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Ecological Fuel Load Reduction with grazing animals can take place at any
time of the year, even during the rainy season. Planned grazing is
also an effective way to manage the regrowth of brush and scrub after
fire has moved through an area. Goats will remove heavy fuel loads
in areas where brush is too thick to penetrate. Managed Intensive
Grazing can reduce the volume, thickness, height, and breadth of brush
enclosements, returning areas to a living greenbelt.
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Living System’s managed grazing replicates the
positive effects of natural wildfire. The herds move slowly through
wildland, forest, rangeland and urban interface zones, carving their
way through dangerous brush and undergrowth. Managed grazing breaks
the continuity of flammable cover, providing natural firebreaks and sustainable fire protection.
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Managed Grazing:
- Creates Fire Breaks
- Reduces Fuel Loads
- Increases Spatial Distance Between Shrubs and Trees
- Prunes Tree Ladder Fuels up to Six Feet off the Ground
- Helps Restore Environments
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A Goat Grazing Primer by Jared A. Lewis
Fire in interface zones has the highest potential for catastrophic
effects. There are a variety of tools and techniques that are available
to mitigate wildfire in the Wildland-Urban interface. What’s
more, in these interface zones fire suppression becomes increasingly
more difficult not only because fire fighters have to contend with
the fire, but also must contend with the fact that homeowners
or city officials may have done little in the way of providing a defensible
space near and around homes and structures, so that fire fighters
can at the least have some chance at saving or diverting a fast moving
wildfire.
So how do goats fight fire?
In order to understand how goats impact the fire environment it is
important to understand the conditions that allow fire to spread quickly
and to burn for long periods of time at intense heats.
The primary factor which effects the intensity of heat, flame height,
and the ability for fire to spread and increase is the fuel that the
fire must consume to maintain itself. These fuels include most types
of vegetation, including trees, shrubs, common weeds and grasses. We
distinguish between the different types of fuels by their respective
reactivity to fire and by their potential to feed and spread fire. Light fuels such as grasses and weeds provide a medium
for fire to spread quickly, especially in areas where these light
fuels have accumulated and formed dense stands of dry and combustible
material. Heavy fuels such as trees and shrubs, once
ignited are difficult to control, will release toxic fumes into the
air (from oils such as the urishol in poison oak) and burn longer
and hotter than grass fires.
With the understanding of the fuels which give energy and momentum
to fire, we can begin to look at how a goat can effectively lessen
the potential for, as well as the destructive capacity of, fire. Goats, unlike other
ruminant grazing animals (both wild and domestic), are non-selective
eaters. |
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Goats can utilize a variety of forages including the
light and heavy fuels discussed above. Goats are also active
and explorative eaters, often climbing trees in pursuit of
food and nutrition. This propensity towards variety coupled with an
uncanny ability to consume unlikely feedstuffs such as low lying branches,
small trees, grasses, weeds, chapparal, shrubs and a panoply of fire-hazardous exotic and invasive species, creates the unlikely but none
the less perfectly suited fire fighting tool in the goat.
As a goat moves through a fire prone area it will begin to target
the light fuels while browsing on the branches of trees and shrubs
as high as it can reach (up to approximately five feet). This vegetation
is the ladder fuel, the vegetation which allows fire
to spread upwards from ground, to trees, to homes. Slowly but efficiently
the goat will increase the distance between combustible vegetative
materials. |
Increasing the spatial distance between plants
exponentially inhibits the speed at which a fire can spread, the heat
and intensity of that fire, and its ability to prolong itself. Furthermore, trees which have effectively been pruned by the goat are
unlikely to crown. A crown fire -
that is, a fire which has spread to the top of the tree - is extremely
difficult to suppress and allows for other trees to crown from the
top down. These types of fires are catastrophic and pose a particular
risk to fire fighters on the ground.
In many ways, a goat’s impact on its environment is similar
to the low intensity fires which burned cyclically and regularly before
modern high-density urbanization. These low intensity
fires maintained a healthy balance and were effective in maintaining
overgrown brush and grasses, while at the same time releasing nutrients
back into the soil. Release of these nutrients relies on decomposition
and the fire cycle and are otherwise left untapped and unavailable
to emerging and existing vegetation. Fire was once an integral part
of the healthy ecosystem, providing the necessary components for regeneration
and self-maintenance. Today, it is no longer possible or responsible
to allow fire in the Wildland-Urban nterface to take its own course.
Modern wildland fires are unnatural and often catastrophic, and no
longer serve as the regenerative element of our pre-urban past. We are now compelled by necessity and our own self-preservation instinct
to find ecological and viable alternatives to fire management that
mitigate catastrophic events and promote ecosystem health, while
maintaining the viability of our homes and communites.
Nature gives miraculous insight into our problems and more often that
not provides the solution to many challenges that human rationale
is unable or unprepared to solve. Observation of the natural world's
tendency towards equilibrium, managing its whole through its various
and disparate parts, allows for solutions to be found that are inherent
within the natural system. More and more, science, and thereby society,
is discovering the perfection of nature in all its intricacies and
interdependent systems. Fire was once revered and worshiped for its
positive nature: providing warmth; used in agriculture or metallurgy;
and a multitude of other purposes.
In our post-modern world fire is no longer revered, but feared, and
rightly so. It is incumbent on us to protect and maintain our environment
and to find the equilibrium that has long since been obscured through
unthoughtful and haphazard attempts to suppress fire. Modern fire
suppression activities must address the inevitability of ecological
disaster after high intensity catastrophic wildfire, acknowlege the repercussions
of non-managemnent, and begin the discourse about responsible and
ecological management of the Wildland-Urban interface.
Through the observation of our environment we find one solution to
our fuel and fire management dilemma. We understand the mechanisms
that mother nature employs to maintain a homeostatic fire environment.
These mechanisms include chemical, mechanical, and meteorogical elements.
Some of these can be recreated and simulated through human activity
or through the introduction of grazing and animal impact into interface
zones. Our model of Managed Grazing / Browsing for fire suppression
and wildland maintenance is based on the modality in which grazing
activity reduces potentiality for fire in the pristine environments
which grazing animals have occupied for countless eons. In fact, grazing
has always been and continues to be an integtral component of the
fire system. It is through animal impact, animal grazing and
browsing activity, that fuel loads were kept in check. The carrying
capacity for a herd of animals - the amount of food available and the type and relative amount of utilizable vegetation for
animal and ecosystem - are invariably connected to the location, duration,
intensity and frequency of fire in the wildland. Natural grazing and
fire systems, which native plants and animals rely heavily upon and
have in fact adapted certain mechanisms of recovery from, have been
altered or disallowed in the current state of our ecosystem, which
includes our human ecosystem, cities, governments and municipalities.
These systems are essential and fundamental to the program of mother
nature. Grazing and fire activity are meta-programs which continually
work on energy, mineral, soil, and many other overarching biological
levels. Without these components and their constituent effects, balance,
symmetry and ecostasisity dissolve: a chain reaction of predictable
ecological and biological events ensue which ultimately nullify the
natural systems ability to maintain itself in a healthy state. And,
because we are also part of this delicate but resilient system - our
towns, cities and infrastructures inhabit and share the same space
and abide by the same laws of nature as do our plant and animal neighbors -
we too are effected by this imbalance. The complexity of our contemporary
fire environment is compounded by economic and political realities
which continually affect and alter our ability to moderate and participate
in the mitigation of wildfire on many levels. Even on a local level
it is often difficult to find adequate, affordable and
sustainable techniques and methods to protect our homes, families,
communities and environments from fire.
We have discovered the link between ecology and fire and science has
solidly established the axiom that we can not achieve fire safety
without ecological viability, which includes fire resistant native
vegetation, proper cycling of dry, dead and decaying matter, as well
as the reintroduction or continuation of grazing for fuel management
which promotes these constituent prerequisites by its very nature.
(pictures courtesy of www.wildlandfire.com)
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