Save shepherds and firefighting flocks

You’ve seen the fun feature stories in newspapers all around California, including this one: Suburban cities with wildland interface hiring herds of goats and sheep to munch down vegetation, greatly lessening the fire danger for surrounding neighborhoods.

While the animals are great mowing machines, and while border collies are very smart and very good at controlling the herds, there is a need for some human supervision.

But thanks to a new California labor law, the people power part of this equation may price the practice of hiring sheep and goats into unaffordable realms.

That’s not good for any of the parties involved, or for our drought-dry state’s already extraordinarily high fire dangers.

As the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tara Duggan reported last month, “California’s 2016 overtime law for agriculture, AB1066, requires that herders of sheep and goats receive pay for a 168hour week because they are on call 24 hours a day. The law went into effect in 2019 for companies with 26 or more employees, and in January will also apply to those with 25 or fewer employees, the size of most operations.”

That’s right — since time immemorial, perhaps even since Little Bo Peep, people who work tending sheep and goats have been on the clock around the clock. It’s nothing like an 8-to-5, and anyone who gets into the shepherd biz knows it.

Many of the big-time shepherds in the American West are of Basque descent, and by now have owned herds over many generations. The people they hire to tend their individual flocks these days mostly come from Peru on H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker visas — ranchers say they can’t fill the jobs domestically. But they also say the new law for smaller operations will put them out of business, as already has happened for larger outfits One Petaluma rancher laid off five herders and sold his 2,000 ewes and 1,500 goats.

To catch a small break, ranchers are asking Gov. Gavin Newsom to direct the state’s labor department to allow a 48-hour workweek for herders, which is in line with federal labor requirements. We join them this fire season to ask the governor to do just and save these firefighters.