Two years ago, there was no view at the top of Woa Roa in Paukaa — only thick stands of trees, mostly albizia.
“You couldn’t see into it,” Tim DeLozier of Aina Pono Livestock and Land Maintenance said on a recent Wednesday, as he drove one reporter and one Border collie named Kolohe up the hill, past land that was no longer forest but open space looking out over Hilo Bay, filled with grasses and ready to be turned over to a new farmer in October.
But there was no poison involved in getting rid of the invasive trees — more than 600 in all. There were no bulldozers, no backhoes. There were just goats.
Goats have developed an understandably unwelcome reputation in Hawaii thanks to the devastating impact feral animals have on native species. They will eat just about anything, browsing through shrubs and grass, and nibbling bark from trees. Aina Pono takes that voraciousness and turns it into an advantage.
Mark Crivello, DeLozier’s business partner and the founder of Aina Pono, had no goat experience when he first got his daughter a Nigerian dwarf goat at the county fair 11 years ago. That first goat led to Crivello becoming a hobby farmer, and hobby farming led to raising goats for meat and to sell as pets. Many in his early herd came from Dick Threlfall at Hawaii Island Goat Dairy.
Three or four years ago, Crivello said, he began a long process of researching ways to use his herd for landscape management. Using goats to clear land has taken off in recent years (a small herd handles weed control at Washington, D.C.’s Congressional Cemetery), and Crivello particularly was interested in the goats’ love of trees.
“Why poison trees when you have this environmentally friendly way to do it?” he said, adding that poisoning albizia leaves the tree still standing, and a potential hazard during hurricane season.
DeLozier joined the business after Crivello had knee surgery and was in a wheelchair, making it hard to be out in the field.
On Wednesday, the pair loaded 50 goats into a trailer for a demonstration of the herd’s prowess. With help from Kolohe, they guided the goats into a portable pen of hog netting where they had felled a gunpowder tree and an albizia tree. The goats went straight for the gunpowder tree, and half the herd was soon lost in the tree’s fallen, leafy branches.
There was little worry that the goats would break loose and join their feral counterparts. The hog fencing was electric (powered by a homemade photovoltaic charger DeLozier wired up), and the goats knew it.
“None of them will go near it,” DeLozier said.
One buck named Henry began to peel the bark back from the gunpowder tree’s trunk.
“Honestly, you come back tomorrow, this is history,” Crivello said. Goats stripping the bark from trees helps with the decomposition process, cutting it down to under a year. In the case of albizia, goats are brought back into a paddock after the tree has attempted its regrowth process. Goats eat the regrowth, and “eventually the trees just die,” DeLozier said.
The goats eating the gunpowder tree is also a win-win situation, he said, because the bark’s tannin is a natural dewormer and makes health care easier.
Goats can and do get sick, one of the challenges of a livestock-based business. There are also pregnant does to worry about, and weather concerns. The herd doesn’t like to work in the rain.
But there are other benefits. DeLozier pointed to a far part of the pen, where brush obscured a steep 30-foot slope.
“The goats can go places and do things machines can’t,” he said.
Site assessment is part of each job. While working through the research process, Crivello and DeLozier attended a seminar sponsored by the Hawaii Goat and Sheep Association, where they learned how to calculate how much dry matter (that is, potential goat food) there is in a given plot of land. Then they calculate how many pounds per day the goats need to eat, and match accordingly.
“You put them in a smaller paddock, you can control how much they eat,” Crivello said. The paddocks are intentionally kept small (Crivello calls this concentrated intensive grazing) so the goats can easily focus on the task on hand.
Aina Pono also has sheep in its arsenal. On a recent job, a flock spent a month and a half at an 8-acre macadamia nut farm, eating the tall grass beneath the trees. Once the sheep had finished up, the pickers came in and gathered up the fallen nuts.
Sheep are grazers and stay low to the ground when they eat. They won’t venture into high brush like goats will, and they won’t eat bark.
The goat herd is now 200 strong, and made up mostly of Boer-Saanen crosses. Crivello estimated that it is the largest on the windward side of the island.
His ultimate goal is to get goats out on the highway medians trimming grass.
“They don’t spook easily,” he said of the herd.
In the demonstration paddock, the goats had moved on to the alibizia tree, where they tore off leaves and balanced on branches to grab hard-to-reach foliage.
But, true to their browser nature, after a few minutes the entire herd took some unspoken goat cue and headed back to the gunpowder tree.
“This one is their favorite,” DeLozier said.
Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
