Vol. XV No. 5
September / October 2021
Serving Soil, Mulch, Compost & Wood Pellet Producers www.SoilandMulchProducerNews.com
NEWS
Sheep, Goats Helping to Mitigate Wildfires
W
hen the Sleepy Hollow Fire Protection District and Fire Safe Marin wanted to reduce the impact of wildfires in Marin County communities north of San Francisco, they brought in a unique crew from Star Creek Land Stewards to remove fire fuel. Some 1,200 goats and sheep from Star Creek grazed hundreds of acres, removing fire fuel including non-native invasive plants. “This approach proved cost-effective and gentle on the land, reducing the fuels for fire, restoring native grasslands where firefighters can more easily control fires, limiting greenhouse gas emissions, and creating pastoral fuel breaks in the open spaces between communities,” noted Fire Safe Marin, a nonprofit working to reduce fire hazards, promote fire safety awareness, and help residents prepare for wildfires in Marin County. The Marin Community Fire Protection Plan of December 2020 reported that herds of goats and sheep have been used since 2016 to graze in open space areas as part of a large-scale fire hazard reduction project spearheaded by local landowners. “The goat grazing program has been a collaborative effort to address key locations for fuel reduction to reduce the impact of wildfires in Marin communities,” it said. Bianca Soares, project manager at Star Creek L a n d S t e w a r d s, said use of sheep and goats for land management and wildfire mitigation is nothing new. It is, she says, something that sheep and goat ranches do daily; the difference now is that while those ranches may have been involved with traditional markets for meat or wool,
By p.j. heller
many of today’s sheep and goat ranchers are in the service industry, providing herds of animals for grazing lands to reduce the threat of wildfires or to improve land quality. “I think just acknowledging this whole industry — not just grazers but sheep and goat ranchers in general — is removing these fire fuels every single day of the year whether they get paid for it or not . . . I think that’s really important to keep in mind,” Soares said. The difference, she added, is that service businesses such as Star Creek have to be much more strategic compared to typical sheep or goat ranchers. Concerns include being able to move animals quickly through a site to avoid overgrazing; determining whether sheep, goats or a combination of the two should be used on a site, and the number of animals required. Star Creek, based in Los Banos, CA, was started in 2014 by Soares’ m o t h e r, A n d r é e (Talbott) Soares, a third-generation California rancher. Bianca Soares says her mother
never differentiated between whether Star Creek would provide land management or wildfire suppression. “It was all one and the same,” she said. “By providing the land management service we were also helping to provide fire fuels management. We were doing both land restoration and management as well as fire fuel suppression.” Star Creek has approximately 3,500 goats and 1,500 sheep. It employs as many as 13 herders from Peru, although that number has dropped recently due to travel restrictions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The company will normally take on projects from about 10 to 500 acres. A typical herd of 400 sheep and goats can graze about 1.5 acres per day; they often graze in steep and dense areas that humans could not access. Before a job is started, Soares will visit the site and based on her findings determine whether a herd of sheep, goats or a combination of the two is required. Sheep would be used for grass, sheep and goats for a mix of brush and grass and just goats for a dense project of mostly brush. “I’m going to make a decision based on what the vegetation looks like,” she explained. “Sheep are grazers and prefer nose level and down; goats are browsers and are nose level and up. They spend more time on two legs that they do on four.” Continued on page 4