Elk Grove’s green grazers are baaa-ck. New deal will keep the four-legged crews on the job
The goats are back, sheep, too. Baying, braying herds of them sprinting for their next meal of runaway weeds, tasty dandelion and thorny star thistle at Franklin Creek and Elk Grove Creek, Strawberry Creek and Erhardt Channel.
They’re back, 2,000 head of them, stars of city of Elk Grove’s grazing management program, now in its fifth year. And, this latest group of kids can expect to be here for a while.
Elk Grove and Woodland-based managed grazing firm Integrazers recently agreed to a three-year, $600,000 deal with options to keep the goats in town for three more years, say city officials. Integrazers’ herds have worked the land in Elk Grove the past two years, city public works officials said.
Optimally, the herds graze March to September, weather permitting.
This year, with work on a new contract finalized, Integrazers’ herds started work in June and have been voracious. Integrazers’ founders Lee Hazeltine and Laura Gunderson expect the herds’ work to be complete in mid-August.
The mission, public works officials here say of the herds now at work on 430 acres at four sites around the city, is weed abatement, knocking down fire risks by chewing down dry, dead grasses in the city’s open spaces and keeping invasive plants, noxious weeds and reeds out of Elk Grove’s network of stormwater channels, creeks and streams.
All, without chemicals, crew or machinery.
“We try to abate (the weeds) to make sure open spaces don’t become a fire risk,” said Elk Grove Public Works’ Tiffany Agrusa, one of the team of staffers coordinating the grazing program. “We consider them a part of the public works team.”
The herds have been at it since June and they’ve had plenty to choose from. A wet winter led to a spring bumper crop of weeds. Public works officials say the four-legged work crews are clearing about two to four acres every day. The animals are expected to be in Elk Grove into September.
“We’ve gotten great reviews,” Agrusa continued. “It’s a well-received program. They’re one of our many tools in public works. And, they’re so cute.”
No getting around that. The herds have become something of a sensation in Elk Grove with videos of the neighing goats and baaing sheep sprinting past backyards and along city stormwater channels popping up across social media.
Elk Grove has a GIS map on the city’s website that allows people to see where the goats are currently grazing and videos of what the city calls “integrated pest management” at work controlling — read: gobbling — weeds. One before-and-after shot on the city’s video shows a herd munching away at a weed-choked channel leaving the land afterward groomed fairway-smooth.
On Wednesday, dozens of the goats were roaming a large, dusty plot on Big Horn Boulevard north of Bruceville Road, dining on dry grass and low hanging tree branches. Another herd was on the job on vacant land near Waterman and Bond roads in the eastern end of Elk Grove.
But the goats, kids and flocks of sheep are more than adorable eating machines.
Where the herds are deployed and how they are used, what they eat, how they interact with humans in more densely populated areas — all factor into Integrazers’ grazing strategies.
Integrazers’ Laura Gunderson’s brief, but deeply informative Facebook posts explore how the herds are integrated into communities and the many objectives they achieve in urban, suburban and rural settings, from weed abatement to fuels management, brush control and maintaining defensible space.
Early Tuesday, Gunderson’s post showed shepherds carefully guiding hundreds of Integrazers sheep along a broad drainage canal in the middle of an Elk Grove neighborhood.
It could have been a scene out of an old Western, all dust clouds and scrub oak, but for the cars and split-level suburban homes that framed the drainage. The setting illustrated the science and the urban realities at play in Intergrazers’ work.
“People that call these canals their home, railroad tracks and nighttime activity pose potential risks to our animals and the public,” Gunderson wrote. “The disposition of the sheep over our curious goats lends better in these types of situations. In addition, the forage and fuels vegetation align well with the needs of the sheep.”
“Truly strategic, comprehensive grazing is highly adaptive,” Lee Hazeltine said Wednesday. “What is the nature of the system in Elk Grove? It’s stormwater conveyance. We want the water to get out.”
Targeting stormwater channels like Erhardt Channel with the burst of high-intensity, short-duration grazing taking place now in the city makes sense, the herds clearing away the weeds, reeds and brush that could clog those same waterways during the rainy season.
On the same Wednesday, another Intergrazer herd had decamped to Fair Oaks’ high bluffs above the American River with different tasks: Managing fire starting fuels, mitigating wildfire risks and establishing defensible space.
“What’s the nature of the system in Fair Oaks? That’s fire (mitigation),” Hazeltine said. “Take the old Fair Oaks bridge in Fair Oaks Village. When a fire starts there, it runs up to those old houses and it’s scary as hell.”
In both cases, Hazeltine said, “it’s a community-based strategic use of animals in an urban environment.”
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