Shepherd Dan Vandenberg watches over a herd of goats as they work at Confluence Park in Calgary on Tuesday.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Jeannette Hall is a modern-day shepherd, environmentalist and capitalist. She wears jeans with a shiny cowboy belt buckle as a flock of her goats chomps on grass, weeds and trees in one of Calgary's parks. The city is trying to control invasive weed species, paying about $25,000 for 106 goats to graze here for two or three weeks.
The animals do not have a discriminating diet and Calgary hopes they can manage its Canada thistle problem. The goats, along with herd dogs and herders on horseback, are now meandering through 35 hectares in the city's West Nose Creek Park. Calgary is testing whether Ms. Hall's company, Baah'd Plant Management & Reclamation, can replace (or complement) its herbicide program.
Chemicals, she says, can affect soil's acidity or alkalinity, which can mess with vegetation.
"That creates a hostile environment for native plants. Often different weeds will come back once you've applied a chemical," Ms. Hall told reporters Tuesday as folks on horses tried to keep the goats in a pack behind her. "We're targeting the weeds and allowing natural plants to come in."
Ms. Hall points to other projects as proof of the goats' potential, including Conrad Lindblom's Rocky Ridge Vegetation Control effort in a city in British Columbia.
"He's famous for the Kamloops site," she said.
Kamloops, however, quietly let its goat contract expire last month. Goats, while popular with the public, had a spotty record.
"The goats were fantastic in certain situations," Kirsten Wourms, Kamloops' crew leader of natural resources, said in an interview this week. The animals could control Canada thistle at Kamloops' Tournament Capital Ranch, but that was because they spent the vast majority of their four-year tenure chewing through an area covering five hectares. The ranch was their home base.
But when the flock was dispatched to work a city park for a week or two, the weeds came back. Short assignments were ineffective and expensive. "It was cost-prohibitive," Ms. Wourms said.
Ms. Wourms declined to detail how much the city paid when the goats were deployed off the ranch, but the fees were not out of line with what Calgary is paying for its pilot project. (Dalmatian toadflax was Kamloops' key concern in the targeted park).
Calgary's trial flock is composed of a number of breeds, including Angora, kiko, Spanish, Lamancha, savanna and boer. One of the flock's constituents is brown with a black mohawk down its spine. Some are all one colour, while others sport spots or a combo of colours such as brown ears on a black head. Some have horns the length of an adult's hand, arcing from the top of their heads toward their backs. Their ears are floppy. They bleat. They are about knee height, with the smaller ones getting lost in the grass. Their droppings look like deer scat.
The flock lacks billy goats, leaving all the work here to nannies (female goats that have reproduced), doelings (young females that have not reproduced) and wethers (castrated males). They are experienced at "bush control."
"This herd has been doing this for six years," Ms. Hall said. "You don't want to take just any goat."
The flock and its caretakers will live in the park until the end of the program, and the on-leash space will remain open to the public.
Calgary is paying roughly $714 a hectare (or $236 a goat) for the herd to graze in West Nose Creek Park. (Baah'd Plant Management & Reclamation also accepts donations on its website). By way of comparison, the city spends about $1,500 a hectare for a round of spraying noxious weeds. That translates to about $52,500 to cover the area the goats are grazing.
"Effective weed control tends to be expensive. Any way we can do it more effectively, hopefully more cheaply, and ideally with less reliance on chemical herbicides, that's a good thing," Chris Manderson, the urban conversation lead for Calgary Parks, said while the ungulates bleated away behind him. "We think [the goats] will be more economical."
The city will grade the goats' effectiveness in a few weeks. "If I can trade off goat grazing to reduce the amount of times we have to go in and spray, I'm pretty happy about that," Mr. Manderson said.
Carrie Tait