When we’ve got weeds in the backyard like cheatgrass, many of us turn to herbicides or maybe just some backbreaking hand weeding.
So what happens when you have 166 acres of sagebrush steppe home to silver-haired bats, western toads, wintering mule deer and even a few moose ... and cheatgrass moves in to destroy the natural ecosystem?
Chemicals aren’t the answer, and the area is steep and hard to reach for manual removal. So call in the goats! They can go anywhere and eat almost anything, including weeds like cheatgrass.
That’s exactly what the Sagebrush Steppe Land Trust did for their Century Heights Preserve in Bannock County as part of a pilot program to try out goat grazing on the landscape.
Eric Pankau, Sagebrush Steppe stewardship manager, joined Idaho Matters, along with Zakary Copeland with Idaho Goat Grazers to talk more are about the program.
