Targeted browsing: How’s this weed taste? Not baah’d

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While baseball players limber up for a long season, Jeannette Hall’s goats are stretching their legs in their own version of spring training.

“The guys are seasoned pros at this. Even now we’re out practising with the babies (kid goats) and dogs,” said Hall, owner of Alberta’s Baah’d Plant Management and Reclamation.

She likens her flock of 200 to athletes, getting in shape before tackling unwanted weeds and brush on industrial, commercial, municipal and private sites across the province. “They can’t go straight into covering 30 kilometres a day,” she adds. “So right now, we’re clocking about five a day, and giving everyone some nice breaks.”

Welcome to the world of “targeted grazing,” where animals aren’t grazing simply to produce meat or milk. Instead, they’re four-legged weed whackers — lean, highly trained, mowing machines. As Hall points out, she’s not running a farm; she’s operating “an environmental consulting firm that specializes in organic weed control options.”

Targeted grazing (also known as prescribed grazing, conservation grazing or even “sheepscaping”) harnesses what a University of Idaho manual calls “the powerful ability of livestock grazing” to “create desirable landscapes.”

Desirable, in this case, means “improving land health by performing weed control, reducing wildland fire, and aiding in restoration projects,” according to the definition from the Society for Range Management’s Targeted Grazing committee. (The Society for Range Management is the professional scientific society and conservation organization whose members are concerned with studying, conserving, managing and sustaining the varied resources of the rangelands which comprise nearly half the land in the world. Established in 1948, SRM has over 4,000 members in 48 countries, including many developing nations.)

So, if you’ve got a utility corridor that needs some brush removal, a tree plantation that requires grass control, or rangeland infested with leafy spurge or spotted knapweed, grazing could be part of the solution. In Canada, grazing sheep have been part of British Columbia’s forest management program since the mid-1980s, and grazing animals have been integrated into some municipal vegetation maintenance programs.

In the right circumstances, it can be highly effective. When a Pennsylvania community used sheep to knock down the weeds and trim the grass in and around storm water retention basins, the effort reduced grass-cutting costs without harming water quality, said Laura Toran, professor at the Earth and Environmental Science Dept. of Philadelphia’s Temple University.

Targeting “baah’d” plants

Hall’s Baah’d Plant Management flock became grazing celebrities last summer, after Calgary’s parks department enlisted 100 animals to attack invasive weeds. Media coverage was massive, and when Hall and the goats held a “meet and greet” session for visitors to Confluence Park, more than 3,000 people showed up.

The goats returned to the 35-hectare park again this year to help researchers test different approaches to controlling such leafy troublemakers as Canada thistle, yellow toadflax, yellow clematis and perennial sow-thistle. “One pass of grazing is not going to control a lot of weeds, so we want to look at repeated grazings, timed grazings and the combination of grazing and spot-spraying,” says Chris Manderson of the city’s Parks department.

Conventional weed control is a costly job for the municipality. Staff scout for weeds, map GPS co-ordinates of infestations, and then target the plants with backpack sprayers, at typical cost of about $1,500 per hectare. Other options include hand-pulling or digging weeds, mowing and bagging the refuse to dispose of the seed heads, the occasional prescribed burn and even using beneficial insects to attack leafy spurge or scentless chamomile.

In 2016, the city spent $25,000 to bring Hall’s animals in for three weeks — about half the typical cost for chemical control. “We want to be able to have grazing as a tool,” Manderson said. “It’s not the only thing we do, but we’d like to use it where it makes sense.”

One advantage for the goats, he adds, is they “seem to be a little more motivated to find the weeds.”

Ringmaster for the “goat circus”

What Hall jokingly calls the full “goat circus” includes up to 200 goats, a couple of horses (for the flock’s human supervisors), a border collie and up to three guardian dogs to ward off predators. The goats are supervised round the clock, with Hall staying in a 128-sq. ft. “tiny house” on wheels that doubles as an office trailer and bunkhouse.

The flock itself is an oddball mix of meat, dairy, and mohair breeds, and that’s partly by design. While some of the bigger goats can reach up to browse the lower branches of trees — handy for reducing the impact of wildfires — “at the same time I have these little tiny athletic goats which can get into these crazy rocky areas where my big goats don't want to go. So, it's good that I have such a diverse group,” Hall says.

She teaches the goats to target weeds using some of the tactics developed by U.S. consultant Kathy Voth (profiled in an earlier At Pasture column), and takes advantage of the goat’s natural inclination to browse brush and graze broad-leaved plants.

“Goats are naturally curious and they're a little bit more trusting and I can build a really good relationship with them. So often times, anything I'm holding in my hand they associate with a treat. If I walk with an armload of toadflax, it's 'Hey, Mom's holding that, so that must be really delicious! ‘"

To ensure the goats knock down the target plants but don’t beat up other species, the flock is controlled by herders on horseback, the border collie, and the use of temporary electric fencing.

The flock also undergoes regular vet checks, vaccinations, footbaths, and faecal sampling to avoid spreading diseases or parasites. They kid in the winter, so does and kids are ready to travel when the grazing season starts. “If you're just on your home farm, you don't have to have the same vaccination protocol and biosecurity procedures that we do. It's costly there.”

In short, targeted grazing is an entirely different approach from the grazing that occurs on farms. On the farm, animals are essentially forage harvesters, eating their fill on a landscape tailored to their needs. Hall’s goats, on the other hand, are vegetation controllers, targeting some plants and leaving others.

“I know there’s the perception I’m getting free feed or free grazing leases, but that’s not true,” she said, adding targeted grazing is not the most efficient way to fatten goats. “These guys are here working, they’re not lounging in the field. They’re getting moved by dogs and horses, they’re being focused on these specific areas, so there’s more stress.”

As Hall says, it’s a high-cost, high-labour business. “This is a passion,” she adds. “There is some money to it, but it’s really just paying the bills.”

Is targeted grazing an add-on to your own farm business? Probably not. As Hall says, it’s just too different from what happens in most farm pastures. (At the same time, rangeland management and targeted grazing do share attributes, and sheep and goats have been used on range pastures to control weeds that cattle won’t touch.)

For most of us on the grass-farming side of the business, targeted grazing offers an example of how well-managed grazing is a powerful tool — even if targeted grazers play a different kind of game, in a league of their own.

For more information

--Check out this handbook from the University of Idaho: webpages. http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/rx-grazing/Handbook.htm

--Another useful site is the Society of Range Management’s Targeted Grazing Committee blog: https://targetedgrazing.wordpress.com/

- Ray Ford