Brushclearing livestock may disappear from hills
Overtime law a threat to wildfireprevention herds, ranchers say
Residents of San Anselmo’s Sleepy Hollow neighborhood joined rancher Bianca Soares to watch a herd of 400 goats and sheep tumble over a steep Marin hillside. Like kindergartners let out for recess, the brownandwhite goats jumped and jostled as they ran, while the dusky white sheep stole occasional bites of grass as they were corralled by two herders and their dogs.
“Can I encourage you to get closer to the houses?” a neighbor asked Soares, who was overseeing the herd’s move from one grazing site to another this month. The animals are actually firefighters — their job is to remove fuels and help prevent fire in the community at the foot of Mount Tamalpais.
A fourthgeneration sheep rancher, Soares oversees three herds in Marin for her mother’s company, Star Creek Land Stewards, which does prescribed grazing for fire prevention — fire grazing — on
“We’re probably going to scrap it out as long as we can.” Rancher Andrée Soares
public and private lands around the Bay Area. As fire season started early this year and with prospects of worse yet to come, their services are highly sought after. But California sheep ranchers say the cost of this type of fire prevention will
skyrocket because of a new state overtime pay law that will increase sheepherder pay by 50%. It’s already causing some ranchers to sell their animals.
“The demand is going up and up,” said Soares, 25, who said clients are already trying to book for next year. She can’t set a price yet because of uncertainty over the new regulations. “It’s about to get extra hard to find.”
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. Sheep and goat ranchers are campaigning for Gov. Gavin Newsom to direct the state’s labor department to instead implement a 48hour workweek for herders, in line with federal labor requirements.
“It pretty much took the profit right out of the sheep business,” said Brian Birt,owner of Mulehead Growers in Petaluma. After the overtime law went into effect for his business, which has more than 25 employees, he laid off five herders and sold his 2,000 ewes and 1,500 goats, which used to provide grazing to vineyards and rice farms for weed removal and some fire prevention.
As wildfires have brought mass casualties and devastation to California cities and towns in recent years, using cattle, sheep and goats to remove combustible vegetation has grown as a lowcost and sustainable fire prevention method.
Sheep and goats can go places where heavy machinery can’t, and grazed areas have been shown to burn less ferociously than uncleared ones — plus, the grass provides free food for livestock.
California’s $76 million sheep industry has around 3,500 operations, including those that raise animals for wool and meat. With the exception of sheep and goat dairies, most sheep and goat ranches hire herders to move the animals from pasture to pasture.
“It’s highly specialized,” said Ryan Indart, a thirdgeneration sheep rancher in Fresno County who said he will probably lay off half his herders and sell many of the 3,500 sheep he raises for meat and for fire grazing at large solar projects in the Central Valley. “You have to have somebody caretaking for these animals and moving them, and to make sure there’s water and to keep the predators away.”
Like Star Creek employees Silvio Justo and Nester Cochachi, most herders come from Peru on H2A Temporary Agricultural Worker visas — Indart and other ranchers said they’re unable to fill the jobs domestically. They sleep close to the herd at night, living out an ancient nomadic lifestyle in RVs while protecting suburban neighborhoods like Sleepy Hollow from fire danger.
Earlier this month, Justo, 37, and Cochachi, 38, walked a herd from an open space on a ridge to graze around the periphery of homes near a cityowned water tank in San Anselmo. While the sheep excel at mowing grass, the goats are experts at trimming lower tree branches and thinning poison oak, coyote brush and brambles.
Chusho, a white Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dog, charged ahead to check for predators. As the goats and sheep followed him, the delicate crunch of their hooves on the dry grass created a soft, enveloping sound, like rain pattering on the window. Sara and Ruby, the herders’ lowtotheground border collies, rounded up stragglers as the men raced behind in jeans and cowboy boots.
By 8 a.m. the herd made it to the new site near the water tank, where they would stay for two days. The grazing sheep made long shadows on the steep slope while Chusho swaggered through the herd.
“When there is a white dog, the coyotes don’t come close,” said Cochachi, who began moving water tanks to fill troughs at the new location as Justo quickly set up electric fencing around the herd.
They had both been working since 6 a.m. — Justo from his company trailer parked a few hundred yards from a suburban street. He first checked on the animals, making sure they had water and that the fences were in place. He’s usually done with active work around 10 a.m. or 11 a.m., then does a few more hours of work in the evening. Cochachi sleeps in a trailer in Lucas Valley and provides support for all three Marin herds.
“I check with every guy every morning,” Cochachi said. “After we move the goats, I move the trailer for Silvio.”
Ranchers say those hours are typical — five to seven hours a day in summer and 10 to 12 hours on weekdays during lambing season, which for the Soares family takes place at their home ranch in Los Banos (Merced County). The H2A visa also requires the owners to cover housing and food costs. Under the new law, in January the monthly salary for herders at small operations will rise from around $2,300 to $3,444.
“The concern is that it is a drastic change in the way that one runs their small business,” said state Sen. Melissa Hurtado, DSanger (Fresno County), who has lobbied the governor to change herder hours to a 48hour week. “It’s a problem for the employee as well. If the employer can’t afford to stay in business, they won’t have a job.”
Yet United Farm Workers, the labor organization behind AB1066, which ended almost 80 years of farmworkers’ exclusion from overtime pay, said ranchers have had ample time to plan for the law. Elizabeth Strater, the union’s director of strategic campaigns, said the overtime pay for herders is commensurate with the challenges of the work.
“If sheepherding is truly an important part of a region’s fire management plan, that work should be valued and compensated accordingly,” Strater said. She added that herders have a unique vulnerability to exploitation because of their isolation, especially those who work in more remote areas of the West.
Andrée Soares, owner of Star Creek Land Stewards, said her business will probably hold on longer than ranches that raise animals for meat or wool, because her primary focus is targeted grazing.
“We’re a pretty stubborn people, and we’re probably going to scrap it out as long as we can,” said Soares, part of a community whose grandparents or greatgrandparents originally came from Spain’s Basque country as sheepherders. But she is worried about the overall infrastructure of the industry falling apart as other sheep operations fail.
In Marin, fire grazing efforts are targeted to buffer zones around residential areas and to ridges between communities, to stop fires from growing and to provide areas where firefighters can stage attacks, said Rich Shortall, a retired assistant deputy chief at San Francisco Fire Department and executive coordinator for Firesafe-Marin. The organization oversees an annual budget of about $150,000 for prescribed grazing, and Shortall isn’t sure what will happen if the costs go up.
“There’s a point where it becomes too expensive for us. What we end up doing is nothing, because those areas are not easily accessible,” he said. The alternative is bringing in a human labor force to cut excess foliage by hand, he said.
“You not only have to cut everything with people, which is expensive, you also have to haul it out,” he said. “That’s another efficiency thing, because (the sheep) eat it, and you can imagine what happens next.”
Richard Carson, a professor of environmental and resource economics at UC San Diego, has a different view of the potential impact of the new agriculture overtime pay. He said after some initial disruption, the market will probably adjust and sheep ranches should be able to raise prices because demand for fire grazing is so high.
“There’s pretty much a frantic effort to thin out as much of this stuff and make a defensible space as you can,” he said. “The good thing about sheep is they just like to munch.”