Putting a herd of goats on a hillside in Southern California is easier said than done.
That’s what the Malibu City Council learned last week from Los Angeles County Assistant Fire Chief Andrew Smith, who has helped trot out hoofed herbivores around the 69 Bravo Helistop in Topanga and other parts of the Santa Monica Mountains. He said the time to act is now if the city wants to bring in goats by late spring, the ideal time for animals to munch through the maximum amount of spring vegetation before it dries up.
A month before the Palisades Fire burned through 23,700 acres in the coastal mountain range, Malibu’s fire season was already underway. The 45,000-acre coastal city lost several dozen homes and commercial buildings to the Franklin Fire in December. Meanwhile, Malibu is still recovering from the massive 2018 Woolsey Fire.
Now, goats have joined the conversation.
“We’re in goat mode right now,” Smith told the councilmembers. “These are proven land management practices — we just have to make it palatable for some.”
In Malibu’s case, that may mean getting the state Mountain Recreation and Conservation Authority on board the goat train, since it controls nearly all the fire-prone areas in the Santa Monica range abutting the coastal city west of Los Angeles.
And doing so could make a real difference since goats are an important fuel bed mitigation tool in wild land management in California, and — along with prescribed burns — are in fact favored among firefighters, according to Smith. Mechanical removal, by comparison, is the most tedious and costly method of pruning vegetation.
But bringing goats onto public land typically requires environmental review through the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. In Malibu’s case, the city would also need a coastal development permit from the California Coastal Commission, something that brought audible groans during last week’s council meeting.
“You’ve got to go through nine miles of barbed wire and broken glass to get approval,” said councilmember Steve Uhring. “I would think that there may be more acceptance to doing some of this stuff now… there’s an appetite to do something different.”
The regulatory hurdles haven’t stopped private owners and homeowners associations from feeding brush to goats in other places across the state.
Herders charge about $1,300 per acre on average for their services, but that varies widely according to the terrain and demand level, according to Michael Choi, who heads his family’s Southern California-based goat business, Fire Grazers.
“There are a lot of nuances, so we have to do site-by-site pricing,” Choi said. “The timing is one of the chief factors — everyone wants the goats between May and July. And there’s the geography itself. One big square is easier to fence than a jigsaw puzzle.”
Fire Grazers does much of its business in the rugged hills of Palos Verdes, where the complex terrain can sometimes drive up the cost to as much as $2,400 per acre, Choi said. His company keeps several herds on the move around the state at all times, totaling about 1,000 goats.
“They’re not a landscaping crew that trims your rose bush,” Choi cautioned. “They demolish the rose bush. But the larger the acreage, the cheaper it is.”
It’s an economy of scale, Choi said. And Malibu can’t drag its feet if it wants to get serious about buying into the goat game.
The council voted last week to refer the matter to the city’s Public Safety Commission, which will work with Smith to develop a plan to tackle the 27-mile long city and deliver its recommendations by May.
“We’ll start with the maps of Malibu,” Smith said. “We already know the targeted areas, and we’ll work with Public Safety — and if you have somebody who’s really good at CEQA, we can use them.”
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