A goat-to move: Sacramento herd provides sustainable way to clear land, prevent fires

“Are those your goats?”

Lee Hazeltine gets this question a lot. His company, Integrazers, provides rental goats and sheep to clear unwanted brush, weeds and other vegetation.

People like hiring goats. They’re a natural, eco-friendly alternative to pesticides. They can tackle terrain that can’t be accessed by heavy machinery. They leave behind goat fertilizer. They make pleasant bleating noises. And they’re extremely cute.

Hazeltine is a large-volume operator, a goat Costco. He has thousands of animals and they can clear thousands of acres. The animals live at the work site until the job is done. Then they move onto the next work site.

Integrazers provides annual grazing services for Sun City Lincoln Hills, a retirement community with 480 acres of grazeable land. In April and May, they were in Elk Grove, grazing about 400 acres of land. The herd recently did a job at the the Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park in Oakland. After the Oakland Hills Fire, the East Bay Regional Park District created a defensible zone in case of fire. That area requires maintenance, so it’s become an annual salad bar for livestock.

“They really love madrone,” said Hazeltine. “They think it’s delicious and tasty.”

Cedar and Douglas fir are also popular with the goats. And sometimes, after they’ve eaten all the branches within reach, they’ll start peeling off the bark.

That’s where the sheep come in handy.

“About the time the goats have finished off their first-selection choices feed-wise, and might start to do damage on the favorites, the sheep have eaten enough of the grass that it’s time to move,” Hazeltine explained.

Sheep are primarily grazers, which means they prefer eating grass and other vegetation low to the ground. During World War I, when manpower was at a premium, President Woodrow Wilson used a flock of sheep to mow the White House lawn.

Goats are grazers as well, but they’re also browsers, and they tend to go for the higher vegetation first.

The animals also eat certain toxic plants, like poison oak, but it’s not a preferred entree. For humans, it’s the equivalent of eating spices like pepper, Hazeltine says. A little bit is good; too much kills the dish.

The cost of renting goats varies depending on the land and specifications. With Integrazers, the price generally ranges from $200 to $400 per acre.

Hazeltine has employees who remain onsite with the animals, camping in trailers near the paddock. They set up the fences, monitor the herd and bottle-feed the baby goats if the mother is unable to nurse.

Hazeltine uses border collies for herding. For protection, he employs Anatolian Shepherds and Akbash dogs. The Akbash is a Turkish breed with a white coat, floppy ears and curly tail. The livestock guardian dogs have one job: put themselves between you and the herd.

Temporary electric fences are set up around the area to keep goats in and predators out. But it’s still possible to lose a goat to coyotes, especially if they’re downwind from the dogs.

Hazeltine got into the goat business in 2006. He was looking for a sustainable way to tackle wildfire fuels.

“We’ve got a fuels problem,” he explained. “And we don’t have an effective, viable tool that’s economically sustainable.”

Hazeltine majored in plant science at UC Davis, paying his way through school with a side business selling firewood. Growing up, he had always planned on a career as a computer programmer. Then he got a weekend job at a horse ranch.

“I was basically grubbing out horse stalls,” he said. “I figured out I liked that a lot better.”

This story was originally published September 2, 2020 at 10:23 AM.