Edible Sacramento Summer 2022

PROVIDING A SOLUTION Hazeltine started his vegetation management business in 1994. He was 30 years old, with a family to take care of and a mortgage to pay. At the time, Hazeltine was known as “Dr. Death” for his ability to kill plants with herbicides on timberlands owned by big names such as Sierra Pacific Industries. “Iwasabrushkiller.Wewerekillingbrushtogrowtrees,”hesays. The work paid his bills and provided a modest living for him. In 2006, he bought 700 goats, his first commercial herd, to com plement his brush-management business. He continued to use ex pensive chemical sprays tomanage plants but began to come to the realization that, instead of killing the nutrient-dense brush with poison, he could use the vegetation as a steady feed source for the animals and, simultaneously, protect the health of the land. “Originally, it seemed really simple. We just needed to get critters in the woods,” he recalls, but he adds that convincing land managers it was a good idea took a fewmore years. When the economy took a dive in 2008, Hazeltine was forced to shut down his vegetation-management business, and he scrambled to find a consistent source of feed for his herd. He was losing money rapidly with a large number of animals that still re quired feeding. By sheer luck, he ran into an old acquaintance, Patrick Shea, executive director of theWildlife Heritage Foundation, and soon Hazeltine embarked on an experiment that would shift his fu ture. He agreed to take a herd of 570 sheep and 70 goats to 500 acres of failing conservation land overgrownwith invasive weeds and a thatch burden, on the perimeter of a high-density housing development in Lincoln Hills, to begin a managed grazing e”ort on 22 acres of it. For Hazeltine, who was accustomed to working alone in the woods, the idea of working in such a populated area terrified him, but he knew he was on to something.

“Everyone was motivated to figure this stu” out. The goats [and sheep] just kind of made sense,” Hazeltine says. The experiment was intended to determine whether grazing couldwork to satisfy both the conservation requirements and the varied concerns of the residents. It did. By 2012, Hazeltine had gone from that first 22 acres to grazing more than 5,000 acres and managing 14,500 animals in Lincoln and Rocklin. Integraz ers provided an a”ordable, holistic, large-scale strategy for man aging landscapes. “Everyone was broke and had all these weeds. I provided a solution,” he says. A SYSTEMS THINKER Hazeltine says that in the early days, hiring a goat herd was seen as a “necessary evil” to managing invasive weeds and ladder fu els, or low-lying vegetation that allows fire to climb to the tree canopy. But there’s been a paradigm shift. That experiment in Lincoln Hills has turned into an annual grazing model that is being duplicated at housing developments, schools, churches, conserved lands, levees, fire districts, vineyards, and orchards throughout California’s Central Valley. “Lee is so hands-on. He is a systems thinker,” says Gunder son, who began her ranching history in theMidwest and is an im portant part of the Integrazers team. With a longtime conservation background, she, like many in the conservationmovement, has shifted her views of livestock. She has witnessed how e”orts to protect wild places and keep them behind fences can have a disastrous effect. Land needs

Hazeltine with two generations of Peruvian shepherds

28 SUMMER 2022

edible Sacramento