How Many Times Must We Watch the West Burn? Holistic Management International Says Goats Help Prevent Fire Damage

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.--(EON:Enhanced Online News)--“The millions of dollars in damages from the recent California wildfires – including the Thanksgiving flare-up in Malibu - could have been reduced or even eliminated if goats had been used to diminish the risks,” says Holistic Management International (HMI) COO Peter Holter.

“The millions of dollars in damages from the recent California wildfires – including the Thanksgiving flare-up in Malibu - could have been reduced or even eliminated if goats had been used to diminish the risks”

The Albuquerque-based non-profit, founded in 1984, works on four continents with stewards of large land holdings to heal damaged land, improve biodiversity and food production and reverse desertification, yielding a “triple bottom line” of sustainable environmental, economic, and social benefits. Thirty million acres worldwide are currently under Holistic Management.

“Holistic Management^® practitioners have used goats – and other animals - to mitigate the risk of fire damage because they reduce the natural ‘fuel ladder’ – vegetation less than 8 feet in height that allow wildfires to rush up the trees and into the canopies,” Holter explains. “Using animals costs significantly less than the millions we spend on fire suppression, and improves the land so that it is less likely to suffer damage from future fires.”

Holistic Management® practitioner and rancher Bill Burrows, who manages 40,000 acres in the western part of California’s Sacramento Valley, thinks it’s essential to bring herbivores, particularly goats and sheep, back into the management of catastrophic fuel build-up.

“These animals are especially beneficial in California because strict air pollution laws limit prescribed burns; mechanical methods are very expensive and cannot be used on steep terrain; and chemicals are not acceptable because we have no idea of their long-range effect,” he says.

According to Burrows, animals, the only tool left, provide benefits beyond the reduction of biomass and adding organic matter back into the soil. “Their hoof action prepares soil for planting grasses and other desirable species, they are efficient in reducing invasive exotic weeds, and they the cheapest removers of biomass around. Goats cost $18.44 per acre, or $144 per ton.”

A 2004 Federal Emergency Management Administration report confirms that goats effectively decrease hazardous ladder fuels and are an attractive alternative to prescribed burns because they do not produce slash piles that must be removed or burned later.

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