The Goats That Ate The World

Invasive plants and animals are part of the curse of modern forms of transport and trade .....

Nothing Can Eat The Poisonous Cane Toad And Live .....

.... and the cane toad in Australia is perhaps the poster boy of introductions that have gone spectacularly wrong.

In fact one of my earliest posts was on the subject of its conquest of Australia ..... I even exchanged emails on the matter with one of the scientists trying to find a solution.

But in the USA, there is possibly an answer to the problem of invasive and nuisance plant species such as Honeysuckle, Poison ivy, Multiflora Rose, Kudzu and Bittersweet .... and it doesn't involve a mixture of powerful chemicals and diggers, or regular repeat treatments. Chemicals will contaminate soil to some degree, and are not very effective in stopping new seeds from sprouting. Simply pulling plants out by machine, can disturb the soil and cause erosion, or even loss of certain soil microbes.

Goats Are Eating Machines .....

No, the answer has four legs, long floppy ears, big horizontal pupils in their eyes, horns, bleat and they can be remarkably friendly to their owners (although not always). Yep, you guessed it (well you didn't really need to with the post title), its the common goat.

An American business man had bought a small herd of goats to be slaughtered for the goat market in the USA, where a growing immigrant community from the Caribbean and East Africa has created a growing market for goat meat. However, while they were in a field blissfully unaware of their fate, they started eating, and eating, and well, eating. Pretty soon they had cleared a field full of pest species, to the ground.

They also wormed their way in to the businessman and his partners hearts by their very friendly natures "We got to know the goats well and thought, we can't sell them for meat" .... this is always a danger with amateur stock keepers. So they were moved around various fields, and with the same effect on unwanted species. Their cast iron constitutions, meant that no plant was immune to their voracious appetites and they had cleared every field of any invasive species sticking its head above ground. 

Despite being rather fussy nibblers, they apparently liked many of the invasive plants, sometimes over native species. They eat up to 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) of vegetation a day, grazing extensively on low-lying grasses and weeds, but they will also reach up and eat from branches, sometimes up to 4 or 5 feet (1.2 to 1.5 meters) off the ground. From this was born an economic opportunity and soon the businessmen were renting out the herd as nuisance plant removers under the name 'Eco Goats,' up and down America's East Coast.

So for the past 12 years, the goat herd has been in a different field every week between May and November, before coming home for a well earned rest and recreation for a few months. They have eaten literally hundreds of tons of invasive species over this period.

The pluses to this method are numerous:

• Plant seeds rarely survive the grinding motion of their mouths and their multi-chambered stomachs, so when passed out, the seeds don't tend to sprout again next spring.
• The goats can access steep and wooded areas where machines (and even humans) cant.
• The goats fertilise the land as they go, usually a number of times every day.
• The goats can cover half an acre of dense vegetation in about four days.
• The goats will repeatedly graze plants until they simply lose the will to grow back. 
• Goat eaten land is also a fire break in those areas where natural (or man created) wild fires are a hazard. In the US West Coast, in the Simi Valley, California, the Easy Fire, which raged from Oct. 30, 2019 to Nov. 2, was prevented from crossing the last 90 feet (30 yards) to the Ronald Reagan museum by the fire break that a goat herd, used to clear the land had created.

They usually start getting bored with the same diet after about the same period of four days apparently and enjoy being taken to a new site, with a different food type. Its hoped that other invasive species such as the phragmites (reed grasses that can grow up to 10 feet tall), can be added to the goats ever growing diets

Other flocks of these types of animals are now available on the East coast, and were already being run on the West coast. Some run herds of mostly sheep, with just some goats mixed, in as they found the goats were harder to control and that ".... the goats led all the mutinies." It also has to be acknowledged that sheep and goats aren't always a full solution. Clearance often requires the combination with some manual root cutting and even with a chemical treatment if really needed e.g. Japanese Knotweed.

But as the goats have done 90 per cent of the ground clearance, this additional work required is much less, and also cheaper than clearance without the animals. So a good solution for the environment, and for the goats .... Win, Win!