Goats feast at Port Oneida

Photo: Amy McIntyre and City Girls Farm brought 20 goats to Dechow Farm in the Port Oneida Rural Historic District to graze this summer.

By Jacob Wheeler

Sun editor

The 20 goats had moved into Dechow Farm in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore’s Port Oneida Rural Historic District just a few hours before, and already YouthWork director Bill Watson was laying in the grass near the goat pen and cuddling a couple kids who approached him.

“He was a puddle,” said Amy McIntyre, co-owner of Pontiac-based City Girls Farm, which brought the livestock to Leelanau County on June 11 to graze in the fields and remove invasive species through the summer.

The National Lakeshore hosted McIntyre’s goats in August 2019 during the Port Oneida Fair to demonstrate how they eat and eliminate invasive species like the Autumn Olive, which grows rampant here. But this is the first year that Sleeping Bear Dunes officials embraced livestock grazing on Park land for a full season.

“We had talked about this for years. We wanted to use things other than herbicides and pesticides used to get rid of exotic species,” said National Lakeshore historic architect Kim Mann. “We invited Amy (and husband John) to the Fair just to see how Park management felt about this.”

For years, people had asked Sleeping Bear Dunes officials when they’d see animals again in Port Oneida, a region of more than a dozen farms on M-22, four miles northeast of Glen Arbor, that were farmed from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Families including the Dechows, the Kelderhouses and the Burfiends used cows and chickens on their land. Leonard Thoreson told Park officials that he had worked with a couple goats as a hired hand at Port Oneida farms before the National Lakeshore was created in the early ’70s. Meanwhile, Mann collected newspaper articles about goats used in other national parks, including The Presidio in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

Mann called McIntyre in 2018 about bringing animals to the Port Oneida cultural landscape after learning that her City Girls goats were grazing on Leelanau Conservancy property at Clay Cliffs near Leland and the DeYoung Natural Area between Suttons Bay and Traverse City. McIntyre said she still has the voicemail saved on her phone. The 2019 Port Oneida Fair was the goats’ test run, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced the Park to cancel the fair the past two years: it returns Aug. 12-13.

City Girls Farm launched as City Girls Soap, which was founded to create hand-crafted goat milk-based bath products. But as the company’s website states, “our first goat, Winnie, had greener pastures in mind. Now, all of the goats work together with us to serve another important purpose: turning blight into beauty.

“Grazing is the world’s oldest, safest and most natural way to clear brush and stubborn, invasive species. This low-carbon, pesticide- and herbicide-free method eliminates Buckthorn, Autumn Olive, Phragmites, Poison Ivy, and Mustard Garlic. A single goat can make their way through 100 square feet of unwanted vegetation in a day.”

Goats have four-chambered stomachs and they grind their teeth when they chew cud, McIntyre explained, so the manure they produce has no seeds in it, which means they won’t re-germinate. They make dry pellets, like rabbit waste, so it crushes underground, putting nutrients back into the ground. Plus, goats are browsers. Their heads hover six inches off the ground, so they are the perfect height to devour leaves and bark.

The ridgeline at Dechow Farm, on the south side of M-22 across the road from the Kelderhouse Cemetery, is dominated by the invasive Autumn Olive and Wild Honeysuckle, which the Michigan Department of Natural Resources more or less introduced intentionally in the 1970s and ’80s by encouraging people to grow it. The plants created an environment where almost no other species grow there.

Farmers who worked the land a century ago sometimes left broken tools or barbed wire in the fields, so heavy machinery can’t safely and effectively operate there. But goats can navigate that environment and are undaunted by steep terrain.

“I like to say that we’re a 21st-century practice but with a nod to the heritage,” McIntyre said.

McIntyre, who recently quit her day job as a bookkeeper to focus on her goats, learned of the conservation grazing opportunity in Leelanau County through a Detroit community activist and urban farmer named Joe Rashid, whose uncle, YouthWork director Bill Watson, works with groups of young adults, ages 16-26, on restoration projects in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, including the Sleeping Bear Inn, the Sleeping Heritage Trail, and the cottage on South Manitou Island.

YouthWork, an AmeriCorps program of Child & Family Services of Northwest Michigan, will have 22 teams working on projects throughout northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula this year. One rotating team will work with McIntyre and her goats at Dechow Farm this summer.

“We’re placing our YouthWork members in the field, helping remove invasive species in an ecological and safe manner, and at the same time giving them the opportunity to have this interconnection with animals,” said Watson. “It’s therapeutic at the same time they’re working.

“Plus, I don’t have to worry about workers’ compensation or blisters because the goats will be doing the work,” he laughed.

McIntyre’s 20 goats and Watson’s YouthWork members will work at Dechow Farm until mid-September. She’ll create circular grazing sections with 82-foot lengths of electric fencing, and they’ll rotate throughout the farm and ridgeline eating Autumn Olive. While the goats feast, she and the YouthWork team will scout out the next paddock.

“What they’ll get working with me is not just ‘goat love’ but real-world critical thinking and math skills, like where do we place the fencing,” she said.

She hopes this opportunity opens doors for ongoing conservation grazing projects with both Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Leelanau Conservancy in the years to come. Watson hopes that human interest in these goats and the important ecological role they play will lead to more YouthWork projects and drive revenue back to Child & Family Services that supports underfunded mental health and trauma treatment services.

The public is welcome to stop by and meet the City Girls goats at Dechow Farm in the Port Oneida Rural Historic District on the following Saturdays between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.: June 25, July 9, and July 23. However, outside of those times, please don’t disturb the working goats.