Targeted Grazing Services
Herd about goats?
Targeted Grazing is a highly effective means to manage herbaceous vegetation on your property. This practice mimics large herds that used to traverse the landscape here, and still do, in other places.
Our “high impact, short duration” approach to grazing using goats and sheep dramatically reduces a wide range of annual and perennial vegetation on the landscape.
An often overlooked benefit of grazing is the impact of the animal’s hooves on breaking up dead fuel accumulation on the ground. This “hoof impact” encourages decomposition by breaking up forest litter and mixing it with the soil, dramatically reducing the intensity of fire behaviour.
Grazing should be thought of as an annual or biannual treatment. Spring time and plant growth come every year, so why shouldn’t the goats?
As one of our land stewardship services, targeted grazing is often used in preparation for prescribed burning to create better access, and to reduce the total fuel accumulation in an area before burning.
After a prescribed burn, vegetation is stimulated by the released nutrients from the ash, the open soil, and access to more sunlight. The year following a burn is a great time to bring the goats on to your property to help manage particularly tenacious vegetation such as Himalayan Blackberries, giving an opportunity for slower growing grasses and wildflowers to establish.
Our model of targeted grazing strives to provide an affordable and effective means of land stewardship to our clients. We encourage neighbors to work together on grazing projects, creating contiguous blocks of land under the same management, and keeping the cost of grazing affordable.
