North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Nate <nrhora@gmail.com>]

It's agreed that an effective walling off of goats would keep them
from pastures. Once this is obtainable then goats can go to other
pastures where they can graze in better fields.

On 7/11/06, Lucky Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu> wrote:
> Richard,
> Goats are, by nature and design, BROWSERS, not grazers, so they
> prefer to eat leaves, buds, twigs, bark, etc., and usually, so long
> as they are browsing, things go just fine, but once they're reduced
> to having to graze low-growing forages, here in the Southeastern US,
> parasitism problems follow closely.   Fully 95% of the dead goats I
> see on a day-in/day-out basis have succumbed to the (barberpole)
> stomach worm, Haemonchus contortus, contracted from grazing pastures,
> rather than browsing rough, overgrown ground.
> As I related to you earlier, "Goats were never intended to live and
> GRAZE in the hot, humid, Southeast".
>
> I don't know about this 'getting into the mind of the doe', and
> devising inventive, distractive strategies...
> Well, actually, I do!
> I know what's in the mind of a goat!
> If there's a tree/shrub/bush available, they're going to eat it to
> the ground and strip the bark off as high as they can reach.  It's
> what goats do - and don't believe for a minute that they can't or
> won't climb a tree, fence, or cage, either.
>
> Check out this little discourse(linked below) on clearing brush with
> goats, from a discussion thread back in '95 on the Graze-L list; it's
> an overview of a study conducted at WVU on the efficacy of clearing
> overgrown pastures using goats, sheep, or cutting and herbicide usage
> - goats reduced brush cover(MF rose, hawthorn, greenbrier) from 45%
> to 15% in one year, and by year 5, brush cover was only 2%.
> http://graze-l.witt.ac.nz/pipermail/graze-l/1995-July/001453.html
> I've meant, through the years, to try to hunt down the full
> published(if it ever was) report, but just never got around to doing so.
>
> Any fruit tree or berry bush that you value had better be fenced off.
>
> In one discussion on effective fencing for containing(or excluding)
> goats, someone intimated that the only effective control was to pour
> a 10 ft high concrete wall, drop back 20 ft, build another concrete
> wall, fill the space in between with water, and stock it with sharks
> and piranhas.  A bit of overkill, but not by much.
>
> Lucky
>
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