Grazing goats go to work to manage coastal hillsides


Herded by a supervising border collie, goats assemble for vegetation management at the Fort Ord National Monument in Monterey County. The animals eat invasive plants, reducing fire danger.
Aubrie Heckel, Bureau of Land Management biological scientist at the Fort Ord National Monument, says goats provide a critical service in managing seasonal grasses and invasive plants. They replaced sheep, which were less effective in removing woody brush.
They replaced sheep, which were less effective in removing woody brush.

By Bob Johnson

 

Early every fall a herd of 500 to more than 1,000 goats arrives at the Fort Ord National Monument to begin managing vegetation on a hillside adjacent to Highway 68 between the Monterey Peninsula and Salinas.

The goats replaced the sheep the Bureau of Land Management used at Fort Ord from 1996 until 2014 because they are more efficient at restoring the hillside ecology and at removing biomass that can fuel wildfires.

A population of goats recently working the site was furnished by Goats R Us, a family-run grazing company in Orinda that supplies goats for fire-fuel abatement projects and eradication of undesirable plant species.

“We want to remove brushy material,” said Aubrie Heckel, BLM biological scientist at the monument. “We have 1,000 goats out here from October on to keep back the annual grasses.”

Heckel discussed the effort during a tour of the site on the eve of the 43rd Annual Eco Farm Conference at Asilomar in Pacific Grove last week.

The River Fire in 2020 swept through Marks Ranch just across the street from the Fort Ord hillsides.

The grazed land provides a firebreak between nearby wilderness and pasture and the nearby campus of California State University, Monterey, which was built on the old Fort Ord site.

There are 86 miles of trails for hiking, biking and horse riding on the former military base that closed in 1996.

In addition to fire protection services, grazing has contributed to the ecology on the site for centuries.

Before Europeans came to Monterey County, antelope, elk and deer grazed the hillsides. Cattle roamed the land during the Spanish and Mexican eras.

From the 1960s until the transition to goats in 2014, the Army and, later, BLM brought in sheep to manage the vegetation.

An ecological benefit of grazing is to prevent invasive grasses and forbs from crowding out the native grasses and forbs.

Goats eat woody brush, which had expanded during the years when sheep were in charge.

The goats willingly graze the hillside, but management is not as simple as turning loose a few hundred or a thousand goats and walking away.

“We lost five goats to mountain lions this session,” Heckel said.

When mountain lion and coyote danger becomes a concern, Great Pyrenees guardian dogs are brought in to protect the grazers. Male Great Pyrenees weigh 100 pounds or more and are described as courageous and resourceful guardians. A border collie manages the goats.

Male goats are castrated, according to the Goats R Us herder at the Fort Ord site. This avoids disputes among the males over who gets to father the next generation. It also eliminates the need for veterinarians to attend births and the complications of caring for baby goats on the hillside with hundreds of adults.

The next generation of goats is produced at the Goats R Us Orinda ranch under conditions more controlled than a grazing effort by hundreds of adult goats.

The animals do require supervision, in part because goats don’t know when to stop eating.

“With goats, you have to watch out for overgrazing,” Heckel said.

When the goats graze too much, they can reduce the preferred native forbs to the point that they do not recover.

The goats can also devour baby valley oak trees BLM is trying to restore at the Fort Ord site.

“Goats are great at grazing. Unfortunately, they are great at grazing small oak trees,” said Daniela Jovanovic, who works on the Fort Ord oak restoration project. “We’re trying to bring the valley oaks up.”

Livestock grazing and squirrel consumption of acorns have reduced reproduction to the point there are only 250 valley oaks on the Fort Ord site.

The trees provide shade, bird habitat, and bird and insect food, in addition to improving soil moisture and sequestering carbon through their roots.

BLM workers plant as many valley oaks as they can during the rainy season and surround them with wire fencing for protection against grazing.

In another restoration project at the Fort Ord National Monument, researchers are trying to find ways to encourage the population of federally threatened California tiger salamanders.

They became endangered after non-native salamanders were released in Salinas Valley ponds to be raised and harvested as fish bait. The non-native barred tiger salamanders then spread throughout Central California, including some of the vernal pools that provide salamander habitat at Fort Ord.

The result is that the California tiger salamander gene pool has become polluted.

Researchers have tried—so far without success—to learn if vernal pools of different wet period length could give selective advantages to the native salamanders.

The next step will be to manage ponds to remove the hybrid salamanders from pools and prevent them from returning to allow the return of California tiger salamanders.

(Bob Johnson is a reporter in Monterey County. He may be contacted at bjohn11135@gmail.com.)

Permission for use is granted. However, credit must be made to the California Farm Bureau Federation