Go for goats.
Small Ruminant Grazing
Northwest Grazing offers goat grazing to help you manage vegetation. Goats are ruminants, like cows, moose, and giraffes. Their unique multi-chambered digestive tract helps them digest fibrous material and thrive on most problem vegetation for landowners and managers. They then return this material to the soil via their dung, increasing fertility and presenting opportunities to reclaim your land.
Goats are a great tool for land management. Goats can be the right tool for jobs ranging from blackberry and poison oak control to wildfire fire fuel reduction. Goats are natural browsers, meaning they generally go for woody stemmed plants first, but they do well on grasses and forbs as well. They excel in challenging terrain, are quiet, and require only your unwanted vegetation for fuel. Plus, they are a pleasure to watch work.
How We Work
First, we assess the property with you and develop a grazing plan. Once we have a plan and are ready to get to work, we show up build fences and deliver the livestock. We supply reliable and effective electric net fencing, 100+ goats, 1-2 livestock guardian dogs, water, and mineral tubs. We are on site daily to feed the dogs and make sure things are going well.
For 2024, our herd will be over 100 animals so, we like to have a few acres to work with. Prices vary, but most jobs start around $1000. Cost is largely dependent on the size of the job and distance from White Salmon, WA.
Contact us today to figure out a goat treatment solution for you!
FAQs
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Yes. Goats will eat poison oak. They don’t eat the roots, however, so the plants will grow back. This is why repeated grazing over many years is necessary if you chose to use grazing as your primary control method.
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Yes. Goats eat new growth and leaves on blackberries, but won’t eat hardened canes in the middle. They do a wonderful job of opening up a sea of otherwise untouchable land presenting the bases of the plants to be easily dug out and removing the material they clear.
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We are based in south central Washigton but available to work throughout Pacific Northwest.
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Ruminants are herbivorous, hoofed animals with multi chambered digestive systems that have evolved to ferment and digest the tough, fibrous materials that us monogastric organisms don’t do so well with. They’re like little kraut machines, with a microcosm of gut flora that help break down all that stuff you watch them eat and wonder how they do it. Northwest Grazing specializes in small ruminant grazing using goats. Cows, deer, elk, and giraffes are some other local ruminants.
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Yes. Goats are excellent at clearing and maintenance. However, since nature never sleeps, best results are obtained from repeated treatments. It may be necessary to graze more than once a year. Often times, it is repeated grazing over multiple years that produces the best results.
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Goat grazing rates very depending on the area and the herd. Our cost is based on the cost to own and keep the animals through the winter plus the time and equipment necessary to move and contain them spread out across the available grazing days. The best way to keep the cost of a project down is to make the project bigger, so talk to your neighbors and see if you can turn your 2 acre job into a 10 or 20 acre job or more!
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We use an electric net fencing that we set up and take down on site. The key to keeping the animals in is making sure they have enough to eat. We calculate the appropriate amount of animals for an area for the forage that is available there.