“Only ewes can prevent forest fires.” Goat ewes, that is. And bucks help too.
SACRAMENTO, California––Should goat herders whose goats nibble brush to prevent forest fires be paid like farmworkers, sheep herders, or firefighters?
What’s in it for the goats?
Communities, private landowners, and government agencies throughout California are preoccupied, as the summer 2023 fire season opens, with getting someone’s goat, preferably under renewable annual contract.
But even with tens of thousands of goats now on the job of fire prevention in the westernmost 10 U.S. continental states, there are still barely goats enough to go around.
Goats eat sticker bush, but owners get sticker-shock
Worse, there may be far fewer goats in California, which employs the most goats and goat herds, if a new state law goes into effect on January 1, 2024.
The new law, repeatedly delayed by legislative intervention, but not permanently amended, would require that goat herders be paid––like farmworkers––the $15.50 state minimum wage per hour, plus overtime.
Ordinary farmworkers, however, work relatively little overtime. Goat herders are on the job around the clock, meaning that about two-thirds of their weekday working hours plus all weekend working time would be overtime.
Recognizing this difference between herding and other agricultural labor, California law allows employers to pay sheep herders a flat monthly salary, plus housing and some overtime.
Goat herders are paid more than most Californians
Goat herders have been paid the same way. Currently, this means goat herders are paid a minimum of $3,730 per month, up from $1,955 in 2019, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations.
This projects to $44,760 per year––about 8% more than the average California per capita income––plus housing and often a food allowance.
Goat herding in the cooler, wetter, and more mountainous parts of California is seasonal work, but can be year-round work in some parts of the state.
Goat herders to get more than Smokey?!
Paying overtime as required would boost goat herder compensation to as much as $160,000 per year, nearly triple the average California firefighter salary of $57,560 per year.
With overtime, California firefighters can make as much as $110,000 per year, but entry level firefighters make about $30,000 per year.
“Companies typically put about one herder in charge of 400 goats,” Associated Press reports. “Many of the goat herders in California are from Peru and live in employer-provided trailers near grazing sites.”
“Most vulnerable workers in America”
Lorena Sofia Gonzalez Fletcher, a Democratic member of the California State Assembly from 2013 to 2022, representing southern San Diego, now heads the California Labor Federation.
As an assembly member, Gonzalez Fletcher introduced the law that would require goat herders to be paid overtime, contending simultaneously that goat herders are among the “most vulnerable workers in America,” and that they should be paid like firefighters.
Goat herders, Fletcher Gonzalez told Associated Press, are on temporary work visas, can be fired and sent back to their home country at employer will, work mostly in isolation, speak little English, and lack the rights of U.S. citizens and green-card holders.
“We should invest in the workers”
“If we are investing this as firefighting of the future, we should invest in the workers,” Gonzalez Fletcher said.
“If there’s so much work, and [the goat-herding companies] are making a lot more money, we should be having a discussion of how much of that belongs to the workers who are sitting with the goats 24/7,” Gonzalez Fletcher added, not mentioning the goats themselves.
Very likely, if goat herders are paid like firefighters, the imported herders will soon be out of work, as U.S. citizens and green-card holders take the jobs.
But since city, county, and state taxpayers contract for most of the brush-clearing done by goats, boosting goat herder pay farther above California norms will encounter political resistance––even if the goats save a lot of property and firefighting expense in the long run.
“We will sell these goats to slaughter”
Meanwhile, what’s in it for the goats is a reasonably normal, natural goat life and lifespan, under better conditions than most of the estimated two to 2.5 million goats kept for meat, milk, and fiber in the U.S. experience.
Tim Arrowsmith, owner of the Red Bluff, California company Western Grazers, currently fielding about 4,000 goats to various brush-clearing jobs, told Associated Press that unless the overtime rule is changed, “We will be forced to sell these goats to slaughter and to the auction yards, and we’ll be forced out of business and probably file for bankruptcy.”
Added Arrowsmith to KCRA News of Sacramento, “We can’t sustain it, and the cities [who hire the goats] can’t sustain it. The goats will go to the market, and we will sell out, and I’ll go to work at Walmart.”
“The city of West Sacramento pays Arrowsmith of Western Grazers about $150,000 a year for hundreds of goats to eat the overgrown grass and vegetation,” KCRA said.
Bearded critters in the Berkeley Hills
Use of goats to consume flammable grass, weeds, manzanita, and poison oak, which goats eat but to which most humans are seriously allergic, caught on like wildfire after the University of California at Berkeley brought in a herd following a 1991 hillside blaze that killed 25 people, razed 3,500 homes, and menaced the campus, all in just one afternoon.
That was the 14th brush fire to roar through the windswept steep canyons behind Berkeley and Oakland since 1923. The first of those fires missed the then much smaller University of California campus by the width of one street and briefly jumped Shattuck Avenue, the main street of the city, two blocks north of the busiest intersection.
With goats on duty, there have been no fires of comparable magnitude.
Only goats eat poison oak
Prescribed and presumably controlled burns, among the chief alternatives to goats, have meanwhile exploded out of control several times elsewhere in California.
Manual and mechanical brush control, meanwhile, is many times more expensive than goat deployment, and much slower.
Other grazing animals have been evaluated for brush control, including cattle, sheep, and wild horses, but have proved to be much pickier eaters, tending to leave much more flammable material behind.
And only goats seem to have a taste for poison oak. Even exposure to poison oak smoke causes many humans to erupt in skin blisters and suffer bloodshot eyes.
Paradise Fire put goats in demand
As of January 2019, when Nevada City initiated a $30,000 crowdfunding campaign to bring in a goat herd, goat brush clearing cost about $1,000 an acre, with a 200-goat team able to more-or-less fireproof an acre a day.
Noted Oliver Milman of The Guardian, Nevada City, “in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, is just 70 miles south of Paradise, which was virtually wiped off the map in November 2018 in the deadliest fire in state history.”
The Paradise fire killed at least 85 people, mostly in the first four hours after it started, forcing 52,000 people to evacuate, doing $16.65 billion worth of damage, about a quarter of it uninsured.
(See Could beavers have saved Paradise?)
Unpaving the way for goat grazers
By July 2019, reported Guardian correspondent Susie Cagle, goats were “munching away at summer-dried, fire-ready grasses in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Nevada, and across California. In some places that outlaw livestock within city limits, officials have even changed local ordinances in order to unpave the way for goat grazers.”
Competition to get goat grazers had jacked up the cost of a goat team to $500 an acre, Cagle mentioned, but that remained a bargain compared to $28,000 to hire humans and equipment to do the same work.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Impervious to poison oak”
“Grazing goats are far from the newest wildfire prevention tool,” Cagle observed, “but they have a tiny footprint. They’re efficient, clean eaters, nibbling away at weeds and grasses and leaving far less damage than an herbicide. They’re nimble climbers, able to scamper up steep flammable hillsides and into narrow canyons that humans would struggle to reach.
“They’re impervious to poison oak, and they don’t disrupt natural ecosystems or scare away indigenous animals,” while helping to preserve wildlife habitat.
“Where conspicuously carved fire breaks on verdant hillsides might upset homeowners,” Cagle wrote, “goats are welcome seasonal cuteness.”
Goats saved the Ronald Reagan library
However, Cagle added, “Fuel management isn’t enough to abate wildfire impacts. Goats are effective, but they can’t do anything about flammable wood shingle roofs,” even if they can scramble up on some of those roofs to take in the view, “or cedar siding on aging buildings that are not subject to new fire safety codes.”
Those drawbacks aside, though, “A hungry herd of 500 goats has helped save the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library from the California wildfires,” BBC reported on October 31, 2019.
“In May 2019,” BBC explained, “the library hired goats to clear flammable scrub surrounding the complex as a preventative measure.
“The goats ate the brush, creating a fire break that slowed the flames” of the so-called Easy Fire five months later, and gave firefighters extra time to react.”
Since then, almost the whole fire-vulnerable west coast has been sold on goats. Brush-clearing is a good deal for the goats, too, who seem enjoy the work and the greater longevity they get from doing it.
The question is, how many people are willing to pay how much for goat help?
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