With 7,000 Sheep and Goats, This Mother-Daughter Team Is Playing a Part in California’s Fight Against Wildfires

Extreme wildfires, like the Camp Fire that burned more than 153,000 acres and killed more than 80 people in 2018 or the Dixie Fire that’s now been burning for months and still isn’t fully contained, usually ignite and grow in dense forests that are too woody to graze sheep and goats. Wind is also a factor. Many homes destroyed in extreme wildfires ignite because of embers carried significant distances by the wind. Grazing has “limited ability to alter this outcome,” Keeley says, but it can create space around buildings, giving firefighters a way in.

Avoiding the large-scale fires that crop up throughout the American West requires completely reversing how land managers have approached fire management over the last century, says Mark Finney, a researcher at the U.S. Forest Service who studies fire behavior. For hundreds of years, periodic lightning-induced forest fires and controlled burns by Native American tribes regularly removed dead materials, like branches and foliage, that fuel large wildfires. That changed around the early 1900s, when government land managers ​​began trying to eliminate all fires​​, allowing flammable materials to pile up over time.

“If the fuels were managed, as they had been up until [European] settlement, we would not be seeing these kinds of fires right now,” he says. Finney adds that global warming, which increases temperatures and lengthens droughts, also exacerbates wildfires. There are efforts to increase controlled burns, he says, but taming wildfires will require many different strategies, livestock being one.

Bianca has seen that first-hand. She’s watched the animals transform overgrown shrublands into spaces where native grasses are coming back. She’s heard about fires that were contained because her goats grazed nearby. It’s a small, but vital, piece of a much larger fire mitigation puzzle, she says, work that exceeds her childhood dreams.