Every fall, ski areas across Vermont have to brush hog and weed whack their slopes to clear them of shrubs and grass for ski season. Now, some mountains are experimenting with a different kind of mower: goats and sheep.
On a recent afternoon, about 150 animals were making short work of grazing Jay Peak’s Interstate trail.
“The goats are great at the trees and the goldenrod and the other types of brush, but the sheep really do well with the grasses,” says farmer Adam Ricci of Barnet. “So by mixing the two together, we get everything covered pretty well.”
Ricci’s goats and sheep are outfitted with special solar-powered collars that use GPS trackers.
Instead of using traditional electric fencing, he draws a boundary map on his phone that he calls a “virtual paddock.”
This lets him move the animals multiple times a day, so they can cover more ground and don’t over-graze. It’s also less labor intensive than keeping them contained with traditional electric fencing.
Ricci’s herding dog also plays a critical role in helping to move the goats and protecting them from predation on the mountain.
“We also have Helios, the guardian dog,” he says. “He spends his time with the flock.”
If the animals stray too far, they get an audible warning that starts as an unpleasant ringing sound.
After a few warnings, wayward sheep and goats get what Adam says is a light shock, similar to that delivered by an electric fence collar for a dog.
He says this doesn’t happen very often, partly because he spends time training the flock to the collars with the visual aid of traditional fencing before putting them in the virtual paddock.
He says it’s a pretty good deal — the goats and sheep get to munch on grasses, but also knotweed and small trees like willow and maple. And Adam gets a place to graze them and a bit of extra income for his small farm.
Jay Peak has about 350 acres of ski trails that all have to be mowed annually, says Andy Stenger, director of mountain operations.
Doing it is expensive and uses a lot of diesel. The mountain is hoping the goats will be an environmentally friendly way to burn less fossil fuels.
So far, he’s been happy with the results, and there are obvious branding benefits.
“It’s good for the environment,” Stenger says. “And it didn't take a lot of convincing for us to hop on board with it.”
Grazing ski trails isn’t a new idea. It’s been tried before, but rotating animals frequently in steep terrain is labor intensive and traditional netting doesn’t always work well on steep and rocky trails.
These collars aren’t cheap — they cost about $200 apiece. A state grant for roughly $150,000 is helping farmers test them out on loan. They've been used to help goats remove knotweed, graze power lines and more.
Private donations have helped them test the technology at ski areas, and so far they’ve also been tried at Magic Mountain in Londonderry.
Dan Smith is with the Agritech Institute for Small Farms, which is lending Ricci the collars for the season.
“We're trying them out for vegetation management on utility lines in place of mechanized brush hogging and weed whacking,” he says of the state grant.
As for the environmental benefits, grazing does use less fossil fuels than mowing. But when it comes to the climate, that’s where the math starts to get a little more complicated.
Meredith Niles is a researcher at the University of Vermont who studies this.
“It’s not an easy apples to apples comparison,” she says of swapping goats for mowers. “We have to think about all kinds of greenhouse gas emissions if we're talking about climate change.”
Niles says goats and sheep produce methane, a super potent climate warming greenhouse gas. It mostly gets released when they burp or fart.
However, she says, so long as projects like this one don’t add a lot more animals to the landscape, it’s likely they’re reducing emissions.
When it comes to managing vegetation outside of ski areas, Niles says goats and sheep are particularly good options from a climate perspective because they produce about 1/15th the amount of methane that dairy cows do, and they compact the soil less, provided they are rotated frequently.
Niles says in Vermont, grazable land can be hard to come by for farms. “So I think this is a really interesting, innovative solution.”
Back on the slopes, Ricci says there’s no terrain at Jay Peak that’s too steep for his goats to graze, and he’s thinking about buying the collars at the end of the season.
Stenger, with Jay Peak, says grazing is slower than mowing, but he’s keeping an open mind.
“The total acreage that we were hoping to hit through this, we're probably not going to hit it,” he says. “But if we pursue it again in the future, we’ll have learned from this.”
If the pilot proves successful, the virtual paddock technology could allow grazing in all sorts of places that are mowed now, like under power lines and solar arrays — a sweet deal for local farmers in need of pasture and for the climate.
