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If you’ve been out to Sweetwater Wetlands during the last few months, you might have noticed a large herd of goats roaming the valley south of the park.

These aren’t pets —  in fact, they’re more like employees: The goats are providing landscape management services to Tucson Water by grazing on the vegetation that grows in the recharge basins.

The goats reduce Tucson Water’s labor and equipment costs and minimize the environmental impact of mechanical methods that often rely on heavy machinery and can result in contamination.

The initiative combines land management and sustainability, leveraging goats as a natural, less invasive tool.

The Sweetwater Wetlands herd belongs to Rocking AR Goats, a Rio Verde-based landscape management company that’s partnering with Tucson Water on the pilot program.

Goatherding runs in owner Reece Bickerdyke’s family. His grandfather came to Arizona from Texas and set up an angora ranch, which is still in operation today.

Bickerdyke has a degree in biology and a certificate in wildlife management and ecology and spent time working with the U.S. Forest Service doing rangeland assessments and habitat restoration for the Bureau of Land Management before he got involved with goats.

“That life cycle is really a lot of fun and super rewarding, but it's a lot of travel and a lot of seasonal work,” Bickerdyke told Tucson Spotlight during a recent visit to the Wetlands to meet his herd. “As I got committed and into a serious relationship with my now wife, I couldn't be in Oregon, Montana for six months, and Arizona for six months, so I started exploring other options.”

He got a job working at the Grand Canyon Deer Farm for a while, until a broken leg left him out of work for six months. He eventually started working at a goat dairy and found that, like his grandfather, he enjoyed raising goats.

“I just kind of started exploring what I could do to both give back to the environment, and sort of have my dream of having my own herd come true,” he said.

In the seven years since he started the company, Bickerdyke’s herd has grown to 120 goats. His goal is to grow his herd to 200 quality does, which would allow him to work on multiple projects at the same time. Right now, he stays mostly with his herd, using electronic monitoring equipment when he has to leave.

“The application with water utility companies has been growing in recent years, so we want to grow our herd so that we can provide both more coverage for land managers and also be able to manage more sites,” Bickerdyke said. “A shepherd and his animals have a really tight knit sort of relationship. They understand each other, they trust each other. And while I could go out and buy 100 animals, I wouldn't have that camaraderie, that synergy with the animals that I have with my herd.”

And while his is currently the largest goat-based landscape maintenance operation in the state, it’s a practice that’s already well-established in other parts of the country, including California, where several local governments have contracted goat herds in recent years to chow down on overgrowth in parks, schools and other public spaces.

The Sacramento Bee reported last year that officials have cited lower costs, less noise and fewer toxic chemicals as a result, along with the added benefit of the residents’ delight at the goats.

“It’s a timeless solution to a modern problem,” Bickerdyke said.

Bickerdyke’s herd has already done work for other water utilities in the state, including the Central Arizona Project and EPCOR Utilities.

Sweetwater Wetlands was originally constructed in 1996 to treat effluent received from Pima County’s wastewater treatment facility and recharge it into the aquifer. In 2013, Pima County built a new treatment facility that could deliver higher quality water, but Tucson Water still uses the Sweetwater Recharge Facility and Wetlands for groundwater storage and recovery in its 11 recharge basins.

This strategy allows the company to store treated wastewater in the aquifer and recover it later for nonpotable uses, rather than pumping groundwater.

But storing water results in vegetation growth, and once a year, Tucson Water has to divert crews of employees to spend several days doing landscape work in the basins.

“We normally have to do ripping because we're storing effluent here and it's usually flooded, so the weed growth happens very quickly ,” said Tucson Water director John Kmiec. “So instead of committing more labor, hours and manpower from Tucson Water staff, which can be fixing leaks and breaks and doing things out in a community to maintain these basins, having it done passively with the cooperation of the rancher here it looks like it looks like a good deal.”

Like many government offices, Tucson Water is facing a staffing shortage, with Kmiec saying in October that the department had more than 100 vacant positions. The goats offered a temporary solution to the staffing issue by allowing all the department’s employees to remain in the community.

“We’ve known about (the goats) for a number of years, and we got to the point in time where we're like, ‘Okay, let's call them up. Let's find the rancher and see if let's do a pilot study and try it out down here in Tucson,’” Kmiec said. “That’s what this winter is. (We’ll) analyze the data after they're gone, and we’ll make that decision at the time to see if it's good practice to keep doing or just dedicate them to Sweetwater every year.”

Tucson Water is partnering with West Engineering for an environmental assessment on goats on the basins, which will test for percolation, soil biome and more after the herd is gone. The goats are averaging 17 days to clear a basin, with Bickerdyke saying the amount of time is dependent on what’s growing in the basin and its density.

In addition to the environmental study that will happen when the goats are done, Bickerdyke is also testing different ways of managing the herd and analyzing the results. With the first two basins, the entire area was open to the goats, allowing them to engage in selective grazing.  For the next two basins, Bickerdyke has been blocking it off in sections to create a more high-density grazing, with the theory being that the goats will eat more than they’ll trample.

“Goats are selective browsers, so they will actually choose their food first. In practice, that means they will eat what I call the steak, cake, salad method,” he said. “They're going to eat all the species they want most, and then they're going to eat the second-best tasting species, and then they're going to fall back to whatever the final choice is.”

This can result in more vegetation trampled than consumed, which Bickerdyke is trying to address through the different management styles.

While the number of municipalities using goats for landscape management is growing, Bickerdyke cautioned that it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

“It’s not like a silver bullet, right? It’s one tool in the land managers’ resources. There have been a number of utility companies that are exploring doing pilot programs with the understanding that sometimes, for whatever reason they might (still) need to (use human labor,)” Bickerdyke said. “But sometimes, goats are the better choice.”

Public Affairs Administrator Natalie DeRoock said experimenting with different management techniques is part of being a responsible desert dweller, which is at the forefront of Tucson Water’s work.

“If we're able to do that and partner with local businesses and do that in a sustainable way, we're going to do that,” she said.

Bickerdyke said that while the agricultural revolution can be viewed as a dated idea, it’s still foundational to our everyday existence.

“Agriculture is the root of society — The ability to provide food, feed people and take care of a culture,” he said. Techniques like these “are a marriage between targeted land management and viewing animals not just as a burden on the land, but as a tool to manage the land.”

Caitlin Schmidt is Editor and Publisher of Tucson Spotlight. She previously worked for the Arizona Daily Star and has been reporting on Southern Arizona for a decade. Contact her at caitlin@tucsonspotlight.org.

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