written by Stephany Wilkes
Photography by Paige Green
Jaime Irwin, of Kaos Sheep Outfit; Brittany Cole Bush (BCB) of Shepherdess Land & Livestock; Sarah Keiser of Wild Oat Hollow, and Paigelynn Trotter of Coastal Land & Livestock – among many others – are providing mentorship and professional training to share what they have learned from starting their target grazing businesses, and to extend opportunities to others. They are generous with their experience and knowledge, and the first thing they all teach is that grazing and herding are life, not just a job.
“You don’t get to talk about anything else,” Irwin says. “You don’t get to talk about football or anything. It’s sheep or dogs. There is nothing else.”
“The animals cannot just be left to themselves,” Keiser adds. “You have to be with them. You don’t just throw them out there and think they’ll eat everything down and take care of themselves. It doesn’t work that way.”
Targeted, or contract, grazing is managed grazing in support of specific landscape and ecosystem goals, such as the reduction of wildfire fuels and harmful invasive species, like yellow star thistle and cheatgrass. The animals who do the actual grazing – cattle, sheep, and goats, whether alone or in combination – are primarily service animals vs. production animals, though they may provide secondary products like meat or fiber in order to diversify income streams. In the American West, targeted grazing is often used in combination with prescribed and cultural burning to better reflect and mimic natural ecosystem disturbance that came from wildfire and herds of bison, elk, and buffalo.
While wild animals grazed intensely and moved themselves along in response to predator pressure from wolves, bear, and mountain lion, domesticated livestock in modern, heavily built environments need skilled people to manage their movements. Every aspect of working with sheep to manage vegetation depends on being able to skillfully handle and move the animals actually doing the grazing, safely and with intention, and that is where the partnership between Paigelynn Trotter and Sarah Keiser come in. In addition to providing contract grazing services in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, Trotter and Keiser provide bilingual (English/Spanish) stockmanship workshops to teach skilled handling and herding.
“Stockmanship training specific to small ruminants is not readily available to practitioners and is a growing need,” Trotter explains. “When we increase a handler’s ability to keep calm control over livestock, and to move them effectively, we decrease the negative impact on land grazed by small ruminants. Increasing the understanding of safe stockmanship basically protects the economic activity of prescribed grazing, because how the animals are managed and handled is what ensures the continued ecological benefits to the environment. It’s what makes grazing managed and how you prevent overgrazing.”
Besides increasing the number of qualified, professional contract graziers, Keiser and Trotter’s stockmanship training provides a threefold benefit: (1) increasing the safety of people and livestock – “preventing anyone, human or animal, from getting hurt;” (2) increasing productivity by decreasing stress on livestock, and (3) increasing the quality of the public’s interaction with grazing projects, and therefore their perception of agriculture. This happens because, as Trotter describes, ¨We are often loading animals on a road or herding them through public lands used for recreation, being observed in our actions and how we treat livestock.”
And sheep are not the only animals to train and handle skillfully: livestock guardian dogs require the same. They are key to the coexistence of livestock and wildlife, protecting both: by scaring predators with loud barks and their presence, dogs reduce the perceived need to shoot coyotes and other predators.
“It doesn’t just happen,” Irwin says. “People need to put the work in to figure out their dogs and you cannot get around it. You get what you put in. If you buy an already trained dog, you still have to spend all this time connecting with the dog to get it to work. It doesn’t just go out and turn on. You have to be its boss.”
Sheep, dogs, goats, horses – all need daily observation and hands-on care, too. Irwin developed bilingual training for the Kaos Sheep Outfit team with Dr. Rosie Busch, veterinarian at UC Davis, and has recently begun to offer these vet-led, hands-on training to the public as well. “Everyone has to be a professional,” Irwin says. “They have to know how to treat a lamb or a ewe that’s in trouble, to deal with injury and figure out what’s going on. But where do you learn if you didn’t grow up learning? Everyone can’t go to vet school. Well, we’ll teach you. Most of the interest in our classes is from newer producers who are one to three years into their operation and having lambing losses, ewes in poor health. Everyone wants to do better – they’re not malicious – but people don’t magically know how.”
Their first class, hands-on Live Lambing, was held in October 2024. Nineteen students got a firsthand look at the chaos of more than 500 ewes lambing, and hands-on experience with emergency c-section, lamb CPR, tubing lambs and ewes, feeding lambs, intraperitoneal injections, necropsy, and much more. Camp Kaos will offer 2025 classes in parasite management, lameness prevention and hoofcare, rumen science, and other topics.
Brittany Cole Bush (BCB) founded Shepherdess Land & Livestock and Grazing School of the West over a decade ago. In addition to using holistic, prescribed grazing methods with goats and sheep for fire fuel load reduction, invasive species management, and ecosystem health, BCB is deeply committed to training the next generation of land stewards working on the land with livestock. To this end, Grazing School of the West offers seasonal educational workshops, vocational intensives, and online training.
Recently, Grazing School of the West – in partnership with New Cowgirl Camp – offered a weeklong grazing intensive at True Grass Farms in Tomales, California. It covered grazing business models and career paths, regenerative principles, and lots of hands-on land and ruminant management (of sheep, cattle, and goats) in service of vegetation management goals.
Maya Weeks participated in the class and shared the following about her experience: “Education and mentorship have been so important to so many aspects of my life. In grazing, these traditions of sharing knowledge directly through relationships is especially key. Grazing isn’t something you can just learn from a book or YouTube — you need to learn it in a hands-on way, and to do so, people need to trust you with the animals they work with and that they are teaching you stockmanship with. While I find interacting with sheep to be intuitive, I feel strongly that I need to learn from extremely knowledgeable people so I can interact with sheep and other ruminants in the way that is best for them as well as will best accomplish my goals. Getting to learn from women and nonbinary people has been a real gift. It has let me bring my whole self to this training and boosted my confidence.”
Despite the challenges, these women graziers believe deeply in the work they do and would not trade it for another trade.
Irwin says, “I would tell people to go into this business. I do tell them that. I don’t think I would want to do anything else right now, but it’s not an 8-to-5. Everyone wants a weekend off and an 8-to-5 job, and targeted grazing is NOT that. The only way it succeeds is 24-7. You have to treat it like a business but really, it’s a life. It doesn’t come when you want it to come. And you cannot do it alone.”
Trotter agrees. “It all feels really shaky sometimes,” she says. “It does kind of always feel like wow, if I break my back, this is over. I mean, it’s over immediately. I have not broken my back. Fortunately, I’m still going and I’m pretty fairly efficient in my work, so that part’s working out. It’s working out pretty well.”
“People need to care and this work requires one to care,” BCB says. “It starts with the self and ripples out to family, community. This is a pathway to jobs that make better people. Everything I do at this point is to support the notion, or significance, of supporting a culture of care, of individuals caring about the things around themselves. And there is nothing that has broken me down – and helped me have the deepening of care – more than working with animals, with sheep and goats on the land. It is a form of personal transformation that I can now share with others from non-agriculture backgrounds. Teamwork, life and death, pushing limits in your mind, endurance. We are so much like the animals we work with. We are all just trying to get along and endure in the elements.”