What happens to all those Christmas trees once the holiday is over?
When most of us take down our decorations, that once well-loved tree gets deposited at the end of the driveway awaiting pickup by the trash man. Until this year, that is.
That’s because a group in Truckee, Calif., found a way to recycle them: Goats.
Although it sounds a little strange, the Truckee Meadows Fire Prevention District has enlisted these animals to help dispose of the trees to make the district a little safer. Provided by Goat Grazers (a family-owned goat herding business), 40 goats will eat the needles off the trees, leaving only the valuable bark.
“All the trees will be taken to the Truckee Meadows fire station in Washoe Valley, which has a lot more room for all them,” Truckee Meadows Fire Prevention volunteer fireman Vince Thomas explains to the Reno-Gazette Journal. “Then, we’ll toss them over the fence and let the goats have at them.”
Christmas tree pine needs are highly flammable and, when left in landfills or used as mulch in parks or in the forests of California, there’s an increased risk of forest fires. But, with the assistance of the goats, the pine needles are disposed of and then the bark can be mulched and safely used in parks.
J.Merriam is the communications manager for Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful. Her group also runs a tree-recycling program and notes how important it is to properly dispose of trees.
“A lot of people dump it out on the desert and that’s really a problem because people think it’s a natural thing and it will decompose,” Merriman says. “But because we’re out in the desert, they don’t decompose, it will just get drier and drier and it really becomes a serious fire hazard.”
This isn’t a one-way relationship, though, as the goats receive benefits as well. First, pine needles are a natural de-wormer, which will help with the goats’ digestion. Additionally, needles are packed with vitamin C.
The program began on December 26 and continues through January 11 with multiple drop-off sites in the area.
Maybe Santa should think of trading in his reindeer for some goats?
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Tag: Goats
In Vermont, These Adorable Animals Give Some New Americans the Taste of Home
Vermont farmers who raise goats for milk have no use for the male babies their animals produce, and often ended up euthanizing them. Meanwhile, immigrants to Vermont from Africa and Southeast Asia were importing thousands of goats a year from Australia and New Zealand to use in preparing familiar dishes from their home countries. These two facts made a light bulb go off in the head of Karen Freudenberger, who volunteers with refugee communities and conservation groups.
One day when she was mentoring a Somali family, Freudenberger noticed that an older man named Mohamed seemed depressed. She asked him if he’d ever kept animals, and he immediately began telling her about his days raising goats, camels, and cows in his home country. “His eyes just lit up, and he was a different person. It hit me harder than any day since…what a hugely important piece of people’s lives is missing when they come here,” she told Kathryn Flagg of Seven Days.
Working with two immigrant goat farmers from Bhutan, Freudenberger formed the Vermont Goat Collaborative in Colchester, Vermont two years ago. She contacted goat dairy farmers, many of whom were glad to supply the project with kids. The farmers raise the baby goats until they are big enough to eat, and then immigrant families come to the farm to pick out the animals they want to buy, which is a lot more convenient than the trek to Boston many Vermont immigrants were making to find goat meat. Last year they sold 100 goats to immigrants from 15 different countries.
Several groups have come together to support the project, including the Vermont Land Trust, which supplied the farmland that was too flood-prone for crops but perfect for grazing, the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which gave the collaborative a $20,000 grant to pay for fencing and feed.
“The whole project is really designed around trying to meet this particular niche demand that this community has…in a way that meets the particular cultural and taste desires of their communities,” Freudenberger told Lisa Rathke of the Portland Press Herald. Meanwhile, it’s making the farming dreams of some new Americans come true. “I never thought, when I lived in Nepal, that I could be a farmer in America,” Chuda Dhaurali, one of the goat farmers involved in the project told Flagg.
MORE: Think You Can’t Afford to Give? These Inspirational Immigrants Will Change Your Mind.