Meet The Chew Crews: Local Growers Using Goat Herds for Healthy Land Management
At first, you might not notice them. Overgrown trees, brush and knee-high grasses conceal the horned, bearded, long-eared ruminants digesting unwanted foliage. As the landscape changes under their hooves, the multitude of goats quietly reveal themselves. Grazing herds are popping up on public urban lands across the Bay Area, in wooded Peninsula backyards and South Bay farmlands and vineyards, all on a mission to do what they do best: chew.
These relatively small herd animals are the new stars of regenerative agriculture and a secret to sustainable land management success. They increase topsoil nutrients that nourish the plant root systems, helping to retain water. And they replenish native plant species, eliminate the need to till and release soil carbon. No butts about it, goats are mighty creatures.
April through October, Green Goat Landscapers’ 300-plus Boer-mix goats are hired nomads, snacking on grass as they go. Father-and-son owners Brian and Daniel Allen move portions of their herd to two-acre-plus job sites around the South Bay and up to San Francisco. Border collies help round up and direct the goats, and a Great Pyrenees guardian dog keeps them safe from predators.
“Using goats is considered one of the ultimate green vegetation management systems. No chemicals are used, no machinery or haul aways, and the goats eat just about anything,”
– Brian Allen, Green Goat Landscapers
City Grazing’s 92 Alpine Oberhasli goats spend their time eating, napping and play-fighting at two-acre-and-under job sites like backyards, fields and hillsides. This San Francisco Bayview–based nonprofit that services the Bay Area is led by Executive Director Genevieve Church, who grew up on a cattle ranch but never expected she’d work with animals for a living. A converted box truck turned mobile barn transports the goats to sites within a 30-minute drive of their home base, including the SF Bay Area Peninsula and San Mateo County.
When goats are unleashed on a plot of land, they immediately dig in and eat whatever’s on the menu, whether it be fennel, thorny blackberries or poison oak. “Using goats is considered one of the ultimate green vegetation management systems. No chemicals are used, no machinery or haul aways, and the goats eat just about anything,” says Brian Allen.
The goats also make some plant-selection decisions that ultimately help reduce invasive species. “Annual grazing tends to benefit California native plants,” says Church. “If we take goats to an area four times a year, they’ll usually kill off invasive Himalayan blackberry. And the goats tend to avoid the California-native blackberry, which is lower-growing.” Goat grazing also strengthens California native grasses’ root systems, versus those of invasive weeds.
And as the goats eat, they poop. Goats simultaneously fertilize the soil as they reduce or eliminate the need for noisy, polluting machinery to clear land and haul off clippings to be composted. “Leave all the droppings there, and it becomes amazing topsoil,” says Church. That new topsoil also helps with water management. Church explains, “If you use goats directly on the property to convert the unwanted vegetation back into topsoil, you’re both increasing that topsoil’s ability to hold water because now you’ve got a richer organic soil and skipping all those other steps that use water at every point.”
"It’s kind of a magical thing that animals can do something that for them is just eating dinner. They’re just getting by and enjoying their food, but it gives back to the soil, it gives back to the native plant population, and it gives us so much joy just to watch them do it."
– Genevieve Church, City Grazing
Using goats to eat the remains of last season’s crops before replanting or to nibble away weeds before putting in new landscaping eliminates the need to till and turn the soil. “When you till, you release carbon back into the air,” says Allen. “There’s a whole movement called no-till farming that basically traps and keeps the carbon in the ground. That’s what the goats do, because you’re not tilling it up.”
The threat of wildfires has also prompted property owners to hire goats to clear defensible firefighting space around their properties. Goats are “browsers” that will eat all the way up the fuel ladder, clearing out dried underbrush and munching the lower leaves off trees by standing on their hind legs. “With most of the properties we come into, the vegetation is somewhere between three and six feet high,” says Brian Allen. “And it’s dry vegetation most of the time. When the goats are done, we’ve gone from vegetation that was feet high to four inches high. That prevents a fire from being able to spread.”
Besides bringing peace of mind to homeowners in fire-prone areas and making way for new landscaping, goats bring joy to people by just being, well, goats. Neighbors come out to watch them hard at work or hardly working in the field, both a therapeutic experience and community-building activity. “To be able to see people just stand and watch the goats and have their tension drop is the kind of stuff that keeps us all going,” says Church.
