Hooves of Gold, Stomachs of Iron

By Richard Martin, 9-05-07

	Caption: No fossil fuel required

I was riding my bike over the weekend on the bike path through CU’s Research Park when I came upon a herd of goats. Grazing away in the brush along the creek, hooved and horned, with a dozen or so interested spectators of the human variety. I pulled up and talked to their herder, a weathered, friendly woman named Lou Colby.

After we chatted a few minutes I asked her where her permanent base is.

“Well, don’t have one right now.”

This took a minute to sink in. So, do they live in hotels or what?

It turns out Lou is an itinerant goat rancher with a mobile herd of around 145 animals, offering “subscription grazing services” for the control of unwanted brush and weeds. Doing business as Golden Hooves Grazing Services, she’s been contracting with the Grounds Dept. at CU for a few years now, and she moves from job to job across the West, wintering in Arizona. Ms. Colby used to manage a 10,000 acre ranch in SE Montana; now she and her goats and her herding dogs are fully mobile, 365 days a year. She’s thinking about buying a place, though: Life on the road full-time “is getting kind of old,” she admitted.

Grazing with goats has some obvious advantages over mechanized weed control. Harsh chemicals and gas-burning mowers are eliminated; the goats will overgraze targeted species like leafy spurge, knapweed, and tamarisk, while benefiting wildlife habitat; and goats are highly motivated grazers, seeking out weeds in dense brush, meadows, or on canyon walls where sprayers or mowers can’t reach. Besides CU, Golden Hooves’ client list includes the Boulder Parks & Rec Dept., the U.S. bureaus of Land Management and of Reclamation, CSU, and the state Division of Wildlife.

There are other grazing services in the Western U.S., including one in Orinda, Calif. with the inevitable name Goats R Us, but few other operations are as large and as mobile as Golden Hooves. I pedaled off, leaving Lou Colby erecting a plastic fence to keep her weed-eaters off the bike path, smiling and perhaps daydreaming of having her own spread again one of these days.