We are into the swing of high summer and three weeks into a heatwave. Days are long, full and exhausting. I rise early to beat the heat, feed and milk the goats, let the ducks out and collect the eggs, and feed the sheep before they head for the shade to wait out the heat of the day. The land is baked dry, our sparse, shallow soils are parched and grass growth has stalled in all but the lowest, dampest spots.
I am working on the land with the goats, clearing fields that have long been choked with purple moor grass and bog myrtle, the aim to rejuvenate and restore fresh, green, diverse and productive pastures. Goats are good for this work; they relish and thrive on the rough forage that has grown too tough for sheep. Sheep need good pasture, at least for some of the year, and good pasture we are lacking. We are feeling the loss of the few acres of lush, lowland grass we left behind when we moved onto the hill last summer, and this spring (did we even have a spring? Because it felt like we shot straight from wild winter rains and floods into summer drought) has been challenging and costly in feed bills, testing me to re-evaluate my grazing plans and heed the land whispering: less sheep, for now, less sheep. Let the goats have their season.
Diversity is the aim of the game, of pastures and ecosystems within our farm and of the whole farm enterprise, each species supporting one another, and us, and the whole farm system. For a while it suited us to focus almost solely on sheep, them being easy to run extensively over our hill land with minimal care while we still lived on our little, lowland homestead a distance away where we could bring the whole flock back to for a chunk of the year for this land to rest. Now that we are on the hill full time, the balance has swung, we are short on sheep quality grass and tall on goat quality scrub. The aim is to find an equilibrium with both species complimenting each other working with the land, and each giving us their return: the goats, milk and meat.
We have invested in some good quality dairy stock to expand our little goat herd this year, with converting all that woody scrub and cellulose into our sustenance in mind. Two beautiful, orphaned, Saanen x Anglo Nubian doe kids from a local micro dairy, and a purebred Saanen first freshener, in milk, from a pedigree dairy breeder, up the country. Along with the daughters and granddaughters of our old matriarch, Fawn the Goat, mostly a mix of Anglo Nubian and Saanen, that gives us a strong foundation herd of good dual-purpose (dairy and meat) genetics. Of course, it will take a couple of generations to build a herd that’s fully adapted and integrated into our land and system, but having good quality stock to begin with is half the battle. We have learnt that the hard way, being suckers for the sympathy cases.
So to work. It is high summer, the wet meadows are dry, the moor grass is high and the bog myrtle is thick and green and fragrant, so that is where I am targeting the goats’ impact for now. I want them chomping back the dominant moor grass and scrub that the sheep won’t eat so that other grasses and forbs can move in to improve and diversify our pastures. This involves me setting up electric fences, sending the goats in to eat the greenery, and then following along behind them to cut back the bared bog myrtle twigs (we gather some of these up to add to our outdoor firepit to make fragrant smoke to keep biting midges away, the rest go on the compost).
I make their fenced paddocks as big as I can, enough to keep them busy for a week or two or more. There’s a time and a place for tight strip grazing over pasture, but I’ve got big areas for them to work and on our really rough ground it takes a big chunk of a day to take down and set up fences. I don’t have time to spend hours every morning untangling electric netting and fighting it off the gorse bushes. And besides, goats like to race. And climb, and explore, and forage, and skip, and fight, and play. Goats need space to express their Goatness. Over the last couple of summers we ran a handful of goats extensively over the land with the sheep. Our land is an open patch of mountain, we didn’t have any internal fences and living away from the farm meant I could only check animals once a day, so I couldn’t manage their grazing and browsing with electric fencing, they were free to roam, forage, find shelter, and sunbathe where they pleased. I spent that time simply observing the goats going about their business in a relatively free and close to wild setting, trusting them to use their own instincts and intelligence, establish hierarchy, raise their own young, and find their own forage. I saw the benefits of relaxed, resilient health that only comes to animals living free to express their natural behaviours and browse freely over a wide choice of forage, and to me that robust, natural vitality in my herd is equally as important as the health of the land, so I aim to manage their impact while also giving them the freedom to roam, climb, browse, and express their natural goatness, to move around and work things out for themselves, to see my goats being goats.
I also learned a lot in those couple of years of observation, about the land, what grows where and when, and what the goats like to eat, and when (various plants are tasty at different times of year and stages of growth), that will be invaluable as I move into a more managed system both to provide the goats with what they like to eat when they like to eat it, and to restrict areas when I don’t want them to eat certain plants. I learned too, that given the space and freedom to lead themselves they will naturally concentrate on a small area until they have exhausted it before moving onto the next, and they don’t go back over an area until they run out of new ground. When I am here, though, they wait for my lead. Traditionally, goatherders would stay with the herd, bring them to the best pastures, protect them from predation, and I see that instinctual tendency to stay by me deeply ingrained in my herd.
When I was a young girl, there was a herd of feral goats living on the hill above our house and I’d follow them around with a sketchbook, just quietly observing them. I learned how to make myself very still and small and move among them unobtrusively—skills that stood well when I went on to work with horses in my teens and twenties and that still stand well and come as second nature to me now, working with sheep and goats. Watching my goats go about their goatness, being among them, it strikes me how things tend to come full circle. How the land has a way of bringing us home to ourselves.
Goats, too, have a way of bringing us home to ourselves. Goats are honesty embodied, raw and uninhibited and true in their expression of individual and of the wholeness of Goat, and to be among them requires that same unguarded honesty. We know a woman locally who works with therapy horses and sheep, and she once described to me how people light up and come back to themselves with the animals. Goats, too, have that deeply moving ability to bring you back to your soul, perhaps with even more punch. They are goats, after all.
Trevor Warmedahl, a.k.a. Milk Trekker describes this raw embodiedness of Goat in his recent essay on his experience of Goatpacking and American Pastoralism better than I can: “Goats epitomize many aspects of human nature: they are wildness, sexuality, passion and violence embodied. They act out with zero inhibition tropes familiar to humans, that we struggle with, deny, and cloak in layers of cultural baggage. We can learn so much, by spending time with these animals, and learning from their ability to be here now, smelling and tasting the world, running and playing, butting heads, or relaxing in the sun. Doing whatever seems right and true, in the moment, acting from their center without worry. Existing in the power of the moment, which is now.” [emphasis mine]
I take a break to sit a while and watch the goats fan out ahead of me, heads bobbing through a sea of waist high moor grass and bog myrtle. They move quickly, snatching a munch of this and a nibble of that conveniently offered at nose level as they push onward through the waves of moor grass. The key to keeping healthy goats is to keep their browse at hip height, or above. Browsers, not grazers. All the veterinary manuals will warn you, goats are highly susceptible to internal parasites. Goats evolved to browse, not graze; their natural resistance to those parasites picked up from grazing pasture is low. Where I live, standard veterinary advice is still, even with the increasing problem of anthelmintic resistance, to deworm goats every six weeks or so. Presumably, our standard veterinary advice assumes goats are grazing low on fields of wet Irish grass. Put goats on short or wet grass, you’ll have parasite problems; allow goats to browse like goats like to do on a variety of nose height, dry grasses, bitter herbs, trees and shrubs, you won’t. I’ll be in trouble with my vet for admitting I can’t remember the last time my goats got a dewormer, and my yearlings have never been dewormed. But they are fat and gleaming on forage alone and I’ll take that. Browsers, not grazers.
Take our choked up fields of purple moor grass and bog myrtle. The sheep forage down low, heads down, they get under the scrub canopy to find the delicate, sweet, new grass shoots and forbs underneath, but purple moor grass grows high and toughens up fast, and once it’s over maybe eight or ten inches high, it loses its palatability for sheep, and without being grazed it takes over and swamps out the sweet grasses and forbs that the sheep will graze tight. Purple moor grass, Molinia caerulea, is a tough, clump forming perennial grass that grows fast for a short summer season then dies back to its root in winter, leaving a thatch of dead hay, if it has not been grazed, that’s dry as tinder, high wildfire risk, and swamps out competing plants to create a barren, rank pasture, over time. It’s what turns our hills brown in winter. It has its place on upland grasslands, but like all things must be kept in balance. There is nothing natural about a Molinia dominated landscape. Traditionally, fire is employed to burn off the thatch and keep the grass and the heather young and sweet. There’s a month or so early in the season when the sheep will eat purple moor grass, before it grows too high, but we have acres more moor grass than the sheep can eat, and not enough good, sweet grass to keep them happy when it’s gone, so that’s where the goats come in. Goats, with their larger rumen capacity are better equipped to digest tough, fibrous browse, and they enthusiastically chomp down purple moor grass like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Goats browse over the high moor grass and the bog myrtle and scrub without disturbing the delicate, fresh shoots below, letting light reach those sweet, green grasses and forbs that are just waiting for their opportunity to spring into life.
A couple of years of running the goats strategically over our grasslands will knock back the moor grass (which doesn’t tolerate hard grazing), and give the pastures a chance to rejuvenate and restore diversity. At least, that’s my plan. I anticipate adding pasture seed, clearing old drains (that’s the ducks’ job) and feeding the soil, too. And when there isn’t purple moor grass and bog myrtle to munch, there are swathes of European gorse that has invaded the lower slopes where our best, cultivatable soil is and a small woodland run rampant with bramble and ivy to clear. Where the goats “worked” on the willow grove last year, they have created gaps in the tree canopy letting light in, so that where previously had been bare woodland floor is now carpeted with flowering speedwell, selfheal, buttercup, sheep sorrel, and fescue. Where they spent too many long, boring rain days last summer, chewing bark, pooping and trampling in the hazel stand that kept a deeply shaded and deeply leaf littered floor, now are foxgloves, fool’s parsley, wood sorrel, and strawberry, the leaf litter disturbed and the light let in, the forest floor burst into bloom.
Last week I had them tackle a large, mature stand of an “invasive”, non-native shrub that is rampant in our hedges and thickets and crowds out our willows and thorns, my nemesis, Cotoneaster. I never liked it, even as an ornamental in my gardening days and now it haunts my native wood pasture dreams. It’s not the goats’ favourite thing to eat, either, but with a bit of encouragement they will strip it down to bare branches and weaken the plant over time, making it easier for me to cut back the mature stand and dig out the runners. Again, letting light reach the floor and giving space, disturbance, and manure for a fresh succession of plant life to flourish.
Working with the goats like this, breathing warm summer air that’s thick and heavy with hircine sweat and the heady scents of May blossom and bog myrtle, sun drunk and soaking in the birdsong on the breeze and the bees that hum around the May tree, I am immersed in work that is as ancient and timeless as these hills. I wonder how many generations before me farmed this land. Whose hands and livestock—yes, hands and livestock, not machines—cleared these pastures of scrub and wood. How many centuries, millennia, ago? Whose hands dug the drains that my ducks now splash in? The flax ponds? So much history there. Or built the walls of immovable rocks that bound this entire parcel of land, half buried, clothed in moss and barely distinguishable from the thigh thick roots of old trees that wrap around them like a lover’s legs. Whose goats and sheep before mine kept the heather sweet and the grasses green? What a disservice it would be to see these old heaths and pastures where the scabious grows and the butterflies flutter and the hares race, run rank and degraded or run to scrub.
An old guy drives by sometimes, and he pulls up and rolls down his side window. He sold this land, long ago, he tells us, with a beaming, toothless smile and a twinkle in his eye. He tells us where the water is, where they dug for springs and where they dug for turf. He tells us where the foxes roam, how he would climb to sit at the highest point to watch them. And he tells us, teary eyed, that he is glad to see us here, to see someone farming the land.
In other news around the farm, the ducks have gone on strike. They did excellent work digging drains and clearing ponds on the wettest ground not so long ago, but their drains and ponds are now dry. They’re not happy with these hot, dry working conditions so they picket around the water butts and dirty every fresh bucket I put out for the goats in protest. Water is scarce when the rain stops, we can’t afford to waste a drop, so the buckets they dirty get added to their pool. Wait a minute…they’re onto something there. Clever, those ducks. Husband got one up and put the goats’ buckets up on blocks—the goats can still reach but the ducks can’t. Three of the ducks have decided the best thing to do while they wait for the rain is sit on eggs. With luck we’ll soon have our first generation of ducklings to be hatched on the hill. The lambs are growing fat and fast, and we are re-planning grass rotations around the drought to wean and fatten ram lambs and cull ewes, soon. The need to reduce the sheep flock is weighing heavy with some difficult decisions to make. All for the benefit and better working of the whole flock and farm. The year’s wool harvest has begun, slowly. I work through shearing the flock myself through the summer with traditional blade shears. I will write about that sometime. And we are two weeks into our local food challenge. I will share what that looks like and how it’s going for us in my next post.
A wonderful , fat update, lovely! Thank You!
I love the munching goat photo.