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  • From: Louis Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] goats
  • Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:35:56 -0600

Amy,
Having grown up in east-central AL, I'm familiar with The Vine That Ate The South.  Kudzu is great high-protein forage for ruminant animals - and the young leaves are tasty if you batter 'em and fry 'em.
It's great, so long as there are no trees for it to climb into or fences to conquer and drag to the ground.
Doesn't take long for a hungry herd of cows to completely defoliate a field - but it re-leafs/regrows pretty quickly once you pull them off to another field.
Back in the day, before the advent of effective herbicides, constant overgrazing was the only effective means of eradicating it - but those big fibrous roots went deep, and held quite a bit of reserve capacity - and if the vines ever got above grazing/browsing height into the trees...it was a lost cause.

I've got photos of my dad, when he was in his late teens/early 20s, along with an older farm worker, mowing a kudzu field for hay with a horse-drawn mowing machine; would have been prior to 1950...

Lucky

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 4:52 PM, Amelia Hayner <abhayner@gmail.com> wrote:
I have a very old USDA book, where some man was just extolling the virtues of kudzu as a renewable hay crop. like clover.
He did make a small comment about how the edges of the field needed to be regularly plowed to keep it in control.
It was either late 1800s or very early 1900s.
Amy

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Louis Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu> wrote:
Cows get out if you leave the gate open.
Sheep get out if they need something.
Goats get out because they want to see what the world looks like from the hood of your car.

Saw a presentation on using goats to control(eradicate?) kudzu, a couple of weeks back - had photos of goats 25 ft above ground, in trees, eating kudzu leaves.  Granted, they got there by climbing up limbs/treetops that had been pulled down by the kudzu vines &/or broken out by ice storms. 
9 goats/acre did a pretty good job of reining the kudzu in(at least what they could reach), but I suspect it'll take multiple years of continued defoliation to eradicate it from a premise.

Goats were never intended to live and GRAZE in the hot, humid Southeastern US;  browsing rough, brushy overgrown properties is what they were designed to do

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Amelia Hayner <abhayner@gmail.com> wrote:


On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 1:31 PM, Naomi Counides <naomi@oznayim.us> wrote:
Goats are not capable of shinnying up a tree truck but I can see where they
could manage to stand in the low branches of a fruit tree.
-----I once had a goat go up a ladder, and run around on the tin roof of a shed. I have photos somewhere... I am just glad goats don't have thumbs, or are carnivorous-- because then they would rule the world.
( they've got it pretty much like they want it, here, anyway)
Amy

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