Its the bee's knee's. LB
Goats and sheep do consume leafy spurge and all manner of undesirable plants. The goats I assume were angoras, given the time period you stated, and they worked extremely well when you could keep them in. I worked on leafy spurge at NDSU from 1986 til 1991. Sheep and goats also ate Wormwood, Canada Thistle, bindweed, dandelions, and many more weeds. Goats are a bitch to keep in though. Most folks claim that if water can get through a fence so can a goat. Sheep are much more comfortable with confinement. Many sheep flocks are kept in with only a single strand of electric wire. I'm actually quite surprised there are not more flerds (sheep flock and a cow herd) in ND. They compliment each other quite well with the sheep eating what the cattle tend to avoid which keeps the pastures in much better shape IMO. There are many other advantages to having both ruminants in the same pasture, but for some reason running them together hasn't caught on. Maybe someone in the peanut gallery can shed some more light on the subject.
I picked up a couple sections of the electric fence netting for our goats. We have a handful of the nigerian dwarf goats. The little buggers don't clear out areas as fast as some bigger goats would but i think they are easier to handle. After getting shocked a couple times they tend to stay in pretty well and only have gotten out when i forgot to turn the fence back on. I've been rotating them through areas i need to clean up on the farm from scrap metal and other junk. They eat about everything, no leaves or small branches on the trees within their reach are safe and canadian thistle stalks are stripped bare. I think i may butcher one or two of the wethers this fall but not sure how they will taste.
Goat is good eatin' when you serve it hot. When I was in Peru with the state department, we would buy a whole goat and I would butcher it. Very not bad. We treated it like beef, but without the rest period lots of people give beef when you take it off the grill or out of the oven. We looked up Mediterranean seasoning and that was a good way to go. Good ole fashioned BBQ worked well too, as did the low and slow usually implemented with pulled pork or brisket. I hope you enjoy it as much as I and the family did.
The flea beetles imported from Europe work very well at keeping spurge to a dull roar. They will never eliminate it because their populations follow the spurge density up and down over time. I helped put the cages together and was there when the first 21 beetles were released in ND. My Dad was the research tech that worked for the Prof at NDSU Entomology that spearheaded the bio control effort on leafy spurge Dr. Robert Carlson. The project was a rousing success at getting leafy spurge in check. Not eliminated like I said, but controlled enough to allow grazing in most areas. WOW was that a trip down memory lane.
You are correct Allen. The beetles have difficulty surviving winter in sandy soils as the cold penetrates deeper than the beetles typically go and they freeze to death. The good news is that towards the end of the beetle project we were noticing that year over year the beetles were SLOWLY adapting to the sandier soils and we were detecting beetle populations that were maintaining their population levels in sandier soils and even slightly increasing. Will they get to the point of being able to control spurge in the grasslands? IDK. Interestingly enough, the grasslands is where some of the most positive impacts to spurge populations were seen from the goats. However, if the goats were not continually hitting it, the spurge would quickly recover and get back to pre-goat treatment levels. That crap can be maddeningly difficult to deal with.
LOL!! Funny you should ask that. We did indeed mark the first generation after the originals with red dots in an attempt to evaluate and calculate the population increases within the cages. We would confine a portion of the cage and visually count the number of marked beetles vs the number of unmarked. I spent DAYS sitting cross legged in those cages counting beetles. Makes my eyes hurt just thinking about it. Thanks Man, for the reminder I probably need glasses now. So Yes, in a way we did give them red berets.Did he give the beetles little red berets?
