Using goats to manage blackberry
Submitted By: sgraham
Location: Bega Valley, NSW
Land Type: Rural Retreat
Affected by Severe Weather?: No
What weed/s are you managing?
Blackberry
What is your weed management strategy?
Use goats alongside manual methods
What have you learnt about managing weeds this way?
What works really well with blackberry is using goats alongside manual cutting. You can put planks on the bush to get them to the top and then the goats eat the blackberry bush down to a reasonable level. That makes it easier to use a mechanical brush cutter to cut it back. We do that several times a season and year after year. That way we have got lots of blackberry under control. <br><br> Using cutting with goats is a good combination because there is some tricky terrain not so suitable for goats, so we also have to go in and do some cutting in those places ourselves. <br/>
What have been the benefits and drawbacks?
Something that wasn’t obvious to us at the start was the difficulty of keeping goats inside any sort of fencing, let alone a temporary netting fence. We wanted to pin them in an area with blackberry, but they need a varied diet and after a couple of days they don’t want to eat blackberry anymore. They start trying to get out. We haven’t gone back to trying to keep the goats in one area. We’ve just created more paddocks and we rotate them through those. <br><br>We had dairy goats before, but they weren’t so good for dealing with blackberry, so this time around we got some Boer goats with thicker coats and have been quite happy with how they’re getting the weeds down to a reasonable level. <br/><br/>
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