How Many Times Must We Watch the West Burn? Holistic Management
International Says Goats Help Prevent Fire Damage
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (Business Wire EON) November 27, 2007 --
“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 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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