Educated Cow Eats Canada Thistle

When people laugh at me, I listen.  So I was paying attention when beef producers laughed at my suggestion that they include goats in their operations as a way of reducing weeds. And it led me to a whole new way of managing weeds – using cows!

I made the goat suggestion after spending 6 years on a research project on how to best use goats for fire fuel reduction.  What I’d learned is that they are are an inexpensive alternative for providing safety zones that protect houses and the fire fighters trying to protect them.  I’d also practiced a bit of weed control with them and knew they could be very effective. But the ranchers didn’t want to have a thing to do with them, and that was fair.  Goats are much more difficult to fence in than cows, the market for them isn’t nearly as well developed as the beef market, and so they don’t really work well for a beef producer.  But ranchers still needed an inexpensive way to control weeds.

I put the ranchers’ need together with something I’d learned while working with folks at Utah State University:  Animals learn what to eat.  I figured that based on all their research, I should be able to teach a cow to eat at weed, and that would be easier than getting ranchers to work with goats.  In 2004, I started figuring out the process for teaching animals to eat weeds, and by 2006 I knew how to get a cow to eat a weed in as little as 10 hours over 10 days.

I’ll describe how all that works later.  But if you like, you can check out my web site at http://www.livestockforlandscapes.com. And if you want to get started teaching your own cows to be weed managers, you’ll want my book:  Cows Eat Weeds.