ST. IGNATIUS — For many people, dealing with weeds and brush is an annoying, but an important chore. But, for goats, grazing comes naturally. With the help of his herd, Will Powell is looking to change the narrative on goats and the good they can do for agriculture and the environment.
“Goats are tough and most people hate goats. Everybody has the story of ‘The goat was on the hood of my truck’ or whatever,” Powell said. “They can be a pain in the butt, but they can also be very, very useful.”
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Powell specializes in hoof care near the St. Ignatius ranch he grew up on. Three years ago, his clients stared chatting with him about their troubles with weeds. After numerous comments in one week, he got an idea.
“I’d tell them a goat would eat that stuff. ‘Get a goat and they’d clean it up,’” he said. “I thought, ‘Shoot, I've got some ground we can put some goats on…. Maybe I'll haul them to these shoeing clients and you know, do that deal, graze some weeds down and get paid for it.’”
Powell started Weed Eaters LLC. He hauls his herd from Polson to Missoula and beyond, doing weed and brush clearance and fire mitigation.
“Usually I bring the goats and the fence and the dogs,” he said. “Typically, we're in and out within a few days. The goats work pretty fast.”
He said that the goats are great because, with the right management, they only eat the unwanted parts of a yard. He does walkthroughs before bringing the goats on jobs, to make sure he can tailor the grazing to the property’s goals.
“They're a true browser, so they want to eat shrubs, trees, kind of woody material, tall vegetation,” Powell said. “Only about 30% of their diet is grass, so they'd rather not eat it. They go through, pick the weeds and we can get them out.”
Powell calls it prescribed grazing. In other parts of the country, using goats for weed control is much more common than in Montana. He believes that it provides people another way to manage their weeds.
“There's all sorts of problems with pesticides and different chemicals and things that everybody's using now, and not to say that that's wrong, not to say that it's right either. But there needs to be that other option, and I think the goats are that other option,” he said.
Powell also sees other benefits in goat grazing. They are fun to watch. They stomp fertilizer and nitrogen from their waste into the soil. They do not spread seeds when they eat weeds. Mainly, they can get more places than a traditional mower.
“It's steep, it's hills, it's rocky, you can't mow it. You can't really weed eat it. You can't really spray it. There's trees in the way. It's like ‘There's nothing really you can do.’ Well, a goat can get in there. A goat can go everywhere,” he said.
Mostly, his goats graze at private homes. Recently, the Weed Eaters have also tackled a few jobs from the City of Missoula, even bringing goats to the Pleasant View neighborhood.
“Everybody that was around really enjoyed watching them,” he said. “We had people that would watch them all day.”
Weed Eaters started with about 50 goats. Quickly, that grew to 75, then 100, then 130 with more on the way. Powell hopes more ranchers consider grazing into the game.
“I don't care if you run cow, you run yearlings, if you run sheep, if you run horses, the goats can be a very beneficial aspect to any operation because they pretty much eat everything that everything else doesn't want,” he said. “Goats are very hardy animals.”
