AG WEEK: Who ya gonna call? GOAT BUSTERS

It all started in 2019, when Mace, Tred and Rebekah Schnoor’s oldest son, wanted to milk goats and show them in 4-H. So, the family bought three Saanen goats.

Today, the Schnoors are kickstarting Goat Busters of Eastern Iowa to help customers remove brush, weeds and invasive plants.

Tred and Rebekah built their house outside of Amber in 2015 when their kids were young. The Schnoor’s have four kids, Lake, Mace, Roth and Rynn.

At the time, the Schnoor’s 120 acres featured a lot of timber, some crop ground and a couple ponds.

“We rent out some crop ground, but it was a lot of really brushy timber,” Tred commented. “There was no air movement, and the mosquitoes and bugs were horrible. Then we bought more goats, and what we have are mainly kiko goats.”

Kiko goats are primarily use for meat production. But they also serve as excellent brush clearers and vegetation managers. And that’s exactly what the Schnoors did with them.

“We started doing rotational grazing about five, six years ago,” Tred added. “We just started moving them around the house and they just ate everything down. I mean they ate everything.”

By that first summer, Tred said the goats opened up the timber’s understory and created air movement. “The bugs weren’t so bad and there were breezes,” he said.

On a farm the Schnoor’s bought just east of their house, Tred said was a valley that was “just a marshy, unusable area.”

“There were honeysuckle bushes growing on each of the woods and it was the same thing, humid and bug infested,” added Schnoor. “So, we started putting the goats in there I think two, three years ago. They cleaned up the honeysuckle, the buckthorn, and then we also cut it out, because the goats will eat up to about six feet, is all they can reach. So, it’s really effective when you graze to also cut down the brush while they’re in there and they just eat it up. And you can either leave it or burn it. We generally remove it.”

Schnoor said now, the valley is completely open and there’s hardly any bugs.

“They really transformed the farm,” Tred added. “It’s way, way nicer.”

Today, the Schnoors continue rotating the goats around the farm to keep the timber area clear.

“They eat the nettles, any weeds, they are really good in the woods because they just eat the multiflora roses and around here, our big problem is the honeysuckle bushes, buckthorn and autumn olive, they just eat all of that,” Tred said.

Seeing how the goats transformed their own timber, the Schnoor’s decided to expand.

“So, we did that around here and we’ve a little bit for friends, but then we decided we’d start the Goat Busters of Eastern Iowa,” Tred said.

Mace, a senior at Monticello High School, completed a business plan last year as part of a Business Professionals of America project.

“It was really just to fine detail it, get the finances done and just a basic business plan,” Mace said.

“It was more on the financial end of things,” Tred added. “I worked with Mace to come up with a spreadsheet on our costs and how we’d estimate the time to put up the fence and how we would bid a project.”

For the business, the Schnoors will install an electric net fence around the targeted area and then place goats inside and let them eat.

“Putting up the fence is the hardest part,” Tred said. “It’s still labor intensive. You usually want to put (the goats) where it’s just inhospitable. So, you do have to cut a path to put the fence up. That’s the hardest part.”

Having their timber restored, Rebekah said, was a huge part in wanting to start up the Goat Busters.

“Just where we’re at, you know? We couldn’t even see from the house down to the pond in the summertime because of the underbrush being so thick there,” Rebekah said. “So, we decided to get the Kiko goats and we’re like ‘hey, let’s graze ‘em.’”

With 22 goats on the farm right now, Tred said they expect that number to double in the next three to four weeks, as many of the goats are kidding.

Along with offering the goat grazing, the Goat Busters also cut trees and brush.