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Livestock Project |
Goat/Hair Sheep Experiment
Our project will take a massively underutilized landscape and convert it to both a productive area, and an environmentally enhanced area.
- Currently, there is no product, food or fiber derived from our chaparral. What our project will do is to turn fire kindling (the chaparral) into a valuable product (goat meat).
- Our project will enable us to create a landscape scale management system for chaparral. Currently, there is no system for such management. The creation of one will enhance the environmental quality of our ecosystem and the natural resource base, and other similar ecosystems.
- Our project will take a massively underutilized landscape and convert it to both a productive area, and an environmentally enhanced area.
- Demonstrating the economic value of this ecosystem will allow ranches and farms to diversify into different income producing strategies, either by producing goat meat in the chaparral or expanding into a custom browsing operation ("paid-to-graze").
- At its core, our project is about enhancing and sustaining the land that supports us all. We want to be able to manage a chaparral ecosystem for the benefit of humans, both rural and urban, and their economic, social and financial needs.
- Our project is creative because there has not been much of an effort to manage this type of ecosystem. What attempts have been made usually are based on mechanical means, like ball and chaining, masticating, chemical applications, or prescribed burns. Our use of a biological tool, goats, is far removed from the traditional means of management, and one, we feel, that has much more potential to become a long term, sustainable control method.
All forty-one Western states face some variation of wild fire threat from chaparral or chaparral like lands. Our project will lay out a step-by-step approach to dealing with those threats. A producer from any of those forty-one states will be able to translate our project so that it will work for any ecosystem.
- The results from our project will be disseminated through field days (Bill Burrows' Stewardship Days), the SCRMP website (www.sunflowercrmp.com), and booklets, on-line or through the University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE). Also, the nutritional data of the forages will be made available on-line by UCCE.
- The Sunflower Coordinated Resource Management Plan (SCRMP) is a group of 65 landowners and government agencies collectively managing 40,000 acres of chaparral in northern California. Our mission statement is "to enhance 40,000 acres of chaparral land and associated areas in order to make the land more productive and safe for the social, financial and environmental needs of the temporary stewards of the land." Our land runs from 1,000 ft to 5,500ft above sea level. Most of the land is comprised of chaparral, but does include oak woodland savannah areas and timber areas.
Since 2002, the SCRMP has received over $300,00 in grant money to forward our mission. We have used that money to create fuel breaks by ball and chain, shaded fuel breaks created by mastication, and burns We have also held 3 field days, showing our projects to over 300 hundred students and interested community members. The most important, but least documentable, result of the last three years is the sense of community that we created amongst ourselves. Before 2000, we were neighbors who only shared fence lines, now we are neighbors who share a vision for the land and the future.