September 17, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, City Grazing started with a simple idea: goats are natural landscapers. Today, the San Francisco non-profit provides goat grazing services across the Bay Area, using herds to reduce fire risk, cut down invasive weeds, and clear land in ways machines can’t. Executive director Genevieve Church, sometimes called the third “Goat Lady of San Francisco,” shares the story of how the project began and what it takes to run a goat-powered lawn and brush-clearing service.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Up next, you'll
meet Genevieve Church. Genevieve runs a very unique business in
San Francisco, that is Citty Grazing. Citty Grazing is a
sustainable land management organization powered by goats. Here's Genevieve to
tell us about how the business came to be and
(00:32):
also the history of goats in San Francisco, beginning with
Estelle West, the first goat Lady.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Goats in San Francisco have a long history and women
raising goats in San Francisco there is a long history.
Estelle West was raising goats, and you know, she was
at a time when having livestock for meat for milk
was relatively common still in the Bay Area.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
But she was one of the.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Last people who was actually in San Francisco proper raising
her animals and making her living from them. San Francisco
was busily becoming a city and didn't want livestock within
city limits anymore. Estelle West was quite a character, apparently,
and loved to flout authority, and she just wanted to
(01:22):
keep raising goats the way her family had been. And
so she was a mild criminal, shall we say, in
keeping her goats in places where the city didn't.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Really want goats. Kept after her.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
This very sweet woman that I met, who was the
second goat Lady of San Francisco. She had been raising
goats on Portreal Hill, which was a little bit less
of a settled area in San Francisco, when she was
a kid. Her family had about five or six goats,
sometimes as many as fifteen. They didn't have as large
(01:57):
of a herd, and they were not dependent on them
for their income, but they were a part of their
family's income stream. And when the city was laying the
first sidewalks in Peterrero Hill, her goats got out and
ran across the newly laid cement and left goat hoofmarks
in San Francisco's first sidewalk in Preterrero Hill. She got
(02:20):
in a lot of trouble. They made her family get
rid of their goats. I met her when she was
in her eighties, and so I'm really happy to get
to carry on the tradition of livestock in San.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Francisco and goats in San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
And of course it's also an honor to get to
be the third crazy goat Lady of San Francisco. I'm
the executive director of City Grazing. We are the last
local herd of working animals in the city. We actually
take in retired dairy goats and we give them kind
(02:54):
of a second lease on life. All they have to
do for us is eat for a living, so they
go out, they eat a lot of the brush that's unwanted,
a lot of the invasive vegetation that we have, and
both reduce fire hazard and improve the health of some
of our small local.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Forests in San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
City Grazing was started as a little bit of just
a fun side project by a man named David Gabich
who owned a industrial waste management company, and he thought
it would be a fun way to advertise their commitment
to green methods and to keeping their waste processing very
clean by having a herd of goats that actually lived
(03:34):
on site next door to the waste processing center. It's
pretty common in California to see goats grazing on the
side of the freeways, so there are a few different
companies in California that do.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Large scale goat grazing.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
These are companies that have a thousand animals or are
up to four thousand animals and graze and really big
areas alongside like Chevron's processing plants, alongside the freeways, alongside
some of the wind farms and solar farms in California.
These are really common companies that use grazing animals to
keep their fire hazard down, and David saw that thought
(04:10):
it would be a lot of fun to do on
a small scale in the city, so he started with
just a few goats, didn't really think much about how
goats multiply, ended up pretty quickly having forty goats, and
at that point was renting them out. He was renting
them to backyards, and that was in two thousand and
eight that he got started. I came on board in
(04:30):
twenty twelve. I answered a very random Craigslist ad. I
had just moved back into San Francisco, was looking for
a new career and found a very unusual ad that said,
write as a paragraph, tell us why you're qualified to
take care of our forty goats in Bayview while our
current goat herd goes home on vacation for six weeks.
(04:53):
And I thought, no one has forty goats in Bayview.
Baby was an industrial part of the city, and I
was just like, I have to see this. I grew
up on a cattle ranch, I'd been around animals most
of my childhood, and I never really thought i'd work
with them again. So I randomly answered this ad and
we just kind of hit it off. David and I
(05:15):
got along very well. The goats definitely needed more care
than they were getting at that time. He just had
one of the employees from the railyard who was taking
care of them. So I just kind of never left,
and in twenty fifteen I took over management. In twenty seventeen,
we converted to a nonprofit and that's really allowed us
to open up who we work with and what we do.
(05:38):
It lets us adopt animals rather than purchasing or breeding.
It lets us have more work with municipalities.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
With schools, with universities.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
It also allows us to be a little bit more
proactive in our hiring policies, so we really strive to
give work to people who are from our underserved neighborhoods
in San Francisco.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
So it's open to a lot of doors for us.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
What we do is specialize in strips of undeveloped land,
and San Francisco has a lot of that, there's a
lot of back hillsides or park areas.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
That haven't been landscaped and that's where we come in.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
And then also just backyards. We do a fair amount
of backyards. It's a lot of fun to bring somebody
five goats to spend a week in their yard and
let their family interact and see what that's like. And
most of our goats are really friendly, they love people.
They're easy to hang out with, and you wouldn't necessarily
want to keep.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Them forever, but they're a lot of fun for a week.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
The community loves the goats, absolutely loves them. From being
completely startled to see a goat, you know, we get
the why are there goats here? Questions from passers by.
We get kids who've never seen a goat before and
do not know what they are and say.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Mommy, what's wrong with that dog? Or is that a donkey?
Speaker 2 (06:58):
That was my favorite quest es that I've ever gotten.
The goats have a lot of fans, and so we
always publicize if we're at a location where the public
can come and view the grazing, and that is just
an amazing side benefit of what we do. It's really
great to be able to give back to the planet.
It's great to be able to contribute to the health
(07:20):
of trees because a lot of what the goats eat
is the himalay and BlackBerry, which is an invasive here,
and a few different forms of ivy.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
So it's a lot of our work.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Is taking care of those two plants to keep the
trees in some of our parks like the Presidio UCSF
Mount Sutro. These are a couple of the larger parks
in San Francisco that we do a lot of work for.
It's really about tree health, but it's also about fire
hazard reduction, but a huge part, especially in the last
few years, people were just looking for anything that they
(07:51):
could do outside with their kids, like how do we
get out of the house, and you can always come
visit the goats, right, So it's just so much fun
to give people that.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Kind of outlet.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And it's not just people with their kids. We've got
dog walkers who bring their dogs. The dogs are fascinated.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
They've never seen goats before either. These are city dogs, right,
they do not know what.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Livestock is, so they have a lot of fun and
the goats are so funny. They're very used to the
urban environment. Goats are such adaptive animals. You wouldn't put
a horse or a cow or a sheep in some
of the situations that we very happily put our goats.
The goats are just like, oh, yeah, okay, is this
the new place we're staying for a week?
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Cool? And they'll interact with the people. They'll interact with dogs.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
They get bored if they're in one location, As anyone
who has goats can tell you, goats get very bored
and they will start trying to break out. They love
to explore a new space. They love new vegetation, and
so we find they have much better manners if we
are moving them around pretty regularly and giving them new
grounds to stomp on. Our mission is sustainable land management.
(09:00):
It's really just about inspiring people to find creative solutions
to the problems that we have. What we do is
so beneficial, but it's really just goats being goats. It's
a very elegant solution to the problem of overgrowth or
fire hazard or invasive plants because we put the goats
on them, and the goats don't do anything special. They
(09:21):
just do what goats do. They compete with each other
for food and they have a great time doing it.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
And you're listening to Genevieve Church, the third Crazy Goat
Lady of San Francisco. More of her story here on
our American Stories, and we return to our American stories
(10:12):
and to Genevieve Church of City Grazing, the goat powered
land Management and fire Prevention organization in San Francisco. Let's
pick up where she last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
We have so many amazing goats and they come to
us from all over.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
As I said, most of our goats are retired dairy goats.
Their milk production drops off and it's hard on their bodies.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
So it's really fun for us to be able to
take those ladies in and retrain them. We take them
in and just put them in basically that pasture and
then leave them there for a week. And when they
first come to us, they'll come to the fence every
morning like, isn't someone supposed to do something with me? Now?
Don't have to go somewhere, And we're like, nope, just
(10:58):
go eat with the rest of the goats. But we
also every year we try and adopt in some of
the little orphan dairy boys.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Dairy goats have to have a baby every year in
order to keep giving milk.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
The females go back into the dairy industry, but those
males usually go into the meat industry, and we like
to adopt a few of those in every year and
raise them to.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Be graising goats.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
So those little guys, they are very social. They've been
hand raised by people. They really turn to us for
all of their needs. There's so much fun to interact with.
They're really naturalized to people and they have big personalities.
But some of our other goats are rescue goats that
have come from you name it, all different situations, and.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Yes, all of our goats have names.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
From Regina, the complaining dairy goat who never stops yelling
at us Toune. We have Huck and Finn, who are
a pair of twins. Another pair that we have is
Curry and Stew. Their original owner raise them for food,
but he bought them as babies and he loved them
so much. He just fell in love with them and
called us and kind of shameface that they said, I
(12:05):
can't eat my goats, can you take them for me?
Speaker 3 (12:08):
So we took them in.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
But my favorite two they've actually both passed on now
Princess and Udo came to us. They didn't seem to
know that they were goats.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
They were these.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Enormous, enormous alpine goats, and they had been raised in
someone's kitchen in Oakland.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
They'd been raised on people food.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
They'd never raised They'd been eating breakfast, cereal, and apparently
human food.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Their whole lives.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
The lady who raised them was very eccentric. Her neighbors
were complaining to the health department. She reached out to
us and we were like, yeah, sure, we'll take them.
So we went to get them, and we didn't really
think it through. We didn't understand that they, you know,
other than going into her backyard, they really hadn't been outside.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
She was keeping them in the house.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
So we had to teach them how to live outside.
We had to teach them how to We had to
expose them, and.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
They were adults.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
They were both quite large, and in the end both
of them took over the herd. Both of them were
the alpha males in the herd. And we named Princess
Princess because he was so high maintenance. I have to say,
like that name wasn't really supposed to stick because he
was the biggest white male goat with giant horns that
you've ever seen. And it was just kind of an
(13:23):
ironic name because he didn't know how to eat or
take care of himself.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
He was such a princess. We had to wait on
him hand and foot before he learned how to be
a goat.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
By the end, he was the king and he just
ruled the entire herd. So those two probably are my
favorite rescue story, But we have others.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
We have goats that came to.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Us from four h So there are four h kids
that had raised them didn't want them to end up
being harvested, so they donated them to us rather than
sell them at the fair.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
One of them, though, he.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Had a little accident, and this was before he came
to us. He lost the tip of his ear and
they decided he couldn't be shown as breeding stock, which
was the intention when he was raised.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
His name is Dipper.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Dipper looks like a small rhinoceros without horns. He's the
most muscular goat I've ever seen. He has giant, thick
legs and huge feet and a giant head. He looks
like he could knock all the other goats down. But
he's the ultimate and gentle giant. He doesn't know he's strong,
he doesn't know that he's just the burliest goat ever,
(14:30):
and he stands off to the side and lets all
the other goats eat first. And we have to keep
him in with the old ladies because he does not
understand his own strength. So they come to us with
such cute personalities and individual natures. Goats love salt. They
have a very high need for salt in their diet.
And so when you see a goat licking the inside
(14:50):
of a tin can, which yes, that stereotype is inaccurate.
One goats will pick up tin cans that have had
food in them and they will carry them around.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
They actually can't eat them.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Trying to lick out whatever was inside that can. If
there's any residue of salts.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
A chip bag.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
You know what's the most common piece of litter that
you see anywhere, It's a dorito's bag. They will take
them in their mouth. They will chew on them and
chew on them and chew on them the way we
chew gum, and then they'll spit them out because they're
just trying to suck all that salt off of the inside.
That's kind of where goats get that reputation from. So
(15:26):
it's like, why why did they chew on plastic? We finally,
I think it was a vet who was like, oh,
it's the salt. They love roses and they love blackberries. Blackberries.
That's great because it's a massive problem in California. We
have Himalayan BlackBerry growing all over the West coast and
it's a terrible invasive plant.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
The roses not so much.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Nobody really wants the goats to come in and eat
their prize rose collection, so we do have to. You know,
we're really intense about our fencing to make sure that
that doesn't happen. Homeowners associations in the Bay Area tend
to I don't know why. They almost all have one
giant inaccessible hillside that periodically needs to have something done
about the fire danger, and we love doing it. City
(16:11):
Grazing gets about sixty percent of our income from our
grazing work, but the other forty percent of our income
comes from donations, and we really.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Rely heavily on that.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
We have a really amazing team of employees. We are
out there setting fencing, clearing paths. San Francisco is big
in terms of population and small.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
In terms of acreage.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
It's a tiny little city that is jam packed, so
we have to build really nice fences every time we
take the goats anywhere to make sure that they stay
in closed, stay safe, and make sure everyone in this
situation is contained. We also have a box truck that
we converted to a mobile barn, but it's essentially just
(16:56):
like any U haul that you'd use to move. We
pull out the ramp, the goats run in the ramp
or run out the ramp, but it's really kind of
hilarious to check out the goats getting in and out
of the truck. It's not what you'd expect, but it's
definitely been one of our best innovations. Talk about funny stories,
we have staged goat yoga. If you missed your chance
(17:18):
at the goat yoga trend when that was a thing,
don't worry about it, because what you really missed out
on was probably getting peed on by a baby goat.
That's what we don't tell you when we saw you
the ticket, But it was a fundraiser that we did
for a while. Some of the other crazy stuff that
we've done. We have pranked a groom at a wedding.
(17:40):
His in laws hired us to bring goats to the
wedding reception and to bring them out behind the groom
while the father of the bride was making his toast,
and we didn't know this. They didn't tell us. I
don't think they loved their son in law very much.
He was terrified of goats, so it was just a scene.
(18:05):
It was hilarious for everyone there except for the groom.
So we've taken goats to nightclub openings, not inside, outside
so that they are their ears wouldn't get any damage.
We've done a really great promotion years and years in
a row. We did about five of these called Goat
My Valentine, where we would bring goats and stage a
(18:25):
photo shoot so that you could come up with your
sweetheart and take a photo with the goats and get
cuddly with our baby goats on Valentine's Day. That was
a really fun one that we did. So people love goats,
it's true, and they're a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
We love them.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
We're all of us at city grazing. We smell terrible
at the end of the day, but we love our job.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And a great job on the storytelling in production by
Madison and a special thanks to Genevieve Church, executive director
of City Grazing. Hi goodness, I love some of the names.
Huck and Finn, Regina, the complaining dairy gooat, and Princess
and Udo enormous alpine goats who never grazed in their lives.
They were raised on human food in a house. The
(19:10):
story of City Grazing, which started as a fun side
project but now takes care of fire prevention and so
much more in the city of San Francisco. Here on
our American Stories.
And we continue with our American stories. Up next, you'll
meet Genevieve Church. Genevieve runs a very unique business in
San Francisco, that is Citty Grazing. Citty Grazing is a
sustainable land management organization powered by goats. Here's Genevieve to
tell us about how the business came to be and
(00:32):
also the history of goats in San Francisco, beginning with
Estelle West, the first goat Lady.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Goats in San Francisco have a long history and women
raising goats in San Francisco there is a long history.
Estelle West was raising goats, and you know, she was
at a time when having livestock for meat for milk
was relatively common still in the Bay Area.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
But she was one of the.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Last people who was actually in San Francisco proper raising
her animals and making her living from them. San Francisco
was busily becoming a city and didn't want livestock within
city limits anymore. Estelle West was quite a character, apparently,
and loved to flout authority, and she just wanted to
(01:22):
keep raising goats the way her family had been. And
so she was a mild criminal, shall we say, in
keeping her goats in places where the city didn't.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Really want goats. Kept after her.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
This very sweet woman that I met, who was the
second goat Lady of San Francisco. She had been raising
goats on Portreal Hill, which was a little bit less
of a settled area in San Francisco, when she was
a kid. Her family had about five or six goats,
sometimes as many as fifteen. They didn't have as large
(01:57):
of a herd, and they were not dependent on them
for their income, but they were a part of their
family's income stream. And when the city was laying the
first sidewalks in Peterrero Hill, her goats got out and
ran across the newly laid cement and left goat hoofmarks
in San Francisco's first sidewalk in Preterrero Hill. She got
(02:20):
in a lot of trouble. They made her family get
rid of their goats. I met her when she was
in her eighties, and so I'm really happy to get
to carry on the tradition of livestock in San.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Francisco and goats in San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
And of course it's also an honor to get to
be the third crazy goat Lady of San Francisco. I'm
the executive director of City Grazing. We are the last
local herd of working animals in the city. We actually
take in retired dairy goats and we give them kind
(02:54):
of a second lease on life. All they have to
do for us is eat for a living, so they
go out, they eat a lot of the brush that's unwanted,
a lot of the invasive vegetation that we have, and
both reduce fire hazard and improve the health of some
of our small local.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Forests in San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
City Grazing was started as a little bit of just
a fun side project by a man named David Gabich
who owned a industrial waste management company, and he thought
it would be a fun way to advertise their commitment
to green methods and to keeping their waste processing very
clean by having a herd of goats that actually lived
(03:34):
on site next door to the waste processing center. It's
pretty common in California to see goats grazing on the
side of the freeways, so there are a few different
companies in California that do.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Large scale goat grazing.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
These are companies that have a thousand animals or are
up to four thousand animals and graze and really big
areas alongside like Chevron's processing plants, alongside the freeways, alongside
some of the wind farms and solar farms in California.
These are really common companies that use grazing animals to
keep their fire hazard down, and David saw that thought
(04:10):
it would be a lot of fun to do on
a small scale in the city, so he started with
just a few goats, didn't really think much about how
goats multiply, ended up pretty quickly having forty goats, and
at that point was renting them out. He was renting
them to backyards, and that was in two thousand and
eight that he got started. I came on board in
(04:30):
twenty twelve. I answered a very random Craigslist ad. I
had just moved back into San Francisco, was looking for
a new career and found a very unusual ad that said,
write as a paragraph, tell us why you're qualified to
take care of our forty goats in Bayview while our
current goat herd goes home on vacation for six weeks.
(04:53):
And I thought, no one has forty goats in Bayview.
Baby was an industrial part of the city, and I
was just like, I have to see this. I grew
up on a cattle ranch, I'd been around animals most
of my childhood, and I never really thought i'd work
with them again. So I randomly answered this ad and
we just kind of hit it off. David and I
(05:15):
got along very well. The goats definitely needed more care
than they were getting at that time. He just had
one of the employees from the railyard who was taking
care of them. So I just kind of never left,
and in twenty fifteen I took over management. In twenty seventeen,
we converted to a nonprofit and that's really allowed us
to open up who we work with and what we do.
(05:38):
It lets us adopt animals rather than purchasing or breeding.
It lets us have more work with municipalities.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
With schools, with universities.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
It also allows us to be a little bit more
proactive in our hiring policies, so we really strive to
give work to people who are from our underserved neighborhoods
in San Francisco.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
So it's open to a lot of doors for us.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
What we do is specialize in strips of undeveloped land,
and San Francisco has a lot of that, there's a
lot of back hillsides or park areas.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
That haven't been landscaped and that's where we come in.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
And then also just backyards. We do a fair amount
of backyards. It's a lot of fun to bring somebody
five goats to spend a week in their yard and
let their family interact and see what that's like. And
most of our goats are really friendly, they love people.
They're easy to hang out with, and you wouldn't necessarily
want to keep.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Them forever, but they're a lot of fun for a week.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
The community loves the goats, absolutely loves them. From being
completely startled to see a goat, you know, we get
the why are there goats here? Questions from passers by.
We get kids who've never seen a goat before and
do not know what they are and say.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Mommy, what's wrong with that dog? Or is that a donkey?
Speaker 2 (06:58):
That was my favorite quest es that I've ever gotten.
The goats have a lot of fans, and so we
always publicize if we're at a location where the public
can come and view the grazing, and that is just
an amazing side benefit of what we do. It's really
great to be able to give back to the planet.
It's great to be able to contribute to the health
(07:20):
of trees because a lot of what the goats eat
is the himalay and BlackBerry, which is an invasive here,
and a few different forms of ivy.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
So it's a lot of our work.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Is taking care of those two plants to keep the
trees in some of our parks like the Presidio UCSF
Mount Sutro. These are a couple of the larger parks
in San Francisco that we do a lot of work for.
It's really about tree health, but it's also about fire
hazard reduction, but a huge part, especially in the last
few years, people were just looking for anything that they
(07:51):
could do outside with their kids, like how do we
get out of the house, and you can always come
visit the goats, right, So it's just so much fun
to give people that.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Kind of outlet.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And it's not just people with their kids. We've got
dog walkers who bring their dogs. The dogs are fascinated.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
They've never seen goats before either. These are city dogs, right,
they do not know what.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Livestock is, so they have a lot of fun and
the goats are so funny. They're very used to the
urban environment. Goats are such adaptive animals. You wouldn't put
a horse or a cow or a sheep in some
of the situations that we very happily put our goats.
The goats are just like, oh, yeah, okay, is this
the new place we're staying for a week?
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Cool? And they'll interact with the people. They'll interact with dogs.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
They get bored if they're in one location, As anyone
who has goats can tell you, goats get very bored
and they will start trying to break out. They love
to explore a new space. They love new vegetation, and
so we find they have much better manners if we
are moving them around pretty regularly and giving them new
grounds to stomp on. Our mission is sustainable land management.
(09:00):
It's really just about inspiring people to find creative solutions
to the problems that we have. What we do is
so beneficial, but it's really just goats being goats. It's
a very elegant solution to the problem of overgrowth or
fire hazard or invasive plants because we put the goats
on them, and the goats don't do anything special. They
(09:21):
just do what goats do. They compete with each other
for food and they have a great time doing it.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
And you're listening to Genevieve Church, the third Crazy Goat
Lady of San Francisco. More of her story here on
our American Stories, and we return to our American stories
(10:12):
and to Genevieve Church of City Grazing, the goat powered
land Management and fire Prevention organization in San Francisco. Let's
pick up where she last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
We have so many amazing goats and they come to
us from all over.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
As I said, most of our goats are retired dairy goats.
Their milk production drops off and it's hard on their bodies.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
So it's really fun for us to be able to
take those ladies in and retrain them. We take them
in and just put them in basically that pasture and
then leave them there for a week. And when they
first come to us, they'll come to the fence every
morning like, isn't someone supposed to do something with me? Now?
Don't have to go somewhere, And we're like, nope, just
(10:58):
go eat with the rest of the goats. But we
also every year we try and adopt in some of
the little orphan dairy boys.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Dairy goats have to have a baby every year in
order to keep giving milk.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
The females go back into the dairy industry, but those
males usually go into the meat industry, and we like
to adopt a few of those in every year and
raise them to.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Be graising goats.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
So those little guys, they are very social. They've been
hand raised by people. They really turn to us for
all of their needs. There's so much fun to interact with.
They're really naturalized to people and they have big personalities.
But some of our other goats are rescue goats that
have come from you name it, all different situations, and.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Yes, all of our goats have names.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
From Regina, the complaining dairy goat who never stops yelling
at us Toune. We have Huck and Finn, who are
a pair of twins. Another pair that we have is
Curry and Stew. Their original owner raise them for food,
but he bought them as babies and he loved them
so much. He just fell in love with them and
called us and kind of shameface that they said, I
(12:05):
can't eat my goats, can you take them for me?
Speaker 3 (12:08):
So we took them in.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
But my favorite two they've actually both passed on now
Princess and Udo came to us. They didn't seem to
know that they were goats.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
They were these.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Enormous, enormous alpine goats, and they had been raised in
someone's kitchen in Oakland.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
They'd been raised on people food.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
They'd never raised They'd been eating breakfast, cereal, and apparently
human food.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Their whole lives.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
The lady who raised them was very eccentric. Her neighbors
were complaining to the health department. She reached out to
us and we were like, yeah, sure, we'll take them.
So we went to get them, and we didn't really
think it through. We didn't understand that they, you know,
other than going into her backyard, they really hadn't been outside.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
She was keeping them in the house.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
So we had to teach them how to live outside.
We had to teach them how to We had to
expose them, and.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
They were adults.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
They were both quite large, and in the end both
of them took over the herd. Both of them were
the alpha males in the herd. And we named Princess
Princess because he was so high maintenance. I have to say,
like that name wasn't really supposed to stick because he
was the biggest white male goat with giant horns that
you've ever seen. And it was just kind of an
(13:23):
ironic name because he didn't know how to eat or
take care of himself.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
He was such a princess. We had to wait on
him hand and foot before he learned how to be
a goat.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
By the end, he was the king and he just
ruled the entire herd. So those two probably are my
favorite rescue story, But we have others.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
We have goats that came to.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Us from four h So there are four h kids
that had raised them didn't want them to end up
being harvested, so they donated them to us rather than
sell them at the fair.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
One of them, though, he.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Had a little accident, and this was before he came
to us. He lost the tip of his ear and
they decided he couldn't be shown as breeding stock, which
was the intention when he was raised.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
His name is Dipper.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Dipper looks like a small rhinoceros without horns. He's the
most muscular goat I've ever seen. He has giant, thick
legs and huge feet and a giant head. He looks
like he could knock all the other goats down. But
he's the ultimate and gentle giant. He doesn't know he's strong,
he doesn't know that he's just the burliest goat ever,
(14:30):
and he stands off to the side and lets all
the other goats eat first. And we have to keep
him in with the old ladies because he does not
understand his own strength. So they come to us with
such cute personalities and individual natures. Goats love salt. They
have a very high need for salt in their diet.
And so when you see a goat licking the inside
(14:50):
of a tin can, which yes, that stereotype is inaccurate.
One goats will pick up tin cans that have had
food in them and they will carry them around.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
They actually can't eat them.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Trying to lick out whatever was inside that can. If
there's any residue of salts.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
A chip bag.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
You know what's the most common piece of litter that
you see anywhere, It's a dorito's bag. They will take
them in their mouth. They will chew on them and
chew on them and chew on them the way we
chew gum, and then they'll spit them out because they're
just trying to suck all that salt off of the inside.
That's kind of where goats get that reputation from. So
(15:26):
it's like, why why did they chew on plastic? We finally,
I think it was a vet who was like, oh,
it's the salt. They love roses and they love blackberries. Blackberries.
That's great because it's a massive problem in California. We
have Himalayan BlackBerry growing all over the West coast and
it's a terrible invasive plant.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
The roses not so much.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Nobody really wants the goats to come in and eat
their prize rose collection, so we do have to. You know,
we're really intense about our fencing to make sure that
that doesn't happen. Homeowners associations in the Bay Area tend
to I don't know why. They almost all have one
giant inaccessible hillside that periodically needs to have something done
about the fire danger, and we love doing it. City
(16:11):
Grazing gets about sixty percent of our income from our
grazing work, but the other forty percent of our income
comes from donations, and we really.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Rely heavily on that.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
We have a really amazing team of employees. We are
out there setting fencing, clearing paths. San Francisco is big
in terms of population and small.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
In terms of acreage.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
It's a tiny little city that is jam packed, so
we have to build really nice fences every time we
take the goats anywhere to make sure that they stay
in closed, stay safe, and make sure everyone in this
situation is contained. We also have a box truck that
we converted to a mobile barn, but it's essentially just
(16:56):
like any U haul that you'd use to move. We
pull out the ramp, the goats run in the ramp
or run out the ramp, but it's really kind of
hilarious to check out the goats getting in and out
of the truck. It's not what you'd expect, but it's
definitely been one of our best innovations. Talk about funny stories,
we have staged goat yoga. If you missed your chance
(17:18):
at the goat yoga trend when that was a thing,
don't worry about it, because what you really missed out
on was probably getting peed on by a baby goat.
That's what we don't tell you when we saw you
the ticket, But it was a fundraiser that we did
for a while. Some of the other crazy stuff that
we've done. We have pranked a groom at a wedding.
(17:40):
His in laws hired us to bring goats to the
wedding reception and to bring them out behind the groom
while the father of the bride was making his toast,
and we didn't know this. They didn't tell us. I
don't think they loved their son in law very much.
He was terrified of goats, so it was just a scene.
(18:05):
It was hilarious for everyone there except for the groom.
So we've taken goats to nightclub openings, not inside, outside
so that they are their ears wouldn't get any damage.
We've done a really great promotion years and years in
a row. We did about five of these called Goat
My Valentine, where we would bring goats and stage a
(18:25):
photo shoot so that you could come up with your
sweetheart and take a photo with the goats and get
cuddly with our baby goats on Valentine's Day. That was
a really fun one that we did. So people love goats,
it's true, and they're a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
We love them.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
We're all of us at city grazing. We smell terrible
at the end of the day, but we love our job.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And a great job on the storytelling in production by
Madison and a special thanks to Genevieve Church, executive director
of City Grazing. Hi goodness, I love some of the names.
Huck and Finn, Regina, the complaining dairy gooat, and Princess
and Udo enormous alpine goats who never grazed in their lives.
They were raised on human food in a house. The
(19:10):
story of City Grazing, which started as a fun side
project but now takes care of fire prevention and so
much more in the city of San Francisco. Here on
our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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