WEED CONTROL CAN BE A REAL BLAST

Local goats don’t kid around with invasive plants on Peninsula

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If only David Bowie could see what he started.

There’s no Major Tom at Ground Control Goats, but there is a woman named Lydia Vadopalas, who has seamlessly melded a love of the pop icon with four-legged munchers used to suppress and clear invasive plants.

Her rag-tag crew of 16 goats commute to their job sites in the “Spaceship,” a custom-built goat trailer.

And sometimes, as proved in a recent video on Instagram, she hangs out with her herd while wearing a glittery space glam jumpsuit.

This is what cutting-edge land management looks like for Vadopalas, who graduated from Evergreen College with degrees in agroforestry and woodworking.

“I’ve always loved animals,” she said.

After an internship at Sunfield Farm in Port Hadlock, she says she became “obsessed” with goats.  A goat kid was born a few days after her arrival, and they instantly bonded.

After college, an opportunity to manage 150 dairy goats on a 300-acre farm in Vermont was a dream come true. The perennially green pastures captivated her, as did the harbinger of her own glam-rock spaceship-themed goat business, a goat named “Lil’ Blaster,” whose face emblazons the official Ground Control logo.

However, Vadopalas was lured back to her home state by discovering a yak farm during a winter trip back to the Peninsula.

MAKING THE GRADE

But yaks just didn’t cut it for Vadopalas. While she admits they’re pretty fascinating creatures, it was now goats or bust.

She found herself on Marrowstone Island at Mystery Bay Farms, another goat dairy, before settling in for a while with Mark and Nancy Bowman in Port Townsend, who ran a goat meat business.

When they moved operations to Port Angeles, she stayed behind with a herd at Natembea Northwest, a 97-acre farming co-op in Port Townsend. When meat processing costs soared during the pandemic, the Bowman’s downsized, and they gave Vadopalas her first very own goat.

When someone suggested a goat-grazing business on the Peninsula, she  was in. After having a hand in numerous goat business models, she felt this was the fit.

After experimenting last year, the business went official. With the help of her business partner, Julia Thurston, and her life partner, by the end of this year, Ground Control Goats will have wrapped up its first grazing season.

At a basic level, the process works like this: A customer books a job, Vadopalas delivers the goats via the Spaceship, and the goats get to work eating up undesired plants.

COMMODITY ODDITY

Just what are the goats eating? 

“They’re really good at thistles,” she said, but blackberry thickets are where the goats really shine.

“When they’re in a big patch of blackberries, all is well with the world.”

Vadopalas said they can easily reduce the most gnarly canes while enjoying every minute.

The Bowmans were instrumental in her getting a leg up on a grazing business, she said. They bequeathed her a group of goat-dairy cast-offs cross bred with hardier Boer goats, traditionally used for meat.

They also left portable electric fencing, critical to corralling goats on the jobsite, and other supplies.

“I kinda lucked out,” she said. “A lot of infrastructure was here left over from the Bowmans.”

In a perfect world, Vadopalas wants to move from simply battling invasives to building an environment that is no longer conducive to their growth.

“Let’s transform the landscape instead of just keep[ing] the weeds at bay,” she said.

Drawing from her agroforestry background, her ideal form of landscape reclamation incorporates planting trees to grow a canopy that would shade out rapidly spreading invasives.

COMMENCING COUNTDOWN

Her big-picture dream is to use goats as a tool for overall landscape restoration.

She’s doing just that  on a longer-term project at the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building in Port Hadlock.

After grazing the goats through an overgrown orchard where several existing trees were pruned and fenced off from goat nibbles, a ground-cover mix of wildflowers, oats, and two types of clover were distributed throughout.

Vadopalas’ goal is threefold: stabilize the fragile bare soil of a steep hillside; attract pollinators to the orchard, and add biomass to the poor soil.

“I strongly believe that good grazing practices lead to a lot of sequestered carbon,” she said, adding that goats are also putting nutrients into the soil through their urine and droppings.

The goats will cycle back during  another season to crop down the returning weeds and less desirable plants.

So far, Ground Control is flourishing. Business has grown mostly through word of mouth, the business Instagram account, @groundcontrolgoats, and through the goats themselves. When folks see the herd out at work, their curiosity often gets the better of them.

In the future, Vadopalas would like to expand into meat and dairy goats as well. But for now, the Spaceship is at capacity, and with the earth below 64 cloven hooves, Ground Control seems to have really taken off.