zurcian braun

yes thank you for this consideration. i have about 1 acre of pure pasture to work with, another 1.5 acres of mixed use pasture that will ultimately have fruit trees and a small garden and a couple tiny homes but i plan on having mobile fencing to help maintain the area. then i have access to about 40-50 acres of mixed forest land, some of it with a LOT of brushy understory. also in the PNW things regenerate very quickly. i think that there is probably a specific number of sheep that i could have here without there being any problem with regeneration. i don't know what that number is but by starting small and paying attention i'm sure i could learn. i'm going to start with just 2-3 sheep:)

with that said i do wonder if the sheep would have trouble getting their optimal nutrition from mostly brushy forest understory.

Benedict Bosco wrote:I raise Icelandics, and they do browse, but they prefer whatever is greenest and most palatable, which is usually grass and leaves, and won’t eat much for stems (they just strip the leaves, and eventually the bark). My concern with trying to focus on browse for a long term feedstock would be regeneration. How quickly do the plants/trees/shrubs recover after a grazing event? Grass by nature recovers fast and is therefore an ideal feed; I suspect you would need a very extensive area to browse for it to be sustainable.

There are number of sheep varieties that are known to do quite a bit of browsing but I'm wondering what that looks like in the real world for folks. I'm in the PNW and have lots of access to forests of different types and maturities as well as some clear cuts and some river plain access which means there is a real variety of browse but I'm wondering if ultimately even the sheep that are know to be good browsers won't really be all that happy unless they're on pasture. Icelandic, Jacob, and Shetland are a few of the breeds I've been considering for wool, hardiness, and browsing ability. ALso would like work towards being able to milk them!

So So So COOOL!! Thanks for sharing

This is a great link, thanks!

Or are they their own species? They're small (often a half an inch), but they do eat a lot.

Thank you all so much for your responses. This is super helpful and encouraging:) Rudyard, your response is full of such good info!! Thank you!!!

I'm wondering if folks have opinions as to whether it's better to train your goats to follow you when you're herding them to graze versus pushing them.

I have experience shepherding flocks of 30 to 50 sheep and goats but it was in open country and there weren’t really any neighbors gardens or busy roads to worry about. Here in the northern cascades we’re planning on having just a few milking goats and would like to take them out at least a couple times a week on long grazing walks through the forest where we live in addition to keeping them in mobile fenced areas.  It’s way way more densely forested here so we could potentially lose track of them more easily and we do have some nearby neighbors and roads to consider. Also in my experience it’s way harder to herd just a few goats/sheep by pushing them rather than a large flock. Less surface area to work with 😅 So I’ve been thinking about training them to follow.

I know that animals personalities can differ greatly but I'm wondering if folks have experience where after training their goats to follow, you can pretty much just walk through the forest and have your goats stick pretty close to you while grazing. Or is that too much to ask of your animal friends.

Thanks so much for reading!

Ed, thanks for the thoughtful response and for sharing your experience and take on things. Very appreciated. Also, I checked out the thread link you included and followed it to this one: plant poisonous plants (basically an extended version of the thread that you shared). And great tip on keeping goats from girdling trees!!

I think viable is in the eye of the beholder. Put differently, it's all in the maple sap that floats your pancake boat!

Having a local sugar is pretty amazing (one that isn't fruit-based.. I make apple syrup too). We certainly have enough wood around here to cook it down. But I think what I'm most excited to tell folks about is that you don't need to cook it at all! You can drink as is, Brew your tea, carbonate, squeeze in some "citrus" (eg sumac), whatever. If you like it a little sweeter, reduce it a touch first. Make a bag of maple ice cubes for special drinks or even pressure can it (yes takes extra energy).

But also yes, people are successfully profiting off of it: Neil

I've made some very delicious big leaf maple syrup since my original post and don't feel like the ratio is a big deal for me personally. I'm used to tapping red and norway maple which are both around 60 to 1 and birch which is even less. The thing that I'm still having a hard time with is timing. When it flows here seems to be so random, and by the time conditions are pretty good, your holes have begun to heal and you don't get flow! So you have to continually tap through the season and really catch they flows at the right time. Especially because the flow may only last a few days (in my area at least). I'm into the challenge though. Being tapped into my environment and such ;)

Any Cascadian sheep/goatherds here?

We're in the process of getting some milking goats and we would really like to herd them in surrounding forests (using traditional herding methods as well as the use of temporary mobile fencing).

My big question is related to toxic plants that we find in our forests. It seems that everywhere I look there's something toxic for goats to eat. Carpets of pacific bleeding heart, huge patches of osoberry and bracken fern, elder everywhere, and buttercup anywhere there's anything resembling a meadow. Sometimes I look around and ask myself, "what can they eat??"

Of course there's lots of good forage in the forest and half of the job of herding is bringing your flock to the good stuff. But it does seem pretty unavoidable that sheep and goats here will be consistently exposed to toxic plants. Everyone says as long as they have good stuff available to them, your goats will mostly avoid the toxic plants. But do the people saying this have the tantalizing array of toxic plants that we do here in the PNW??

Am I supposed to just be the parent who does their best to provide good options to their kids and hope they make good choices? Anyone have relevant experience to share?

Thanks!