Taming Raw Land with Goats

One of the difficult tasks when you get to a new farm is to clear land for grazing and for pastures and we don't use heavy equipment here, we use our animals. So let's see how we do it. So we've just put the goats into their first spring rotation, kind of in a pasture slash wooded area that we hope to have as pasture one day. You can sort of see them mixed up in the scrub out there. This part was partially and selectively cleared when we bought the place not quite two years ago and started prepping for the house. It actually is in a valley that leads right to the pond but the goats have been given pretty much this whole area that you can see here and they are going to town. You can see the dogs over there, they're actually checking out the perimeter, figuring out where the new area is, making sure it's safe, kind of clearing it for the goats, just making sure everybody's going to be okay because the pond actually keeps the goats fenced in. Goats hate water, they don't like to cross water, they won't swim in the water, so it will hold the goats just fine. You can see how we just put hard fencing right down into the water there and that will keep the goats contained up in here. What we don't know is whether Cedar will respect it. He's never had the ability to have that kind of freedom. Iris hates swimming so we don't have to worry about her too much but Cedar, this will be a first try for him. As a general rule though, he doesn't like to be more than five feet away from his goats so we're hoping he'll be fine. He's probably one of the best goat dogs we've ever had so we'll see how this goes, just kind of monitoring for the rest of the day. Here they are checking out the water. All-they-can-drink buffet. Oh, Cedar just saw his first bullfrog. Well, we were a little concerned about Cedar when we terminated the fence into the pond there. We knew that Iris would drink out of the pond but she generally doesn't swim. Cedar, on the other hand, we weren't really sure about him. Well, it turns out this giant livestock guardian dog who's afraid of apparently nothing is terrified of bullfrogs. So, not only would Cedar not swim out of the pond, he wouldn't even drink out of the pond. So, we actually had to put a bucket of water up there so he could drink but he was the only one who drank out of it because everybody else went down there. He just wouldn't go near those bullfrogs. You can see now that all the goats are gone. The fences are moved and they're in a new portion of a pasture that we're trying to clear over there. I want to point out that Casper, the male goat, when he stands on his hind legs he's a lot taller than I am. These trees back here are cleared up to about five or six feet up. I really like that and some of these trees like this scraggly little thing behind me is going to come down because it's kind of useless. The other thing I want to point out is over here, over in this area, you can see a definitive line between where the goats were and where the goats were not. If you look to the right of that line you see a lot of small little saplings popping up. There's also poison ivy and some other things that will actually cover the canopy floor and not allow grasses to come through because it shades it out. Now, over here they cleared all of that but we don't want erosion so they did it extremely gently like goats do and they defoliated those small saplings. They ate the poison ivy but you can see along the hillside there's moss and grass and leaves and sticks that will prevent any erosion so they don't completely make the land barren but they intricately go through and pick off what we don't want and leave what we do want. Now that the goats have cleared everything out it gives us an overall visual of what we have behind us. We dropped these trees last year and everything grew up around it so now we can look at it and can I use any of these for lumber? Can I use it for firewood? Should I leave some of these treetops down here as a shelter for young fish because that protects them from the bass and stuff? We may burn some so it gives us a great opportunity to get down here work open up that ground a little bit more allow the pond to work up into there and get some grasses along this hill. If you look back at our farm tour series you'll find an old video of dairy goats where we did this back at our old farm and it was incredibly successful so we're repeating the process here and so far we've had great results so thanks for watching this week we hope to see you again next week and if you haven't subscribed please do so leave comments too we'd love to read those and we learn from each other. We'll see you then!