Women's Commune 2018
June 2018
This was the very first ‘job’ we did for someone off of the farm. We don’t have pre and post footage but we thought it was important to include. You see, there is a women’s commune a mile or so up the road from us and we have always had very cordial relations with them. At one point in 2018 they asked me if I would be willing to mow one of the pastures with my tractor for a special event that they were hosting. I thought that it would be a nifty experiment to see if goats could do the work!
The field that they needed cleared was absolutely overrun with scotch broom, which is fast-spreading invasive plant. The have an interesting way of spreading- those big black seed pods that you can see in the videos below dry out and heat up. In the high summer they will literally explode and catapult theit seeds over a fair distance, thus seeding the next generation. Well, the goats absolutely LOVED those seed pods. An seeds that passes through a goat’s digestive system are rendered inert, so the goats interrupted the scotch broom reproductive cycle. I mowed that field the next year and the scotch broom had not returned!
