A local distribution operation has joined a popular wildfire-management trend by hiring goats to take care of grass that had grown too tall for comfort behind its warehouse in southern Kern County.
About 100 of the four-legged yard-trimmers were brought in last month from the Yosemite area to spend several days clearing unwanted greenery from a 3-acre lot behind the Ikea facility west of Interstate 5 just north of The Grapevine.
It was a first for Ikea Tejon, and likely not the last as the company looks to ramp up its use of goats to help it reach a goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. Previously the company hired contractors to clear the grass using more conventional means that include internal combustion and hauling away of waste.
“We are excited to continue using goat-powered landscaping in the future,” Ikea Tejon’s sustainability developer, Isobel Frueh, said by email Friday. She added the cost of the service came to less than half that of previous landscaping jobs.
“This is a great example of how sustainability is good for business!” she wrote.
Owner Michael Choi of the Mariposa-based company that owns the goats, Fire Grazers Inc., said the popularity of the service has in recent years grown like … wildfire.
His father started the business in the early days of the Great Recession by leasing and then renting out a herd of 50 goats. The operation soon expanded to 300 and now Fire Grazers owns and manages about 1,000 of the animals, often deploying them along steep hillsides and cliffs in posh Southern California neighborhoods.
Ikea Tejon happens to be located along a route the company travels often, Choi said, and so the two parties struck a deal to have goats stop in for a few days in March.
Ikea’s Frueh said the arrangement worked out so well the company might call back the herd sooner than it had originally planned.
“While we typically only have landscaping done once per year, the popularity of the goats might warrant more frequent servicing, depending on our landscaping needs,” she wrote.
Not all grazing jobs are so simple, Choi said. Some are done on badly overgrown lots, others on sparsely vegetated properties. The goats work especially well on cliffs because of their natural mountaineering skills.
Because the assignments vary, averages can be misleading, but Choi said 800 goats can generally clear about 4 acres in a single day.
Among the benefits of hiring goats is that there’s no waste to be bagged up and loaded onto a truck. Even the waste the animals leave behind is seen as helpful in that it can improve soil quality and promote plant diversification that supports insects and other wildlife such as birds.
Whatever the reason, Choi said, demand for the goats’ services is definitely increasing.
“Every year I just get more and more phone calls,” he said. “People are recognizing, really, the need for this sort of thing.”