Noxious weeds are extremely aggressive and
are very difficult to control.
Weeds are symptomatic of a problem. The problem
is sometimes poor soil having no organic matter that cannot
support good growth. We want to make the grass the best competitor
and stress the weed at every turn.
Goats help with this problem because everything
they eat is then recycled as fertilizer and laid back down
on the grasses. As the goats graze, they trample in the fertilizer.
"There's a lot of awareness now of what
chemicals do to the environment," says Malmberg. "They've
been using chemicals against weeds for 45 years, so there
shouldn't be a weed on this planet. Obviously it's not working
and they're looking for something else, a logical way to slowly
heal the land."
The goal is to build the soil so it can produce
the kinds of plants that we want to grow there. What we need
is to be looking at the water cycle, mineral cycle, energy
flow and succession.
Ewe4ic Geological Services worked last year
in seven states, moving from job to job, migrating north to
south, and up and down in elevation; working all the time.
Jobs include federal contracts with the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation,
Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, as well
as state, county, and city contracts.
Weed and brush control using
goats is an effective resourse for private land owners as
well. The smallest area we have grazed was a 12-foot by 60-foot
backyard, grazing 30 baby goats there for three days. The
biggest job was grazing 20,000 acres in Montana.
We take a lot of data while we are herding goats.
We use a video camera with a GPS unit hooked into it. We then
create a noxious weed layer that can go into any government
database for their noxious weed inventory.