Thursday, May 25, 2006




Friday, May 19, 2006

Julia looks away while Bailey chases goats
More Bailey chasing goats
Sunset in Bridger 5/18 Posted by Picasa

Goats grazing in Bridger, MT
Snacking on Russian Olive
Leafy Spurge plants secreting latex sap after goat's first bite Posted by Picasa

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Immigrants and Weeds

Tonight, George Bush is going to address the nation on immigration. I’m going out to set some electric fence, move 600 goats, and reduce the population of leafy spurge on a property along the West Yellowstone River in Bridger, Montana. To a strict literal interpretation, our two tasks could not be any more different. However, some striking similarities exist between our two pursuits. Julia is my Rove, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld (I accept the implications of total reliance on her talents). The goats are my national guard; electric fences my borders; and the dogs are the communications network that hold it all together. Both W and I are approaching problems with a foreign population on US soil. How we view the problem, and the approaches that we take to solving it will greatly affect the success that we will have in our quests. Ultimately, the success or failure of our goals will depend on our ability to address the root causes.

Leafy spurge, euphorbia esula, infests some 2.5 million acres of grassland in a 1200-mile radius centering in Montana. Spurge is native to Eurasia, but it has spread across the world. It competes intensely for resources, has 15 feet or longer taproots and reproduces at the subsoil level by rhizomes. Spurge contains latex in its milky sap that causes stomach ulcers, blisters and even death if consumed in sufficient quantities. The damage bill renders some ranges and wildlife preserves uninhabitable.

Tordon wipes out all broadleaf plants, and is the chief method of combating spurge. It gives an instant victory for the sprayer; the spurge will recede until the next year. However, Tordon makes the weakened biological system even more vulnerable to reinfestation.

Spraying spurge is the chemical equivilant to deportation. Deportation is expensive, ethically questionable, and does not address the root cause of the massive immigration into the US. Immigration presents a problem because illegal immigrants do not pay taxes but use the same resources as tax paying Americans. The unambiguous reason, or root cause, why there are so many immigrants crossing the borders is because of the immense economic disparities in the world economy. Immigrants cross the borders to obtain access to resources that they cannot as easily, or at all, in Mexico, Haiti or any other country where US Green cards are more valuable than winning lottery tickets. The free market dictates that people flowing into the US will equalize the world wage rate. This, however, would be a nightmare for the average wage of the US citizen and is simply not an option for a US politician representing his or her constituency. So we will continue to talk about guest workers and border security while the pressure grows and grows. Like a hurricane gaining strength to transfer the enormous accumulated heat north, the immigration pressure will continue to move people to the colder, richer US. Bush simply has his finger in the dyke.

Fortunately for me, the root causes of spurge infestation are easier to address, although they may be a little harder to understand. Unlike Bush, I have immediately available the tools that will allow me to release the pressure that spurge puts on its ecosystem. Spurge infests rangeland and riverbanks that have been tossed out of balance by years of over and under grazing, making them extremely vulnerable to infestation. Because leafy spurge seeds create no threat to a healthy grassland, our challenge is to create stable, productive grasslands where spurge cannot thrive.

The goats assist in creating this environment because of what they eat and how they're managed. They selectively eat the flowery tops off of it like a pig rooting truffles from the forest. In an area overgrazed by cattle, leafy spurge remains with tiny grass plants struggling around it. Through grazing, we direct more of the solar energy to the grasses and turn a noxious weed into valuable fertilizer.

The US track record in protection of our ecosystems indicates mismanagement. We have degraded soils and reduced their capacity to support life as we have settled the country. Leafy spurge, spotted knapweed, star thistle, and others make evident the detrimental effect of our decision making. Our ecosystems are now vulnerable to weeds that don't support biodiversity. From another perspective, however, these plants are essential.

Most noxious weeds build up the organic matter in our soils and keep them from washing into the oceans, a habit that we have pursued with incredible ability (topsoil is far and away our nations biggest yearly export). They colonize otherwise bare soil where no native plant could survive. In some ways, immigration is no different. Immigrants keep our agricultural, manufacturing, and construction sectors alive. Weeds bring up nutrients not normally available to the ecosystem. Diversity, both human and ecological, is a net benefit when the systems involved are vigourous. We should stop viewing both weeds and immigrants as a problem and look at them as an opportunity for soluations to local and global instability. We can do this by eliminating the vacuums that are created because of lack of resources. Nature does not like vacuums, people and plants will move to fill them as long as natural laws rule our existence. I hope that we can take steps to alleviate global poverty and build soil to create healthy communities.

Monday, May 08, 2006

Julia and I made the front page! (well, sort of)

This article was on the front page and back page of the Sunday Billings Gazette. The only mention of Julia and I is as the two young herders in the second paragraph, but the pictures were taken on the job where Julia and I are working in Bridger, MT. In the picture of Lani, in the upper right, Bailey and Cody (our border collies) turned the goats so that the photographer could have the scene set for a few more snaps.

I think its a well written story and does a good job of expanding upon the role of the goats.

Enjoy:

http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2006/05/07/news/state/25-goat.txt

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Julia and Goats in late afternoon
"Do you think that we are supposed to chase this thing?"
Sexy Sadie Posted by Picasa

Julia and I have an unusual life.

We reside in a 24-foot trailer. Our home cannot have a foundation because our job requires us to be mobile, to live on the land where we are working. We are often away from the power grid, and so we rely on an 80-watt solar panel for all of our power. This might not seem like a lot of power, and, in our age of energy abundance and inefficiency, its not (a typical incandescent light bulb is all that this can run). We manage, however, to get by pretty effectively. We can run our technological gadgets (laptops, cell phones, ipods) and still have enough power left over for some non-essential items like the fan on our propane heater and the water pump.

The primary responsibility that Julia and I have is to the land where we are working. We work towards the goals of the landowner, or manager, who hires us. The tool that we employ to handle this responsibility is a herd of 600 goats. My language of description is key here. The easy way to describe our job is to call us goat herders. I think that this is somewhat misleading because it implies that our emphasis is on the goats entirely. We are trying to move away from the dominant paradigm in land management which considers animals as separate from the land, or as an influence that only fouls or spoils it. Our goats work with succession, manage plant species, adjust soil profiles, and change the way in which the ecosystems function. That is the basic story of our job. I hope to use other blogs to talk more about the specifics of how the goats work with the land.

The one goat that I want to talk about, however, is a goat that violates some of the rules of our job. This goat not only has a unique personality, but she is one of the few goats with a name: Sadie. She often acts in quirky ways that are, for lack of better description, “very un-goat like”. We use dogs to control our goats. Kodi , Bailey, and a rotating cast of dogs from our boss Lani, help us control where the goats are at any given time. The goats respect the dogs, moving in unison when the dogs get into their flight zones. Sadie does not. I think the dogs respect Sadie. She doesn’t put up with their intimidations and frequently fights back, chasing them away when they get too close. She sleeps outside of our trailer. If we are not careful to close the screen door, she lets herself in to snack on whole oranges and bananas and pull calendars off the wall to see how they taste. We even have to tie her up while we feed the dogs because her relentlessly diverse appetite has given her a taste for dog food. No dog can get to his or her bowl with an un-tethered Sadie nearby. Why do Julia and I put up with such an unruly goat? She feeds us. Sadie is part milk goat, part family member, and all of the reason why I find the wires on our solar panel pulled out on a morning when I have gotten up later than Sadie thinks she should be milked.

One of the things that make goats (including Sadie), and other four-legged, cloven-hooved animals special in their relationship to our ecosystems is their eating habits and the way that they process what they eat. Sadie puts the local vegetation and citrus peels through a four-stomached digestion factory and turns in into delicious milk. The first and most distinctive aspect of this factory is the rumen, the chamber where fermentation of masticated plant material takes place. When a goat, sheep, or cow is chewing their cud they are actually chewing regurgitations from their rumen. In a goats world, this regurgitation might be enjoying the taste of a particularly good piece of sagebrush a few hours after grazing. The human analogue to this behavior is reflection, or rumination, the process of recalling the events of our lives after they happen to us. In fact, the thesaurus, under ruminate, has "chew over" listed. So, when I was thinking about, or chewing over, the web address for this blog about goats, ecology, and life I thought I found an appropriate one: www.rumen-ations.blogspot.com.

I wish you all well.

Jon and Julia