, they have that
stigma with the goats but that's just like anything. That's like a border collie
that's not given it's purpose or allowed to do what
it's intended to do. Children are the
same way, you know? It's, it's, you channel
their energy and what they do to some sort of positive
action and then they're okay. - You, you're the head nanny. You tell them what
a goat's like. - Oh, goats, they are curious. They're very social. You, you can train
them for anything. They just cover a lot of ground. - They will cover a
lot more ground than... - Than sheep or cows - Especially the cows. I used to be able to
set down a bunch of cows or bulls, put them in
an area and go back, check on 'em five days and know exactly in
the area they'd be in. If you did that with goats,
you're liable to gat a call from the Canadian Mounties. - It's what we do as a company, is all we do is manage
these goats and let them do what they need to do and
what they do naturally and we'll just manage them. - [Narrator] It's a
matter of stewardship. - It's undoing the wrongs
that have been done in the last 100 to 500 years
of how this land has been used. Over grazing by
cattle and horses, you get all these problems because horses and
cattle don't eat them and it's been overgrazed
and now cut up by ranchets and subdividing and
roads and fence lines. Permanent fence lines are
so terrible of destroying the flow of energy on the land and the flow of the livestock,
the flow of the wildlife, the flow of everything. It disrupts that, so, to try
to counterbalance the wrongs I want to bring the
exact opposite back. So, I bring a big herd of goats. Cattle and horses are grazers
and they eat all grass. Goats are browsers and
grass is their last choice. - The goats eat one thing,
the cows eat the other thing and that way you're
really taking advantage of what you have on your ranch. You're increasing
your, your livestock. You're increasing
your profitability,
your carrying capacity and hopefully your
bottom dollar, you know? You just have more way to
sell, more meat to sell. That's kind of where we're at. Some people just, it's
not for them, you know? Goats are just a tool
in the toolbox, right? And there's many different
ways of managing land. This is just one of them. - So what I want to build
with this living machine I have here, and, by the
way, they're self propelled, is, bringing all these
things into balance and everything you can't see. You can't see joy,
really, but you can, when these animals are
playing and they're... You can tell they have
purpose and these dogs. It's joyful and it's, it's
fun and people like to see it. (music) So, the management should be
the highest intrinsic value of the land and then
the byproduct would be how rich this is,
how beautiful it is. The aesthetic value. How much life it supports. How much water it can hold. The land outta function like
a giant sponge to hold water. That means the soil is
full of organic matter and then can hold all the
water available to the plants. So, that's what we
should be managing for. - I mean, this didn't
come to be by not grazing. You know, the bison, the
deer and the elk all started this whole trend of eating it. The whole cycle's
starting again, creating
a good range land so, by not eating it, it's
probably actually doing more harm than
grazing it by far.
Our city used a 300 head herd of goats on weeds infecting some river side parks. Amazing to see, they were eating some prickly thistles and loving it.
this was so much interesting than expected. ty
“...the soil of in...”