Rent a Goat: Turning Goatscaping Into a Thriving Business

Episode 142
For the Love of Goats

Delve into the business of goat landscaping, also known as targeted grazing, goatscaping, and even rent-a-goat. In this business, your herd is hired by a landowner to clear off an overgrown plot of land. This has the potential to create a triple win as the goats could get some great browse, the landowner is able to clear land in a holistic way, and you can pocket some extra cash.   

Today, Margaret Chamas, the affiliate network support person for Goats on the Go, is joining us to cover the ins and outs of this intriguing and potentially lucrative market. She discusses the number of goats you need to get started, startup costs, overhead costs that may surprise you, and what you can expect to charge for your services.

She also covers potential pitfalls such as seeing your herd’s body condition slip when the available browse is lower in quality, dealing with escaping goats, and the most difficult part of the job.

Transcript – Rent a Goat

Introduction 00:02
For the love of goats. We are talking about everything goat. Whether you’re a goat owner, a breeder, or just a fan of these wonderful creatures, we’ve got you covered. And now, here’s Deborah Niemann.

Deborah 00:17
Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s episode. Today we are actually revisiting a topic that we did early on in the podcast, and that is talking about goat landscaping. Everybody loves the idea of letting somebody else feed their goats and getting paid for it, and that’s not exactly what it is. So we are joined today by Margaret Chamas, who is the affiliate network support person for Goats on the Go. Welcome to the show today, Margaret.

Margaret 00:47
Thanks for having me on, Deborah.

Deborah 00:49
So originally, we did have the owner and founder of Goats on the Go on the show about three years ago, and he talked about what was being done then. And it was really fun to meet you at the ADGA conference a couple weeks ago, and I attended your session on targeted grazing, which is also like goat landscaping. Or, as I said, some people think of it as having somebody pay you to feed your goats for you. So can you tell us–explain to our listeners what exactly are we going to talk about today?

Margaret 01:21
Yeah, so first, and the first slide of all these presentations I do is generally a set of definitions. So when we’re talking about what you might colloquially call goatscaping, or goat grazing, or rent-a-goat, or in the sheep world they’ll call it lambscaping, which I think sounds even better, but there’s a bunch of cutesy and catchy names for it. And I love that. But the more technical term is targeted grazing, or sometimes prescribed grazing. And so that is using the animals as a tool for land management, or landscape management. And that matters, because the primary goal is managing the land more so than feeding the livestock, and that’s a mindset shift that oftentimes the farmer or the grazer in question has to kind of get over, and then just as often, some of our customers have to get over that as well.

Deborah 02:14
Okay, so let’s go ahead and address that one big elephant in the room first. So what is it? It’s not exactly having someone pay you to feed your goats for you, right?

Margaret 02:25
Right, right. So there are multiple ways that targeted grazing appears on the landscape. And there are certainly occasions where the goat owner is like literally dropping a bunch of animals off on a, say, a vacant or derelict pasture, and they’re getting cheap or free feed, essentially in exchange for the landowner recognizing that, hey, while those goats are and/or sheep or whatever are out there, they’re going to be eating all these invasives. So sometimes it is truly just like a kind of an exchange. The landowner realizes that their pasture or their field that has been neglected is going to be better after the goats go through.

The livestock owner is benefiting because now they just have this extra place to put their animals, maybe for a couple of weeks or a month, let their own pastures recover. And so the money doesn’t always, you know, there’s not always an exchange of money or much expectations. But when we’re really deploying targeted grazing as a business or an enterprise, there needs to be more of an exchange of services and intention and then often money. So when I’m taking my goats out to a project, that landowner has specific goals. It might be eliminating a certain type of vegetation. It might be gaining access to land that they don’t have.

They are expecting a certain level of cleanup done by these goats, and I have to deliver that. And that takes a lot more management than, say, the guy next door to me who says, oh, yeah, sure, you can use my pastures, you know, just make sure that the goats are kind of cleaning up the brushy spots. So again, that expectations and that level of all right, how much effort and management does the grazer put in? As that level of effort has to go up, then the grazer needs to be getting a lot more back out of that in terms of value. And there’s actually not often as much feed value as we would like to think. It’s not a great selling point, because at this point you’ve already lost the potential customer.

But there have been times I’ve broken down the costs. I’ve said to someone, “Okay, I’ve got my herd of, you know, 20 goats who I might bring to your property. These 20 goats would take about three weeks to eat through a single round bale of hay. That costs me maybe 75 bucks to buy and then 15 minutes to put out with my tractor. All right, so I’ve spent, you know, 10 bucks in time. Let’s even say 25 bucks in time, plus 75 bucks for the hay. That’s $100 it cost me to feed these animals for three weeks. On a grazing site, in my average vegetation, those 20 goats would go through two acres maybe in those three weeks.

And that’s going to be me setting up fence, probably four times at least, plus driving the goats out there with a truck and trailer, and picking them up afterwards with a truck and trailer, at $1.50 a mile each way, and then driving every day to go check the goats at 67 cents a mile, and paying myself at least a respectable wage of, let’s even say, 15 bucks.” You start to add the numbers up, and it’s a lot cheaper to feed that hay bale. So once you start crunching the numbers, you realize, okay, if I’m going to take this time and effort to manage this properly, like these landowners are expecting, it’s a service I got to be paid for that.

Because there’s also the expectation of, well, if the vegetation isn’t primo quality, my goats might lose a little bit of condition. I’m not going to let them starve. I won’t let them suffer. I’m not going to make them eat anything toxic. But we accept a certain level of condition slip on certain types of projects, and that’s not something I might accept if I’m managing them with the goats’, you know, best performance in mind. So it’s a lot more complicated than the initial discussion of take your goats, put them on someone else’s property, and make profit.

Deborah 06:08
I know. That was one of the things that surprised me during your talk, was when you said that sometimes they actually might lose condition a little bit on some projects. So when you see that happening, then does that mean that you wind up having to give them some supplemental feed while they’re there?

Margaret 06:21
It sometimes does, and we’re finding, as our network grows, geographically especially, we’re starting to see cases of vegetation in different parts of the country, and how, at certain times of year, we find some people, they have to supplement certain types of minerals to get the goats to eat the vegetation because it’s deficient in something, or you might have to bring a protein block, because whatever they’re grazing on, they’re willing to graze it, but they need some extra protein to keep everything balanced.

So there are times when that supplemental feed is necessary, either from a goat happiness point of view and willingness to consume, or sometimes just to prevent that slip. Knock on wood, by and large–and again, I’m near Kansas City, Missouri–so it is warm, it is wet, and so someone said the other day, “You spit on the ground and something grows.” That’s very much the case. I generally have an abundance of vegetation in some form of vegetative status, so it’s high quality, easily digestible.

So I usually, I’m fortunate I don’t usually have to worry about that. Or if I have one project where they slip a little bit, I know the next one’s probably going to be a bit better. Or I’ll, you know, cherry pick my order of projects to make sure they’re not stuck on, oh, tall rank, you know, prairie that we’re trying to nibble the weeds out of. Like we’ll switch them to something a bit more nutritious for the next job. But, yeah, in certain locations, certain regions, people are watching the diets a little bit more closely and supplementing.

Deborah 07:45
Okay. So if somebody’s thinking about doing this, how many goats do they have to have? And be sure to give us numbers for standard-sized goats, as well as like Nigerian dwarfs.

Margaret 07:54
Sure. There are, you know, if you look on a national basis, and you just look at goat grazing companies out there, there’s almost everything. There’s five goats, there’s 10 goats, there’s 50 goats, and there’s 500 goats. Most of my experience comes from within the Goats on the Go network, obviously. And so what we have found, for our affiliates and the type of projects we most often do, we’re looking at a couple dozen goats. Three to five dozen is most common in a grazing unit, but we found that 20ish is about as few standard-size goats as you want to have, just in terms of eating fast enough to cash flow effectively.

Again, every day you have to drive out and check the goats. That’s an expense. So the faster they eat through an area, the fewer trips you have to make, the less you know money you’re taking out of that acreage charge you’re getting paid for. When you start looking at smaller breeds of goats, we find most of our success with standard-sized goats. They have the reach, you know, they have that six foot clearance where they’re going to eat up so that people can walk unobstructed through the area once the goats have left.

That said, plenty of us, we may start out with Nigerians or miniature goats, you know, and TexMasters are becoming kind of popular as people add in meat genetics to have an extra sale opportunity. You obviously need to increase your stocking rate if you have mostly or some miniature goats. But I would say, don’t do all miniature breeds, not all small size animals, because they’re just, they’re not going to get the visual and consumption effect that people are expecting from this.

Deborah 09:29
Okay. And then once people have the goats, what else do they need to be able to start a business like this?

Margaret 09:36
A number of our affiliates come into this already having some goats and having a truck and a trailer, and because those are going to be like your biggest expenses of doing this–the truck, the way to move the animals around, and the animals themselves. Beyond that, we are die hard fans of Premier 1 electric netting, and a solar charger, and then some water tubs. So the last time I ran numbers on my recommended starter kit, you know, seven to 10 rolls of fence and tanks and fence chargers, spare batteries, ground rods, all that, it was about $2,500 for the equipment that you would need specifically for this job. And again, that’s excluding a truck, a trailer, and goats themselves.

Deborah 10:16
All right. And then, can you tell us a little bit about what you do in Goats on the Go? Because this sounds, like, so easy. Like, oh, anybody could do this. But I’m sure it’s a lot more complicated than it sounds.

Margaret 10:29
It is, it is, and again, the concept is simple. The execution is where it gets a little bit tricky. I mean, that does make my job tricky, right? So I’m network support. I also do recruitment calls, and it’s less me, like, salesman-y trying–it’s like a weird job interview where we’re both very much interviewing each other, the prospective affiliate or the interested goat person. They’re trying to ask me, is this a good fit for them? And I’m trying to both convince them that it might be a good fit for them if it seems like it will, but also trying to be very realistic about what this takes. It is a very physical job.

You are, you are going through the brush, over the brush, you know, over the hills, through the woods, often on foot, and it’s often hot, and there’s ticks and there’s mosquitoes and there’s pricker bushes. Like all the reason that goats are attractive for the landowner are the same reason it’s kind of rough for us, because we’ve got to deal with the steep slopes and the prickers and the, you know, whatever else. So I am in this weird position of both simultaneously, like, trying to sell this and get people to join. But I don’t, I want it– I very much–and Aaron Steele, the founder, is the same way–we really only want people to sign on and join who we think are going to succeed.

We would be much happier with 50 affiliates who had tremendous amounts of success and stayed and kept working and kept doing it versus having 200 who only made it for a year or two. We really try and prepare people. Part of that preparation also, once folks are in the affiliate network, they get training. And again, none of this is rocket science in the sense that: you put the goats somewhere they eat the thing, when they’re done eating the thing you move them somewhere else.

But we’ve done this long enough that we’ve got a pretty good game plan of about this many goats take about this long to graze about this much area. Here’s the equipment we found that works and/or doesn’t work. Here’s where a lot of us are charging price-wise. You know, you do you. You pick what price level you’re comfortable with. You take into account your local economics and demand level. But we’ve got enough of a game plan that we’re pretty confident because we’ve seen it successful. I mean, we’ve seen it work. We’re at 70 affiliates now, so we feel pretty good that we can get you going well enough that you can cash flow.

You can learn all the nuances to your particular area: your vegetation, your customer type, while still cash flowing. And then, because of how our rules work, there’s very few strict rules of Goats on the Go. It’s not, we’re not dictating prices, we’re not taking percentages of profits. So like we can get you going, but then once you figure out whatever you like doing or whatever works best in your area, you can choose to never do a project that’s more than five acres, or only do projects that are an acre or less, because you only want to do, you only want to have 20 goats. So you, you know, you’re just recognizing you’ve got to cherry pick those small projects. We’re great with that. We’re happy with that.

Deborah 13:31
So what is the difference between your affiliateship and a franchise?

Margaret 13:36
Yeah, there. There is some sort of a legal difference, and I don’t know all of what it is. But as an affiliateship, here’s how we function, I guess. All our affiliates use the Goats on the Go name, and so if you go on our site, you’ll see Goats on the Go Ames, Goats on the Go West Des Moines, Kansas City North, Provo Utah. Like everyone’s got a little territory moniker, but we all share that Goats on the Go part of the name, because we’re all trying to push the web traffic and push the interest back to GoatsontheGo.com which is how most of our customers find us and get in contact with the affiliates.

So we have that shared branding and kind of shared marketability. We’re unified by the basic training we all kind of abide by. But again, the nuance can vary from affiliate to affiliate. So while we do as Goats on the Go Official, we do require Premier 1 brand electric netting. Actually, that is one of our hard requirements–that brand. We don’t dictate what you’re charging. So what I tell people is, this is not a Subway where you have to offer the $5 foot long. People can choose whatever price range they’re comfortable with. If you decide that you want to do a free demo project for your local church, because it’s your church, and you really feel strongly about helping them out, and you also recognize it’s going to be press, go ahead. We’re not going to say, “No, you can’t do that.”

If you decide that you want to do reduced fees for veterans, we’ve had some people do that, you know. They feel that service members should get a discount, and so they’re free to do that. So we don’t set rules on that side of it. Our three rules are: you have to attend training, you have to use the Premier 1 brand netting, and you have to have commercial liability insurance on your business. And that’s really it. Those are the hard rules.

Deborah 15:23
Okay. And then I know, when you think of franchises, of course, also you’re thinking like six figures or more to get involved. What does it take to get involved with Goats on the Go?

Margaret 15:34
There’s an annual fee, which is currently $2,400, and then at the startup there’s a $500 fee to kind of get in–get you on the website, get you to that first training, and call on, kind of all the initial onboarding stuff. And to put that in perspective, because a lot of people, you know, I’m not going to pretend it’s not a chunk of change. It is a chunk of change. You’re right. It’s not much compared to a franchise, but it is. It is a big check to write, especially before you’ve done the training or gotten any animals out and made profit. To put it in perspective, though, most of us, our goats are out and grazing at least an acre a week, or an acre every 10 days, just in terms of whatever balance of our local vegetation and our number of goats, that’s where a lot of us are sitting at–an acre a week or so.

Most of us are charging well north of $1,000 an acre. Actually, I think everyone is charging well north of $1,000 an acre. But exactly where the midpoint is, or what the average number is, I can’t say at this point, because everyone all over. I mean, our folks in Portland are going to be doing much different than, you know, the folks in central Iowa. So there’s a lot of regional variability, but like there’s the math for you. If you can graze an acre a week and you’re charging at least $1,000 an acre, that’s your cash flow. That’s your gross income, kind of minimum.

And the next question most people usually ask is, well, how many weeks are you doing this? And that’s going to depend on your growing season. But most affiliates, by the time they’ve been doing this two years are booked, like from season start to season end. So for me, season start is about May 1st most years and ends sometime in October, whenever it starts to get cold and rainy. So I’ve got, you know, five to six months. And again, my first year was slow. My second year, I had two herds fully booked from May 1 through, actually, they were grazing into November. That was a very long season.

Deborah 17:25
I just want to call out something that may have just slipped right past people. And you said you’re grazing two herds.

Margaret 17:32
At one point, I had five. I don’t recommend that. But at one point I had five herds. Yeah, I don’t recommend that. I don’t.

Deborah 17:38
You must have been driving non-stop, like from herd to herd.

Margaret 17:42

Yeah, I was putting close to 5000 miles a month on my car. Yeah. So there’s another one. You know, it’s good to have the truck. You need the truck to go haul the things and the goats, but it’s nice to have a slightly more efficient car that you can still throw, like, three rolls of fence in, so you can do that for the daily checks. Yeah, I actually did an entire webinar on what’s a day in the life of a goat grazer like?

And so I broke down the timelines and the time frames, including, like, what happens if you have multiple herds? No, after doing that, I decided that my limit is really two herds, and I could do a third one if it was very close to home. I’ve got an HOA three miles down the road from me. I don’t mind having a herd piddling around there, and other herds out somewhere else. But more than three and more herds was not sustainable on a personal or marriage level, frankly.

Deborah 18:35
Yeah, that sounds like you must have just been running non-stop.

Margaret 18:38
Mostly, and then God forbid those moments when you got the call that the goats had gotten out somewhere, and you’re, you know, an hour and a half away in the other direction.

Deborah 18:45
Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Okay, wow.

Margaret 18:48
There’s one that people may not think about. The reality is when, not if. The goats will get out. It will happen. If you’ve trained them properly and managed this well, they’re not going to get out because they’re malicious, they’re going to get out because a tree branch fell on the fence, or, you know, something like a deer went through. Which is part of why we encourage people to get out and check them every single day, even though a lot of times it means you drive, you get there, you walk around the fence, everyone’s fine, they have stuff to eat, you leave 10 minutes later. But we emphasize that daily check because that’s when you’re going to catch the overhanging tree branch that’s looking a bit sketchy, or, you know, the area that the deer knocked down and the goats just haven’t noticed it yet. Things like that.

Deborah 19:30
Yeah, that is a really good point. I love the idea of a day in the life of a goat landscaping person. That sounds like a really cool thing. Maybe we’ll have to talk about that someday.

Margaret 19:43
I could do a rehash of that. Or certainly, you know, at least for the episode Show Notes, if you want, I can share the link to that.

Deborah 19:49
Yeah. So what is one of the biggest things that people don’t think about before starting this? One of the things that surprises people the most when they first get started?

Margaret 19:58
I tell people, because this is what I found, the single hardest thing about this job, which is not what I would have guessed. The single hardest part about this job is the goats are on the project. They’re there. They’re grazing. Everything’s going fine. And you go to do your daily check, and you look and you say, Huh, do they need to move now? Or do they need to move tonight? Or can I get by till tomorrow morning before they get so hungry that they jump the fence? Because the nuance in this is that we are in a very tenuous relationship with these animals.

Part of the beauty, or part of the strategy, is that we’re mob stocking these goats to a certain extent. You want them condensed enough that they’re competing for vegetation. They’re eating what’s right in front of them instead of spending the afternoon, you know, meandering the whole area they’re in to try and find the best stuff. They’re just going to eat what’s in front of them. The flip side of that is, if you’re not ready to move them, when they’re ready for you to move them, they might start looking across the other side of the fence. So if you can walk that line where they eat whatever’s in front of them happily and trust that before too long, you’re gonna come move them somewhere else, they are generally very happy to stay in the boundaries you’ve set up.

But if you misjudge, and you think that you can get by till tomorrow morning but really you couldn’t, once the goats have learned, they feel betrayed. You know, they’re starving, starving, starving. They have to go search for food however they can. And they hop that fence the first time, and then it usually takes a while to retrain them and recondition them to know that, you know, I will take care of you. You know Mom will come bring you food. So the ability to look at an area and say, I can wait till tomorrow, I’ve got a day left on this versus I better come back tonight and move them, like, that’s one of the trickiest ones. That’s one of the hardest things to learn, the hardest things to train. And one of the things that I think people don’t consider.

This is a very strange business as well, because it is simultaneously super flexible and super inflexible. You know, if I know I’m just checking my goats today, I can do it first thing in the morning. I can do it in the afternoon. You know, it can–it’s a nice thing to add on top of other, especially other self-employed or kind of farm-based enterprises, because you can scooch the schedule around a fair bit. What does get tricky, though, is that when those goats need to move, you got to be there. You know, if the goats got to be transported today, unless you’re going to bring them a bunch of bales of hay, you might need to transport them today. And so everything else needs to be able to move out of your way.

On the other hand, if you, once you get good at it, you can say, You know what, I only want to do fence building on weekends. I don’t want to do any during the week because maybe I do have a town job or a 9-5. And so you do your fence building on the weekends, and you get really strategic about how you’re going to graze through an area. You accept that you might have to bring them supplemental feed, but then you can flex it around your existing lifestyle. So it is weird. Like I said, it’s weirdly flexible and inflexible.  

Deborah 23:05
Yeah, that is a really great point. I could totally see where somebody who’s new would think that it’s like, well, I visit them once a day and I either move them or not. Like, it actually never even crossed my mind that you might have to go to a site twice a day.

Margaret 23:19
It’s rare, but yeah, and until you’ve–that’s just one that, again, we–that’s one of the things that is harder for us to train. And we try and we try and we try, but it’s tricky.

Deborah 23:30
Yeah, because you’ve got two things here. One is, you got to have your goats fed. And the other thing is, you’ve got a customer who does not want you to leave an area before it’s done.

Margaret 23:44
Yep. Dealing with the customers is usually very positive, and this is something like, I am not a salesman. I don’t like doing that sort of stuff. I don’t like being pushy. And the beauty of this is that it does kind of sell itself. It’s a very visual product, and people love having the goats there. So what is nice is that most landowners are very happy if you explain, hey, if I let them stay any longer, they’re going to get cranky, or they might risk eating something that they shouldn’t be eating, because, you know, it might be toxic. Most landowners are very understanding. But there is a certain level of, you do need to meet expectations in terms of that vegetation cleanup and removal and so there, there are moments when it means okay, I do need to come back in six hours and do check them again.

Deborah 24:27
Yeah. Is there anything else that people need to think about before contacting you and getting started?

Margaret 24:35
People can contact me at any point in the game. I talk to people who have goat operations. They just need a plan, and they’re gonna start grazing. I talk to people who have, you know, just put a down payment on a new acreage, and this is something they’re hoping for. And so really, we’re, you know, we do an intro call, but they’re probably not actually going to be finalizing anything until a few years out. So people are always welcome to contact me at any time. This is because this industry is still relatively new in terms of it being, like, accepted, right?

The targeted grazing has been going on for decades and decades. It’s not new in and of itself, but acceptance of it is new in a lot of places, and it being an actual industry, as opposed to, like, a thing that kind of happened on the sides or in certain, like, fire areas, that’s still new enough that there’s not a normal. No one knows what to expect cost-wise, or animal-wise, or equipment- wise. So I fully expect, and I’m happy to answer questions from everyone who’s like, I just heard about this, and I’m curious, to people who’ve watched all the webinars, listened to all the podcasts and and have very targeted questions.

Deborah 25:49
Okay. Are there any parts of the country where this is especially lucrative or not a good idea?

Margaret 25:55
Excellent question. Again, and this is also going to be very centric, based on what we as Goats on the Go have experienced and the type of grazing operations we work with. Most of our folks, again, running a couple dozen goats in a given grazing group. Most of our folks who come in, who have, like, existing goat operations, they might be up to 300 or 400 head of goats in the operation, not necessarily in the grazing herd. And most of the jobs we do tend to be between one and 10 acres in size. It’s not that we won’t do more or less, but this is just to distinguish or to separate kind of what I’m talking about in averages compared to, say, the big companies that are doing hundreds of goats and multiple Border Collies and guys on horseback, like grazing across entire, like, hillsides further out west for fire mitigation.

So we’re, I’m talking a slightly smaller scale than that. Where we have our greatest success is kind of like the peri-urban fringe around a city center. So while we’ll do inner city parks, if the city’s up for it, and I’ve done tiny little postage stamp backyards in downtown Kansas City. A lot of our jobs tend to be the people who have a couple acres, but they might still be commuting back to the city to do their actual work, which makes them enough figures to afford that house on three acres. So it’s the Venn diagram of people with money, people with land, and then people who often have a little bit more of an environmental bent.

You know, they don’t want to spray the area with herbicides. They don’t want the unsightly and loud and stinky machinery clearing through it. They want to manage it a bit more holistically. Those are our private customers. Our public customers are going to be businesses, parks, campuses, land trusts, who kind of have that, oftentimes that eco motive behind them, and also either public or, you know, private foundation dollars to go with it. So that describes a lot of our most successful areas. It’s urban fringe.

And so we have more struggles once you move out into like real ruraldom. Fellow farmers are not, generally, our customers, at least not in the–at least not in the same service level, right? Like so what we talked about at the beginning, where there’s that like continuum of like grazing goats in exchange for general improvement of a land base. That’ll happen in the more rural areas. You know, the cattle guy nextdoor sees what the goats are doing and says, Hey, would you mind just bringing them through to just mow down some of the extra multi-flora rows? And again, maybe they pay you a little bit. Maybe they’re going to pay you by just watching the goats for you for a month while you go on vacation. But not always as much money taking place.

So that’s where it’s hard to run this as a business doing the 1000 plus dollars an acre number. That’s more of your city center. I will say we are desperately in need of affiliates in the Chicago area. You know, Greater Chicago area, Chicago area, Detroit area, the Northwest, Pacific Northwest, and then I’ve been getting more New York and Pennsylvania inquiries lately. So if someone goes onto the Goats on the Go website, there’s a map showing all our affiliates, and their territories are shaded in. Customers use that to contact their local affiliate.

But if they’re not in an area with an affiliate, they can submit their info to a separate form that feeds into a database that new affiliates get access to. All those submissions come through me, so I do kind of see, like, where we’re getting hits a lot of times. And again, Chicago, greater Detroit, just, you know, kind of the middle New England states, oh, and almost anywhere in California. California is desperate for more goat people, especially the ones who aren’t doing the 20 acres at a time with 500 goats.

Margaret 29:39
Awesome. So I just thought of a fun question, because I just interviewed someone about llamas as livestock guardians. Does anybody take a llama out there with their goats?

Margaret 29:50
We’ve had people do llamas. Yep. I’ve brought my donkey out on a couple of jobs, and I know a few people who do guard donkeys. Dogs–and this is a question I often get–so what about predators? What about the necessity of guard animals? This is another one where it will vary by region. Normally, knock on wood, normally, we don’t need guardian animals, because normally, again, we’re in that peri-urban space. There’s enough people that you’re not you’re not rife with coyote or bobcat action or anything like that. And we’re moving the animals fairly often, and they’re surrounded by an electric net.

So generally we’re not entering their periphery, or we’re not there long enough for them to start to think, Huh, maybe that’s a good meal. This, actually 2023 was the first year that any affiliates had lost animals to natural predators. So it was a couple of mountain lion attacks further out west than me. And so I know our Colorado affiliates, guardian dogs are considered livestock, so they’re allowed to have guardian dogs in with their goats, even when they’re on someone else’s property.

In most states, I don’t think that flies, especially not if you tell your insurance company about it. They’re gonna hear guard dog and then oh yeah. And then I’m taking my goats, you know, into the city next door, or the rural area. It’s, frankly, a recipe for disaster, because most guardian dogs are going to think of everything as their territory, instead of just like the little quarter acre they might be in at one time.

So it’s not generally necessary and also not generally recommended. But we’ve had some jobs that are a little bit more remote or less human population, and then putting at least a dog or a donkey or a llama, or, on occasion, dogs, if you know your state or local regulations allow. Yep, that’s definitely been done. Honestly, though, my number one predator is the stray dogs and dumb or drunk people. And the guard dog isn’t necessarily going to help with them. Sadly, neither will signage. And I put a lot of signage up too.

Deborah 31:51
Yeah, I could see that. Well, is there anything else that people need to know before we sign off today?

Margaret 31:55
GoatsontheGo.com is the place to go to, and my email address is support at goatsonthego.com and literally, my job is–I have the coolest job, because I get to play with goats a lot and work with goats a lot, and then I get to talk to other goat people, or prospective goat people. So I truly love having those conversations and encourage people to reach out, even if they’re really not sure. Even if they’re at the very earliest stages of, oh, maybe someday, please talk to me. We’ll, like, we’ll chat.

Deborah 32:24
Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Margaret 32:25
Thanks for having me on.

Deborah 32:26
And that’s it for today’s show. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to hit the “subscribe” button so that you don’t miss any episodes. To see show notes, you can always visit ForTheLoveOfGoats.com and you can follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/LoveGoatsPodcast. See you again next time. Bye for now!