Rock Springs Hires Goat Army To Munch Its Way Through Clogged Canals

Rock Springs has a problem with foliage clogging up vital drainage channels running through the heart of town — city officials decided to hire an army of 300 goats to eat the problem away.  

“They’re doing a great job of clearing up the Bittercreek drainage,” Paul Kauchich, the City of Rock Springs director of Engineering and Operations, told Cowboy State Daily.

Lani Malmberg, of the Wyoming-based Goat Green LLC company, told Cowboy State Daily that her outfit can deploy up to 1,200 goats to gobble virtually everything in their paths. 

It’s worked well for drainage channel clearing, noxious weed control and wildfire risk mitigation across Wyoming and numerous other Western states, she said.

“We do not sell our goats for slaughter. These goats work for us their entire lives. And the knowledge and experience they’re carrying with them is extremely valuable to us,” she said.

‘This Isn’t A Petting Zoo’

Malmberg said managing mobs of livestock comes naturally to her, because she grew up on a ranch. 

She spends most of her time on the road with her goats, staying in a camper and traveling between contract jobs like the one in Rock Springs.  

The goats arrived in Rock Springs aboard cattle trailers on Saturday and are scheduled to gorge their way through the drainages until Friday.

The goats are eating dried grass, noxious weeds and sage brush. They’re also stripping bare invasive Russian olive trees, Malmberg added. 

“Big goats can stand on their hind legs and strip the bark off a Russian olive up to nine feet off the ground,” she said.

Most of the goats from the chosen 300 for the Rock Springs job are bigger, more mature animals, weighing roughly 200 pounds each, she said.

Grazing animals can eat about 3% of their body weight in dry matter per day, Malmberg said. So the 300-goat phalanx is clearing hundreds of pounds of vegetation from the drainage passages every day.

She said that although her goats are “well-behaved” and diligent workers, they’re still essentially wild. 

“This isn’t a petting zoo,” she said.

Kauchich said he’s been out a few times to observe the goats’ progress and agrees that they’re aloof toward humans.

“They don’t really care if somebody’s standing there or not. In all honesty, they just want to eat, sleep and whatever,” he said.

People Welcome To Watch, But No Loose Dogs

Kauchich said the goats are working in highly visible areas, and plenty of locals have shown up to watch them do their thing. 

That’s fine, Malmberg said, so long as folks maintain a respectful distance. 

Dogs generally aren’t welcome, unless they’re on leashes and under control, she said. Loose dogs – or coyotes, foxes and other critters – harassing the goats has been a persistent problem wherever they go.

She keeps an electric fence around the goats’ gobbling zone. That’s to prevent any of the goats from wandering too far, and to keep out aggressive disrupters. 

“A Rottweiler charged the fence this morning, but didn’t get through the fence,” she said. 

She added that some local adolescent boys came by on Sunday, and tried clowning around with the fence.

“I think they just wanted to shock themselves on the fence,” she said. 

Weather Isn’t Cooperating

Kauchich said the weather has been slowing the goats down. Rock Springs has been hit with wind, rain and snow flurries. 

When conditions get too nasty, the goats “just want to hunker down” instead of mowing their way through tangled vegetation, he said.

Malmberg said she usually doesn’t take contracts in places like Rock Springs this early in the year “because it’s still winter” and the goats prefer temperate conditions. 

However, the city’s drainages must be cleared out as much as possible before spring runoff begins this month, to diminish the risk of flooding, she said.

Hundreds Of Trampling Hooves

Kauchich said the Rock Springs City Council agreed to budget $50,000 for this week’s goat run down the drainages. 

If all goes well, Rock Springs will have plenty of work for the goats to do.

“There’s miles and miles of drainages in the city. This is just kind of a test run to see how it (using goats) works,” he said.

Despite the weather hampering progress, he’s been pleased with the results so far. 

The goats are a great option, because many of the drainages are too swampy to bring in equipment such as mechanical brush cutters, Kauchich said.

And hungry goats are a better choice than chemical weed killers, he added. 

“The only other option would be to use weed chemicals. And we don’t want to spray a bunch of chemicals in the Bittercreek channel, which flows into the Green River,” he said.  

Malmberg said that the goats will happily scarf down just about every kind of plant, including poisonous weeds that would sicken other animals. 

They also “fertilize the ground” with their droppings as they pass through, she said. 

And the trampling of hundreds of goats’ hooves stabilizes banks in the drainages, protecting them from erosion, Kauchich said. 

“They’re compacting the soil with all of their trampling,” he said. 

Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.