Goats eat, recycle Christmas trees

GOATS are known to eat just about anything, but it didn’t dawn on Vince Thomas until recently that the menu might include Christmas trees.

“They’ll eat the pine needles and leave the skeleton of the tree,” said Thomas, a long-time volunteer fire-fighter who has come up with a new use for his family-owned goat herding business, ‘Goat Grazers.’

Thomas is launching a new programme with the Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District to use his 40 goats to help recycle Christmas trees. He says, he got tired of watching people discard the trees in landfills or dump them on public property, where they became a fire danger.

Thomas said: “We had the idea of doing just that with the recycling programme and we thought about the trees. And the goats are great employees, they love their job and they don’t complain.”

“I did a lot of research on that, and it’s OK for the goats,” Thomas said. “With cattle and some of the other animals, it can cause miscarriages. But for goats, it’s a natural de-wormer, and pine is very high in vitamin C, so it’s healthy for them.”