With 7,000 Sheep and Goats, This Mother-Daughter Team Is Playing a Part in California’s Fight Against Wildfires

29 September 2021

USA – As a little girl, Bianca Soares felt happiest playing in the sheep pastures owned by her grandfather in Los Banos, California. She dreamed of being a sheep rancher just like him, and like her great grandfathers in the Basque country before, but he told her that it wasn’t possible. The industry was dying, and by the time Bianca reached adulthood, sheep ranching wouldn’t be a viable profession.

Back then, Bianca’s grandfather didn’t know how California would change over the coming decades due to climate change, population booms, and land management practices. Average temperatures would climb higher. Droughts would last year after year, leaving blankets of desiccated plants. And wildfires, an issue state residents have always contended with, would surge in frequency and intensity.

In this hotter, drier California, Bianca and her mother Andrée Soares have found a way to keep fires away from people while also continuing the family tradition: They own 7,000 sheep and goats, all ready to eat the dry vegetation that can feed fires near homes and businesses.

When my mom bought the goats I was finishing up high school and it was like oh my goodness. Suddenly it became very…

“When my mom bought the goats, I was finishing up high school and it was like, ‘oh, my goodness.’ Suddenly, it became very clear that this was an opportunity for me to be involved and I jumped on it,” Bianca Soares says. “I was so happy. It was a dream.”

“They eat it and it’s gone, recycled back into the soil,” says Andrée, who left a 29-year-long nursing career to run Star Creek Land Stewards Inc., one of a growing number of companies across the country that leverages livestock in the battle against wildfires. “You don’t have to worry about it burning on the ground or bring in tractors to haul it off.”

Sheep, which primarily eat low-lying grasses that allow fires to spread along the ground, and goats, which also feed on taller plants like shrubs that can help fires jump upwards into small trees and low-hanging branches, are naturals when it comes to fire abatement. A herd of 400 can eat around 2,200 pounds of vegetation every day, Andrée says, and they do it cheaper than human crews and without the herbicides or gas-powered machinery those crews require. Plus, four-legged foragers can go where people can’t, including rocky slopes and foothills that are tough for humans to clear.

Andrée Soares left a 29-year-long nursing career to run Star Creek Land Stewards Inc., one of a growing number of companies across the country that leverages livestock in the battle against wildfires.

That’s especially useful in areas where wild land meets human communities, says Bianca, now a fourth generation rancher and Star Creek’s project manager. The animals often work near people, nibbling zones around schools, public parks, or businesses, and they work fast. Corralled in low-voltage electric pens and supervised by human herders and dogs that protect them from predators, 400 sheep and goats can clear up to two acres daily, creating wide fire breaks that can prevent flames from moving into homes and provide firefighters with pathways to fight blazes that come too close. The goal, Bianca says, is for the animals “to be used as a tool alongside firefighters to give them a better chance of doing their job.”

Jon Keeley, a fire ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, says that targeted livestock grazing can, in certain cases, help firefighters reach homes and businesses, particularly in areas that are dominated by shrubland, but it “can only play a minor role” in the state’s war against wildfires. It can’t fix the underlying factors that are driving wildfires to grow bigger, hotter, and scarier over time.

“In the past, California, all of their dollars were spent on [fire] suppression, meaning waiting until the fire started,” Andrée Soares says. “We’ve seen a shift in the the allocation of the budget to more prevention measures, and grazing is one of the tools in the toolbox.”

Extreme wildfires, like the Camp Fire that burned more than 153,000 acres and killed more than 80 people in 2018 or the Dixie Fire that’s now been burning for months and still isn’t fully contained, usually ignite and grow in dense forests that are too woody to graze sheep and goats. Wind is also a factor. Many homes destroyed in extreme wildfires ignite because of embers carried significant distances by the wind. Grazing has “limited ability to alter this outcome,” Keeley says, but it can create space around buildings, giving firefighters a way in.

Avoiding the large-scale fires that crop up throughout the American West requires completely reversing how land managers have approached fire management over the last century, says Mark Finney, a researcher at the U.S. Forest Service who studies fire behavior. For hundreds of years, periodic lightning-induced forest fires and controlled burns by Native American tribes regularly removed dead materials, like branches and foliage, that fuel large wildfires. That changed around the early 1900s, when government land managers began trying to eliminate all fires, allowing flammable materials to pile up over time.

400 sheep and goats can clear up to two acres daily, creating wide fire breaks that can prevent flames from moving into homes and provide firefighters with pathways to fight blazes that come too close.

Sheep primarily eat low-lying grasses that allow fires to spread along the ground. That includes yellow starthistles, an invasive species.

“If the fuels were managed, as they had been up until [European] settlement, we would not be seeing these kinds of fires right now,” he says. Finney adds that global warming, which increases temperatures and lengthens droughts, also exacerbates wildfires. There are efforts to increase controlled burns, he says, but taming wildfires will require many different strategies, livestock being one.

Bianca has seen that first-hand. She’s watched the animals transform overgrown shrublands into spaces where native grasses are coming back. She’s heard about fires that were contained because her goats grazed nearby. It’s a small, but vital, piece of a much larger fire mitigation puzzle, she says, work that exceeds her childhood dreams.

Smoke from the Caldor fire, which has been burning in the Sierra Nevadas since August 14, casts a haze on the horizon.

The Star Creek crew arrives for a day of grazing in Tahoe National Forest, Truckee, California.

“People light up. I’ve hardly met a person that doesn’t get excited when the goats or sheep arrive,” Bianca Sores says. “Everybody loves to go out and spend time with the animals when they’re there.”

Steve Lewis, the livestock truck driver for Star Creek, supervises the loading of the sheep.

A herd of 400 can eat around 2,200 pounds of vegetation every day, Andrée says, and they do it cheaper than human crews and without the herbicides or gas-powered machinery those crews require.

The Soares family also runs Talbott Sheep Co., which raises wool sheep. The animals are shorn in the early spring, prior to grazing season.

The view over the Sierra Nevada mountains. Almost three million California residents live in “very high fire hazard severity zones,” according to a legislative analysis. “We can’t keep building deeper into the fire zone and have no requirements in law that are firm enough to ensure the costs of defending those new developments from fire won’t be passed on to everyone else,” Senator Henry Stern told the Washington Post. For those who already live in fire hazard zones, grazing sheep and goats can be one piece of the mitigation puzzle.

In early fall, Star Creek’s animals are taken back to the Central San Joaquin Valley for lambing season, where they give birth and rest during their “off season.”

29. September 2021/by GFMCadmin