Goats and Weeds

Rangeland management using goats. I play a golf course in Boise that has lots of canyons and those canyons are filled with briars and weeds. Hit a ball into the canyon and you can pretty much count on saying goodbye to that ball. Solution? Management calls in the goats every year and sets them loose. In two days, they have exposed hundreds of errant golf balls because all of that dense brush is gone. So goats can eat their way to almost complete weed control. All kinds of research has been done on cattle controlling cheat grass on rangeland but I don't know that anything, cattle, herbicides, weed eaters small or large can compete with goats. Craig Madsen, is the owner of Healing Hooves in Edwall, WA. In a word, Healing Hooves is a goat business... Or in his words: "Essentially a vegetation management business. I use goats for managing weeds or brush because their preference is, they kind of like the broadleaf plants and also brush and use them a lot for doing blackberries and that kind of vegetation and we do a lot of knapweed and the other noxious weeds they prefer over some other plants.?

When it comes to controlling noxious weeds, Madsen makes an excellent point. Goats don't mind going into areas that cattle will not penetrate. "If it gets much over 20% canopy the cattle won't go in to utilize it at all." Having been an eyewitness to what goats can accomplish on weed control, I would think a lot more research should be done on goats controlling noxious weeds on public lands.