The lawnmower was broken. Not that I knew how to use it, anyway, as I’d spent my whole life until a year ago in lawn-less New York City. Now, though, I was in Boulder, Colo., with waist-high weeds in my yard. I refused to even consider herbicides, but my attempt to pull the weeds by hand proved futile: After several hours, all I had to show was one small patch of bare turf and an aching back.

The weeds didn’t bother my boyfriend, who reasoned that it was all just leafy green stuff and therefore natural and therefore good — demonstrating, as the saying sort of goes, that one woman’s weed is another man’s wildflower. But, though some of the weeds were beautiful, I knew enough about gardening to understand that sometimes you have to be ruthless. So I did what any environmentally conscious, recently transplanted city girl would do: I hired a herd of goats.

Guggenhime sowing his wild goats.

Photo: Hillary Rosner.

The goats belong to Jim Guggenhime, who is 27 years old, blond, good-looking, and exactly as laidback as you’d expect a professional goatherd to be. Before college, Guggenhime traveled and taught in East Africa, where he developed a fondness for goats. After graduating from the University of Colorado, he amassed a small herd. He soon decided he wanted to turn the goats into his livelihood, but raising goats exclusively for meat was too difficult and too brutal. (Guggenhime is troubled by his love for both the animals — “they all have such personalities and they’re really cute” — and their meat — “it just tastes so good.”) Recognizing goats’ other profitable asset, Guggenhime opened a grazing business this summer called Nip It in the Bud. His herd of approximately 200 now travels the region helping to keep the ecosystem in balance.

Using goats to battle weeds is gaining popularity in the West, where noxious and invasive plant species are pervasive and poor management has left a lot of land in bad shape. A company in California, Goats R Us, has been using goats to keep weeds in check since 1995. In the inland West, the grand dame of goat-herding is Lani Malmberg, whose herd of 1,200 has no home base but goes from one job to the next, migrating from Colorado to Wyoming to Idaho and beyond. Malmberg, who holds a master’s degree in weed science, helped Guggenhime start his company and sold him some of her goats.

“There’s a lot of awareness now of what chemicals do to the environment,” says Malmberg, who believes we are on the cusp of an “age of environmentalism,” current federal government policies notwithstanding. “Plus, they’ve been using chemicals against weeds for 45 years, so there shouldn’t be a weed on this planet. Obviously it’s not working and they’re looking for something else, a logical way to slowly heal the land.”

A leafy lunch.

Photo: Hillary Rosner.

Enter the goats. Technically, goats don’t graze; they browse. They’ll eat brush, leaves, twigs, and other such food first, only turning to grass when there’s nothing else left. Goats also don’t munch each plant down to a nub and move on. They’ll pick off the flower heads so the plant can’t go to seed, and eat the leaves so it can’t photosynthesize. But they’ll leave the stalk, which holds the soil in place, preventing erosion. With only a bare stem left, the plant has to work overtime just to stay alive, giving native or more desirable plants a chance to grow. Goats also poop a lot, and as they roam, their tough hooves stomp the pellets into the soil, fertilizing and helping to soften Colorado’s hard clay. They also irrigate, a pint at a time, with nitrogen-tinged urine that helps balance the minerals in the soil. And, notably, they’ll eat just about anything, including plants that are poisonous to other animals.

No Good Weed Goes Unpunished

Using biocontrols (such as goats) instead of chemicals is a practice that has grown alongside organic farming, but it has yet to really explode into the mainstream. “A lot of it is force of habit,” says Chad Brunette, senior horticulturalist at the Denver Botanic Gardens, who believes the goats are also a useful public relations tool. “Most people who have a huge weed problem would just spray Roundup. People are too busy to think sometimes.”

Brunette, who spent several years working with organic farmers, says his favorite biocontrol was a mobile chicken coop in Michigan. “This one old guy had a chicken coop on wheels that he would cart around to his fruit trees, and anywhere there were insects he would park that coop. He saved money on seed for the birds and the fruit trees suffered less damage.”

A push in the right direction.

Even outside the world of organic farming, biocontrols and other environmentally friendly weed-control techniques are beginning to take root in the collective consciousness. From old-school push lawn mowers to carefully cultivated insects, alternatives to harmful herbicides and polluting weed whackers are becoming more readily available as awareness of sustainable gardening grows.

“We’re asking, ‘What is the true cost?’” says Malmberg, considering the impact on the planet of spraying toxic chemicals versus running goats or using other eco-conscious methods to wipe out weeds. “It’s a slow change. We’re on the crest of it but it is in motion.”

Push mowers, which run on elbow grease rather than gas or electricity, are for sale at most garden centers and Home Depots. Organically inclined home gardeners can find chemical-free herbicide recipes on the Internet that use vinegar and other ingredients commonly found in kitchens, or they can buy readymade versions at eco-friendly gardening supply stores. And in the future, intrepid weed-battlers may be able to purchase insects specially matched to specific invasive plants. Along the eastern edge of the Rockies in Colorado’s Front Range, a University of Colorado professor has been successfully using several types of beetles to combat diffuse knapweed, a noxious invasive species that has infested more than 3 million acres across the West.

But insects are targeted at specific species; what I had in my yard was a more generalized mess that clearly called for goats.

Herd It Through the Grapevine

I decided to check out Guggenhime’s herd in action before I hired them. Goats are generally used on areas considerably larger than my 2,000-square-foot yard, and in more rural areas — county land at the edges of towns or sprawling private ranches. When I caught up with Guggenhime, his crew was grazing at the Mount Vernon Country Club near Golden, Colo. on 1,100 acres of pasture overgrown with poison hemlock, Canadian thistle, musk thistle, and spurge. It was tough to imagine the pasture being restored to prairie grass, but the herd seemed to be making progress. In sections of the pasture, clusters of denuded stalks stuck out from the landscape.

The goats get down to business.

Photo: Hillary Rosner.

“We tried chemicals, beetles, hand-pulling,” said Dave Harrison, a Mount Vernon homeowner who was throwing down pea and clover seed in the pasture. “Goats are by far the most efficient.” Guggenhime typically charges $1 per day per goat, plus transportation and fencing costs, which makes the goats an economical alternative as well.

Guggenhime agreed to dispatch a crew of 32 to my urban yard as a test run, to see if the small-scale weeding venture could be profitable. First, though, he sent a colleague by to fence off the sections of yard I didn’t want eaten: three rose bushes, some beds of tulips and poppies, and my city-girl-gone-green vegetable garden. (The ravenous nature of goats has its drawbacks: Without active management, overgrazing can be a problem. In parts of central Asia, overgrazing by goats is wiping out biodiversity and turning foothills into desert. My main concern, however, was for my broccoli.)

The next day, Guggenhime carefully maneuvered his 25-foot trailer into the alley behind my bungalow and let loose a posse of eager weed-munchers: almost three dozen nannies and kids and a few billies. The goats trotted from the trailer and through a makeshift corral into the yard, where they grouped in the corner looking disoriented. Soon enough, though, they realized they had landed in a weed buffet, and they quickly dispersed and got down to it, munching and snoozing and pooping and batting horns and saying “maaaaaaa” and munching some more. Meanwhile, Guggenhime and I seeded the yard, one-third wildflowers and two-thirds native grasses. (It’s a good idea to seed before or during a goat session, Guggenhime had told me, because they irrigate and fertilize as they till the soil with their hooves.)

Lying down on the job.

Photo: Hillary Rosner.

The first plants to get chomped were the leafy shoots of my big elm tree, some of which were several feet high and covered with delectable, bright green leaves. One goat even climbed into the tree to munch. Meanwhile, others busied themselves on a big patch of thistle, as still more went to work on a tangle of shrubbery and bindweed that had grown a foot high and more than a foot thick over our chain-link fence. “Am I dreaming, or are those goats in your yard?” asked my neighbor to the west.

When the time came to leave the goats overnight, Guggenhime turned on an electric charge in the fencing to thwart would-be escapees. When the goats are grazing on larger plots of land, he sleeps in his trailer to make sure they’re okay. But tonight he was going home to his wife and five-month-old son, Jake.

“Do you feel like you’re leaving your babies in the hands of a stranger?” I called after him as he and Nap, his Australian shepherd, hopped the electric fence and headed out into the alley.

He turned back and smiled. “I feel like I’m leaving a stranger in the hands of my babies.”

The night passed uneventfully, just a group of goats grazing in the moonlight before dozing off. I was amazed at how late they slept in the morning; I spent a full two hours drinking coffee on the deck before any of them bothered to stand up. But they deserved their sleep. The yard looked like a different place. The tangled jungle of waist-high weeds had given way to clumps of grass and soft soil. The virulent shoots that grew around the old elm tree had been obliterated. A groundcover that no one seemed able to identify had been mowed down from a foot to a couple of inches high.

In the morning, Guggenhime loaded his goats back into the trailer so they could join their comrades to help clean up county land just south of the city. Two weeks later, I’m still something of a naturalist celebrity in the neighborhood: “I saw your goats grazing by the highway!” friends keep enthusing. Here in my yard, native grass, delicate and shimmering, has begun to peek through the many lumps of residual goat poop. Stripped and browning stalks of formerly proud weeds sway weakly in the still-slightly-barnyard-tinged wind. My vacant lot has become a nascent (if fragrant) Eden. I’m going to bring the goats back in the fall.

Zuni Salt Lake.

Photo: Zuni Salt Lake Coalition.

For 20 years, the Salt River Project, an Arizona-based utility company, had sought to build an 18,000-acre strip mine near a salt lake in Western New Mexico. The Zuni Pueblo, other tribes, and environmentalists fought the plan, saying the mine would disrupt sacred Zuni burial sites and damage Zuni Salt Lake, a focal point of spiritual life for many tribes. The tribes and their allies methodically and aggressively fought the mine on every front, filing lawsuits, challenging hydrologic data, and staging media events.

Grist spoke with Pablo Padilla, a member of the Zuni Pueblo and a leader in the fight against the mine. Padilla, a 28-year-old law student at the University of New Mexico, left the pueblo in 1991, got a degree in government from Harvard, and then returned in 1997 to serve as the tribe’s first-ever environmental protection specialist. In that capacity, he coordinated the anti-SRP battle, implemented environmental programs, and helped manage the Zuni’s half-million acres of land. Grist caught up with Padilla in Boulder, Colo., where he is completing a summer internship with Environmental Defense.

So this is a big victory. Are you surprised?

I’m surprised at the timing of this decision. The Salt River Project is a big force within Arizona. They’ve been adamant in every forum in which we’ve engaged them that they’re going to have this coal mine. My perception is it got too expensive and that there’s been an enormous amount of political pressure. Those two reasons were what finally tipped them over.

The tribe has been pursuing issues of water hydrology. SRP’s original environmental impact statement said there would be no impact to the lake. The tribe had to hire its own consultants to take another look.

Pablo Padilla.

Photo: Environmental Leadership Program.

What did those consultants find?

They found huge discrepancies with the adequacy of the [SRP] hydrological reports, and heavy-handedness with which the project sponsors were dealing with cultural resource issues. There are an estimated 500 to 800 burial sites on the actual mine site. The BLM [U.S. Bureau of Land Management] and SRP tried to engage the tribes to develop a policy for burial. We weren’t able to because it’s such a contentious issue. The mining would re-contour that earth and dig up the graves. To [BLM and SRP], they’re just graves, but to us they’re our ancestors. So you can imagine the emotion that went into it.

With the hydrological issues, there are basically three sources of water, underground aquifers that the mine was going to tap. The deepest is the Dakota. We were able to show that there was a hydrological connection between the lake and that aquifer. So we were able to take it off the table. Then they moved to the Atarque aquifer. This past Friday, there was an issue with a pump test; the Zuni tribe and SRP and the feds, all the stakeholders were deciding how to do an adequate pump test to show that Atarque is connected to the lake, which is 10 miles away. I have a feeling that SRP knew that once that pump test happened they would not have a water site. The third aquifer is very shallow. It wouldn’t give enough output for them to do the operations.

What other factors do you think influenced SRP’s decision?

I have a few things that I think made them cave in. The first is that there were at least three tribal administrations that have taken on this issue — at least 15 years of the tribe actively engaged in stopping the mine. Just two days ago, we had several court proceedings in place, in federal court, in state court, in administrative court.

Second, we had a network of good legal and lobbying expertise that was crucial for us.

And third, and I don’t want to de-emphasize this at all, the tribe helped to create the Zuni Salt Lake Coalition about three years ago. The coalition ran a very aggressive campaign in Arizona to target the actual users of the energy. It’s a pretty powerful argument to say, “You’re going shave 6 cents off your next energy bill but at the expense of this very important place.”

As far as the tribe as a government is concerned, in the last few years we’ve entered direct negotiations with SRP. In the fall of 2001, we met and had eight mediation sessions with the company. Those broke down before a settlement could be reached. I couldn’t talk about this before, but now I can say it: They offered us millions of dollars to be quiet. We didn’t take it.

How did you personally get involved in this fight?

In my former job, I was environmental protection director for the tribe. Later I was executive assistant to the tribal council, part of the negotiating team.

One of my reasons for going to law school is so I can take up these type of issues, because I’ve seen the value of law and policy for the tribes.

You grew up on the pueblo. Was it difficult to leave and then return?

Yes. There are a lot of issues that come about by you leaving. My decision to transplant my little boy [Charles, age four] to the city while I get my degree is a difficult one. I mean this with all sincerity: One of the big reasons why I invested five years of my life in this project is because I want him to be able to make his pilgrimage to Zuni Salt Lake. It’s a really special thing. You go out to the lake and perform a ceremonial ritual. You go out there as a young boy and you make a pilgrimage there and make offerings to her and then you take salt from her and you go back and give the salt to your aunties.

That’s been going on for millennia. It’s one of the oldest rituals we have. At least 20 indigenous communities go to the Zuni Salt Lake. So even though the land is Zuni land, we’re just holding it for everyone else. Salt is really important. She’s a deity. She resides there at the lake. That whole area is a sanctuary area, so even when tribes used to fight, whenever we went into that area, everyone used to put their weapons down.

How does the fight over the mine tie in with the history of exploitation of native lands by the government and by corporations?

I consider this a classic story of someone bringing in a heavily subsidized industry at the expense of a local community, under the auspices of energy needs. In this case it turned out to be an Indian community. One of the real tragedies is the realization that rural America is so dependent on extractive industries. The state of New Mexico was going to get about $200 million from this, and 150 jobs, and now they’re not. So we’re being pitted against other people who wanted to see this happen.

One thing to note is that [New Mexico] Gov. Bill Richardson [D] has been quoted in the papers as saying that he’s happy about this decision. That’s a good sign. I’m really happy that we have leadership that can recognize the value [of Zuni Salt Lake] over and above what we might receive [economically].

Do you think the outcome in this case could have implications for future disputes of a similar nature?

I think so. I think that there’s a national campaign from indigenous people within this country to stop projects that are going to destroy their sacred sites. So this is good energy, a good victory for those other tribes that are still fighting.

One thing I’ve realized is that the issues I’ve seen my tribe face, other tribes are facing as well. I’d like to broaden the scope of my work to effect change in other tribes as well.

One of my goals in the next few months is to write about this, not just the victory but a history for my people of what just happened. I want to give it to my son so when he gets older he can understand. When he has a son he can show it to him and say, look what happened.