[APWG] Grazing=short-term weeders and long term damage

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear All,

That story about the goats grazing the weeds in Southern California.  That
is the most  long-term damaging method to the native ecosystem, of
managing weeds here in the arid West, and must be discontinued
immediately.

1.) The goats, sheep and cows aren't stupid, and will eat the native
legumes first, before they start on the weeds.  That is why Statewide,
most of California's clover species are extinct.  Native clovers are
keystone species that help keep our native grassland ecosystems intact
against exotic species of clover.

2.) Grazing animals by their nature, are phosphorus miners, and in arid
areas your soils are already low in phosphorus already from 150 years of
grazing.

So when you let hundreds of loose goats onto your land, they eat the
phosphorus out of the ecosystem, and store it in their bones.  Then when
the goats die or are killed, nobody in 150 years have taken their bones,
and brought them back to where they grazed, so you have a
phosphorous-mining operation that works very efficiently.

We have measured almost zero phosphorus in the soils, like in the Palo
Alto soils where my test plots are located, with the soil tests at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/soil-test.JPG.

>From left to right are the results from the Rapitest you can buy at the
hardware store, with pH, Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium.  The N-P-K
should be about 5X darker for normal native plant growth.  We have
stripped out the nutrients so efficiently by grazing, that only weeds can
thrive in these depleted soils, unless we put back the bones.

3.) Certain weeds do no respond efficiently to grazing because of their
toxic nature.  In California  coastal weeds we have, are poison hemlock
and Harding grass for example.  The picture in the article about the
goats, could be Harding grass, which is the coastal California equal of
kudzu, introduced by the USDA about the same time kudzu was planted in the
South in the 1930s.

Harding grass contains a psychedelic chemical 5 Methoxy-DMT, which was
listed by the DEA in 2009 as Schedule 1, which means that most grazing
animals in their right minds, stay far away from Harding grass, and those
who do sample that weed, can start to lose theirs.  In Australia, they
call the effect, Sheep staggers.

4.) In California and most states, we have the equal to NEPA, called CEQA,
which means that every project done on public land that could change the
native ecosystem, must have an EIR written for it.  Unfortunately those
laws are enforced by the public, so many public agencies ignore the law
and just do their project without any tests or analyses or EIRs, and just
let the goats loose and hope for the best, or set the whole place on fire,
without any before-and-after monitoring.

That is what happened to our best 100 acre example of northern California
wildflowers--the agency whose land they were on, set them on fire five
times without any monitoring, and destroyed $20 million worth of
resources.  I am in the process of getting those 100 acres back into their
pre-burn conditions, at http://www.ecoseeds.com/invent.html

5. Conversion instead of weeding?  Instead of weeding, we should be sowing
in seed of the local natives, to start the process of conversion, like you
can see in the two ex-situ test plots from the Palo Alto soil at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/two-possibilities.jpg.  One pot shows the European
weeds germinating without the addition of native seeds, and the other has
California poppy seedlings suppressing the weed seed from ever
germinating.  This is the magic of allelopathy, that will become one of
our most favorite tools in the future, to use in weed control.

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333