Out with the mowers, in with the sheep

Petaluma’s Sarah Keiser is helping to bring local communities together while helping them to be more fire resilient.

She’s doing it with goats and sheep.

Through her farm, Wild Oat Hollow – which produces soap, yarns and other natural products – Keiser is helping to create grazing cooperatives that are replacing fear with hope.

The dozen grazing co-ops Keiser has helped start now maintain herds of animals close enough to their neighborhood to be walked from property to property to graze. Keiser helps the groups get started, teaches them how to care for and manage the herd, helps them create a grazing plan and is there to answer questions when they arise.

“Our goal is to have the county, and hopefully our whole watershed, become a truly healthy fire ecosystem through collaboration and awareness on what a healthy fire ecosystem is,” Keiser said.

Grazing animals can get at areas that can be hard to reach for tractors and mowers, alleviating the need for toxic chemicals or gas-powered machines to take down the brush that can feed fires. The animals also help create a healthier ecosystem while they happily munch.

It all begins with the soil and, according to Keiser, the magic’s in the poop.

“Literally all their poop is this living culture that cultures our soil, and it adds microbiome back to the soil,” she said. “They're building the soil through their manure.”

Through such efforts, Keiser is trying to demonstrate that there's a way forward that is about taking care of the land, not just managing the land.

“The City of Petaluma is really trying to pilot that concept as a municipality, which is really great,” she said.

To that end, Keiser is working with Drew Halter, Director of Parks and Recreation, and Delana Bradford of City Parks to develop a strategic grazing plan for all of their open spaces. The goal is to sustainably manage annual vegetation growth for healthy fire ecosystems, increased carbon sequestration and resilient communities.

“They're going to do a mix of hiring contract grazers to do five of their city parks,” Keiser said, adding that the plan could call for ranchers or grazers who live near open space parks come to in and graze those. “They’re working really hard to think strategically about how to manage open spaces without the use of synthetic pesticides and while trying to reduce their fuel usage,” she continued. “Instead of being like, we need to get this vegetation down, it's like, how do we return the system to health? And so they're using animals.”

Wild Oat Hollow is something of a staging ground for future grazing cooperatives. Keiser breeds resilient, hardy animals that will help start herds for future grazing co-ops.

“I have both goats and sheep, personally,” she said. “Some of the grazing co-ops use cows. So you know, each community has their own thing.”

Keiser’s first grazing coop started when her children were very young and the family acquired some sheep and goats.

“We were totally head over heels in love,” she said.

She soon began noticing that some of her neighbor’s places had very tall grasses.

“This was before the fires, so no one cared as much,” Keiser said. “But I started asking neighbors if they would want the sheep there for a couple of weeks. We’d just walk the animals down the road together to graze there and they’d provide the water and they'd get to sit out and pet the lambs or read a book with the sheep.”

Once the animals were finished grazing in that spot, the heard would be walked to the next place.

“And so we were actively doing prescribed grazing,” Keiser said, “which is how you do the atmospheric carbon sequestration because you're grazing and then allowing the plants to rest.”

Keiser explained how carbon sequestration works once the grazing is done.

“That regrowth is where that plant is practicing photosynthesis and grabbing atmospheric carbon and bringing it down into the soil, which is where it's beneficial,” she said. “We bring them back when the regrowth has happened and they graze again.”

Eventually, the neighborhood started doing community potlucks to come together and celebrate the joys of grazing. Keiser has witnessed this community-building aspect taking place in the other grazing co-ops where people who have been neighbors for 20 years have now become friends. Community grazing cooperatives also provide a way for traumatized communities to heal.

“One grazing coop calls themselves Herding Hope because every single one of them lost their homes in 2017,” Keiser said. “We have helped communities that have burned to heal from the inside out. They're connected to their neighbors, and they now feel safe on their landscape because they have the tools and the animals that are keeping them safe. They feel more resilient.”

Keiser has a strong environmentalist background and admits she loves the tangibility of bringing livestock back to the land, utilizing them to heal the land and build resilient communities.

“It's like this missing niche,” she said. “So many of our problems are remedied.”

In addition to organizing the co-ops, Keiser has been working with Resource Conservation Districts in Sonoma and Gold Ridge and the University of California Cooperative Extension on a Cal Fire grant that would fund grazing for vegetation management, with goals of communities grazing their entire neighborhood together.

She has also received support for the work through Fibershed and Globetrotters, and working with UCCE to help communities build grazing projects all across the county.

“No matter the size of the property, people and municipalities can reach out to us,” Keiser said. “There are ways that we can help them to have ongoing sustainable land stewardship through a grazing cooperative within their community.”