cfpinz":v373h2iw said:
Keren":v373h2iw said:
Okay I know I'm 'the crazy goat lady' but seriously ... goats! They will knock it down and eat it, and get fat on it.
I'll try to upload some pictures tomorrow of our bamboo patch, before and after grazing. You wouldnt believe the difference.
Goats were my first notion. Read somewhere that it will kill goats. Figured "Oh well", they make new goats every day. Reckon you just proved that notion wrong.
Apparently bamboo has cyanide or something like that in it. Theoretically it should kill them. But yeah, it doesnt.
Interestingly, a friend of mine has a bad fireweed problem. Fireweed is toxic to cattle and sheep and just about everything. They decided to get some goats a while back, to eradicate it. Figured they would buy young goats, graze them on the weed for 12 months, then slaughter and start all over again, basically so they were selling off the goats before the toxicity built up to a stage where it started causing problems for them. Well, 5 years later they still have the original goats and no problems. Goats can eat a lot of toxic plants that other livestock cant. I spoke to a researcher about it once, and goats metabolise a whole lot faster than other ruminants, so the toxins dont stay in the system very long. Also, they can apparently isolate/segregate/compartmentalise the toxic compounds in their body so they dont do any harm