Edible Sacramento Summer 2022

A s you drive along back roads in Sacramento, Placer, Butte, Yolo, and El Dorado counties, you’re likely to see herds of grazing goats and sheep as they help to restore the natural balance of California’s open spaces while keeping neighborhoods safe fromwildfire. These hardworking herbivores are becoming a common and welcome sight among communities living in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) — that transition zone where people have built communities within the natural wild environment. The herds and their American, Peruvian, and European shep herds are an instrumental part of the team called Integrazers, a Pleasant Grove-based business organized and run by Lee Hazel tine and his life partner, Laura Gunderson. “Well-managed, quality grazing is necessary for land,” Hazel tine says. “It is the grazing animals that keep the land healthy.” For 30 years, the University of California, Davis-trained sci entist has used experimentation to forge a regenerative grazing path, developing a model that is attracting a following.

“I’m a pioneer. I’m a figure-it-out guy,” Hazeltine says. Grazing in California dates back some 200 years to the arriv al of Spanish settlers, but an actual ranch industry did not take o” until after the Gold Rush. Before European settlement, herbi vores such as ground sloths, bison, mastodons, camels, and oxen dominated the early California grasslands for millions of years. Later, pronghorn antelope, black tail deer, and tule elk kept things in check. Early explorers documented 500,000 tule elk in the Central Valley. “What we do is mimic large herds that were here before all of us,” Hazeltine says of Integrazers. Native Californians burned, dug, tilled, and pruned native vegetation to maintain the biological resources they used for food, medicine, and construction materials. A natural, healthy cycle of small fires kept vegetation levels in check. But for the last 150 years, a focus on fire suppression has led to a buildup of vege tative fuels in populated WUI areas — that beautiful but danger ous place considered at great risk of catastrophic wildfire.

Integrazers' sheep graze on pasture grasses

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