Ragle Park is using sheep to reduce the threat of wildfire

Coastal Land and Livestock, an all-women grazing company, was hired by Sonoma County Regional Parks to help with its grazing program

In Ragle Ranch Regional Park, a shepherd and a guard dog watch over a flock of sheep. (Photo by Paigelynn Trotter)

You’re probably used to seeing goats grazing in Sonoma County parks and in the Laguna. They’re used to keep weeds and brush down as a way to minimize the risk of wildfire.

This week we got a call from a reader, urging us to head over to Ragle Park to see a different kind of grazer: sheep.

About a quarter mile up the trail from the gazebo in Ragle, Shepherd Noelle McDonough was standing beside a low electric fence chatting with some hikers who were curious about what was going on.

McDonough is employed by Coastal Land and Livestock, an all-women sheep and goat grazing company.

“The company owns roughly 300 goats, and we lease about 300 sheep,” McDonough said. “There’s 300 sheep in here right now,” she said nodding to a large copse of trees guarded by a serious-looking Anatolian guard dog named Quercus, which is Latin for oak.

I asked why they were using sheep instead of goats. Turns out sheep are daintier eaters.

“Sheep are much more grazers, like cattle would be,” McDonough said. “They like grass. They like putting their heads down to graze. They'll eat a little bit of thistle and stuff at head height. Goats love climbing. They love browsing. They love looking up, looking down, like ‘How can I get to the highest point on that tree?’ They're way more curious. So that means they just have a more voracious appetite. They would eat the whole bottom layer of the tree line, the grass, the ferns, everything would kind of be taken back.”

“Sheep will pick at oak leaves. They’ll pick at blackberries, but they're not gonna eat to the same intensity that a goat would. It’s just not the same sort of species in that way,” she said.

McDonough said the company fences off an area—usually around an acre—and lets the sheep go to work for the day.

“The fence is essentially to keep predators out and the sheep and our dog in and keep them safe,” said McDonagh. “We're moving them almost daily. The longest they’ll be on the same piece of land is maybe two days.”

The dog stays in the paddock with the sheep all night while the shepherd sleeps in a camp nearby. The dog’s job at night is to keep predators, like coyotes and even mountain lions, at bay and to alert the shepherd of any problems. “You kind of get to know his bark,” McDonough said.

Sheep at golden hour behind a low, electrified fence. (Photo by Paigelynn Trotter)

“I think animals grazing land is really important,” she said, “and we should be doing more of it, because not only are you getting the trampling and the grazing of grasses and hopefully reducing your fuel load and helping to increase the perennial stands, as well as knocking back some invasive species, you’re also getting the fertilizer.”

“They're a great piece of machinery in one creature, rather than having people have to do several different steps in order to yield the same results,” she said. “The land that we all live on now evolved with animals grazing it. I’m excited it’s coming back into popularity, and people are seeing the importance of it.”

McDonough said she’s heartened by the response of hikers, who often stop to ask about the project.

“It’s also kind of community-building. A lot of people have been coming out, just really excited, happy, and wanting to know about what we do,” she said.

Ironically, Paigelynn Trotter, the owner of Coastal Land and Livestock, which is based in Petaluma, said the most common question she gets on site isn’t about the sheep or the project at large. It’s about the sheep dogs. She said the #1 question that people ask is “What kind of dog is that?”

Trotter began offering goat and sheep grazing services in collaboration with other livestock owners in 2017. Now, the company’s team of women shepherds, dogs and goats migrate between Mendocino and Sonoma counties, offering seasonally adaptive grazing services.

She leases the sheep from a family friend.

Unlike many grazing services, Trotter hires American shepherds—all women from Sonoma County. (She said that in some other companies it’s common to hire shepherds on a seasonal visa from Mexico or Peru.) Coastal Land and Livestock shepherds work 24-hour shifts on site, some of that time sleeping in the shepherd’s camp.

“We just rotate 24 hour shifts. Essentially, sometimes it means you're spending three days on the project, sometimes up to five days, and then you clock out, and the next shepherd comes and clocks in...so there’s multiple people on one project,” she said.

Three different fulltime shepherds—McDonough, Trotter and Sequoia—have all worked on the Ragle project.

Trotter said her company doesn’t do small parcels, in part because of the wear and tear involved in moving the animals and the setting up and taking down the paddocks.

“We have a 5-acre minimum in the city of Petaluma and a 10-acre minimum outside of it…we’ve settled on being somewhere for a week minimum, just to maintain a healthy culture for both the animals and for our team so that we aren’t just living on the trucks, getting on and off.”

The grazing project in Ragle Park is being funded by a $35,000 grant from Sonoma and Gold Ridge Resource Conservation Districts. That money pays for two 2-week grazing stints—the one that’s going on now and another that will happen next spring.

Lulu Waks, grazing program director for Sonoma County Regional Parks, said grazing is being used in seven regional parks right now.

“There are a variety of reasons that we might use targeted grazing, and each park is different, with a lot of overlapping goals,” she said. “The one that I think could be said for every single park would be fuels reduction. That’s the most obvious goal, and the first that comes to most people's mind. Another is the reduction of thatch in general, and how that can lead to an increase in biodiversity because smaller-statured plants that might be getting smothered by dead, dry-grass material have the opportunity to persist and thrive.”

Waks said the sheep grazing in Ragle are actually part of a larger strategy. The park is using the animals to clear out the understory and make it more accessible to park employees, who’ll come in at a later date.

“Our hand crew will come in with tools later in the fall and winter and do some selective thinning and lifting of that lower canopy…then they’ll pile that material and burn it. Then our hope is to be able to come through and do a broadcast burn,” which is basically a prescribed burn.”

“This is all in the name of enhancing biological diversity, wildfire resilience, reducing fuels, bringing back the use of fire to a landscape that was historically burned, and enhancing that grassland and oak woodland habitat, making it healthier, more resilient to wildfire, and enhancing the health of the trees that are there.”

Waks said grazing won’t be a permanent feature of Ragle Park—it’s a limited, one-time grant—so if you want to see the sheep at work, head out there this week, because the shepherds of Coastal Land and Livestock will be packing up their animals and heading off to another job on Friday.

Contact Coastal Land and Livestock via their website. Have a smaller property? Trotter gave a shout out to Sarah Keiser at Wild Oat Hollow, who helps smaller property owners set up neighborhood grazing cooperatives.

A dog and his sheep at Ragle Park. (Photo by Paigelynn Trotter)

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