Land Management Goals
While these photos show what goats can do in an extreme way, for most jobs, the goal is a more natural and less dramatic result.
It is very easy for people to get too focused on weed eradication instead of soil health! Weeds are (primarily) a symptom of poor soil health. It's taken a long time for our soil to get as bad as it is (the land was originally managed by browsers such as Buffalo, Antelope, Elk, and Pronghorn, however, they have largely been removed. The soil has slowly gotten worse with poor agricultural practices, such as the poisoning caused by herbicides and pesticides, destroying the natural ecosystem of the soil.
There is no one-and-done solution for this. In order to restore the soil, a large percentage of the plant material (organic matter) needs to go back into the ground each season. Nobody wants to mulch weeds back into the ground, because they'll just get more weeds. Goats literally turn the weeds into fertilizer with less than 10% (usually considered only 1 to 3 percent) of seeds surviving and returning to the soil with a potential to germinate. In addition to this, the microbiome of the goats works to improve the soil in ways that we are just beginning to understand.
As mentioned on other parts of the site, we can manage the goats many different ways to get different results, however, getting the job done quickly and efficiently, and putting those plants back into the soil, just like nature intended, is the core of what we do. The goats are also tiling and aerating (to some degree) as they go. The way that goats hooves work is ideal for the soil, with minimal damaging disturbance. If we can help people to understand the actual process of reducing the weeds through improving soil health, perhaps more people will use goats to manage the land and improve all of our over health conditions. We'd love to have our goats working for you, OR, to help you to use your goats to improve soil in your part of the world.
