Sula, a favorite of Montana Goat Farm, eats snowberry, demonstrating the animal’s diverse palate.
Prescriptive Grazing Leverages Connection for Restoration
At the edge of a temporary electric fence, a small crowd gathers to watch goats eat grass, sticks, and weeds. There are no engines roaring, no gas burning or chemicals drifting through the air, no workers in respirators spraying pesticides across the hillsides. Instead, there are dogs playing underfoot, bells softly clinking as they hang from goats’ necks, and neighbors stopping by to chat while the goats work their way through their newest paddock.
“We wouldn’t be gathered like this had we called a sprayer,” says Adam Stolte of Montana Goat Farm.
He is probably right. If the area were being sprayed with chemicals, most people would keep their distance. Pets and humans alike would be kept indoors and, from afar, watch an applicator don protective gear and a respirator.
While the wide use of chemicals to clear out unwanted weeds and invasive species is a fast solution, it has major downsides. The problem might appear solved for a season, but the landscape holds the impacts much longer. Chemical effects linger in soil and waterways. Pollinators encounter chemical residues on flowers and leaves, posing a significant risk to nearby beehives and butterfly nests. Biodiversity declines. Repeated applications weaken ecosystem resilience.
Instead, imagine this: Adam, his mother, Kim Stolte, and local landowner Cynthia Fox stand and watch 90 goats move slowly across the landscape, chewing thistle, knapweed, and more. What might at first look like an unconventional spectacle is becoming a more common practice for weed control and wildfire mitigation in parts of Montana and the Western U.S. where invasive species spread aggressively through disturbed soils while hotter, drier conditions amplify wildfire risk.
Montana Goat Farm provides an alternative to chemical spraying by bringing goats in to do what they naturally do best: eat. Goats eat invasive and noxious species common across Montana landscapes, including Canadian thistle, Russian olive, knapweed, and leafy spurge—plants that are often difficult to effectively manage.
Goats aggressively browse woody vegetation and dense overgrowth that contribute to wildfire fuel loads. Unlike cattle, their digestive systems also destroy a high percentage of invasive seeds, helping reduce the spread of invasive plants while returning nutrients to the soil. In steep, rocky, or difficult-to-access terrain where goats do especially well and where machinery is unsafe or impractical, goats become remarkably effective land managers. Another benefit of using grazing is that dense thatch is broken down, creating a more hospitable environment for plants to recover over time.
For Stolte, the work is more than just weed management; it’s also about sustaining a way of life that is increasingly difficult for small farmers to maintain.
It’s likely more costly to keep a herd of goats compared to an ATV with a sprayer attachment. But Stolte wants to be a farmer. He values this way of life and its connections to people, animals, and the planet.
Like many small farmers, Stolte faces rising land costs and the economic instability that comes with relying on a single source of farm income. By combining targeted grazing contracts with meat production, Montana Goat Farm creates multiple streams of support from the same herd. The goats help landowners manage invasive species and reduce wildfire fuel loads while also contributing to the local food system. And to further diversify, Kim Stolte teaches wool-felting classes and offers farm visits through Airbnb experiences.
Montana Goat Farm’s model provides three-fold benefits: environmental, economic, and social. Some of those benefits are clear and measurable, such as reduced chemical use, improved soil health, lower fuel loads, and local food production. Others are harder to quantify. Goat grazing is a communal process that provides meaningful work and food within a local economy. Stolte walks his goats to his grazing contracts whenever possible. People stop to watch. Conversations begin. Neighbors meet. The less tangible aspects of sense of purpose and community are real and immediate, as are the increased bonds between people and the landscapes they inhabit. Stolte grazes his herd in the Montana Ranch Homeowners Association west of Gallatin Gateway over the winter, and residents have started asking when they will return, as they love seeing them on the land.
Goat grazing is a communal process that provides meaningful work and food within a local economy. Stolte walks his goats to his grazing contracts whenever possible. People stop to watch. Conversations begin. Neighbors meet
For Fox, the primary question was never how the land looked from the road, but how it functioned as a living ecosystem. She had heard about goat grazing and was thrilled to learn that one of her neighbors was providing just this service. She has been working with Stolte and the goats for three years.
Modern landscapes are often caught between competing pressures. Land use has shifted into private landscapes, and homeowners and landowners are tasked with managing both soil health and manicured expectations. Lawns trimmed to perfection or weed-free hillsides might create the appearance of care while masking deeper environmental degradation beneath the surface.
Even as we are pulled toward a tidy appearance, we must recognize that landscapes are living systems. They are complex, and balance can rarely be restored or maintained with short-sighted, one-time, quick solutions. Our landscapes are alive and meant to work together; the world we see, and the world underground, are reciprocal. Soil microbes, pollinators, grasses, animals, water, and people all influence one another in ways both visible and unseen.
Using goats to manage a landscape isn’t an overnight fix. It works gradually, season by season, in step with other ecological processes. We are constantly surrounded by quick fixes and often separated by the natural systems that sustain us. What if restoration isn’t about control, but connection?
Still gathered around the fence, we talk about more than just invasive species—we see how many native ones we can list, listen attentively to how Stolte walked his herd from a grazing contract in Kelly Canyon back to Gallatin Gateway last summer, and muse over the way the valley has changed and the ways we are engaging with it.
No one seems in much of a hurry to leave.
To learn more about goat grazing with Montana Goat Farm visit montanagoatfarm.net or call Adam Stolte at (541) 490-0817.
