Weekend Open Thread: GOAT Goats!

By
Greg Diamond
– July 13, 2023Posted in: "The OC", Fresh Juice

We haven’t had an Open Thread for a while — and Neshanian is allotted only three top-level posts each containing no more than three links, so self-edit, Counselor! — and some interesting things have been reported in the Orange Lady of late. So while I’m making time to work on the story that either Vern, I, or both of us will present, I thought I could give you this low-effort easily cooked snack.

This link leads to an Orange-Lady paywalled story from May 30 that has been sitting in a tab waiting for me to write about it. (It’s Associated Press, so non-subscribers can likely find a non-paywalled version in a search.) It illustrates that sometimes two valid interests can clash — but that sometimes it is pretty easy to find a solution if you’re not too wedded to your personal or ideological interests.

For example: I believe in decent minimum wage protections for all workers — but is the strict enforcement of overtime laws worth giving up what may be our best defense against wildfires — especially in our fecund first year after a long drought? Is there some way to reconcile these two interests?

The story noted that goats, perhaps the world’s most indiscriminately voracious herbivores, are being used to clear up grasses, weeds, shrubs, and other vegetation on California’s hillsides. Goats can easily and speedily get to places that would otherwise be hard to reach, including ones adjacent to housing developments, and consume the fuel that might otherwise lead a wildfire. They don’t poison the environment, as chemical herbicides do; they are more efficient and less labor and fuel-intensive than the use of mechanical weed-whackers. I’ll add that something that wasn’t in the story: unlike sheep, which are great at grazing lawns until they are even, goats can pull out vegetation by its roots — which over millennia was supposedly a cause of desertification in areas like the Middle East. It’s a perfect match!

Well, perfect except for one small thing: goatherds. (Yes, that’s the caprine equivalent to “shepherd.”)

Many people associated with the Lakers belong in discussions of who is a GOAT. But only Kobe Bryant got the eating part down right.

Hundreds of goats may work on a single project; companies reportedly try to employ one goatherd for every 400 goats. And this is where the main complaining source of the story comes in — burdened with somewhat of a credibility problem.

The California Farm Bureau asserts that new state regulations could raise the monthly salary of herders from roughly $3,730 to $14,000 — more than they say goatherd industries can pay. One business owner quoted in the story says that he would have to sell off its 400-head stock of goats to renderers and likely declare bankruptcy.

Goatherds and shepherds are required to be on-call 24/7. They have been considered salaried workers rather than hourly wage-earners. But that does include some additional compensation, raising their monthly compensation from $1,955 (2019) to ($3,730) in 2023 and soon a projected $4,381 (2025). That seems — not unreasonable, if they’ve been screwed over in the past!

And they most likely have been. California Labor Federation head and former legislator Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, who sponsored the overtime law applying to farmworkers, calls goatherders especially vulnerable due to their temporary work visas — some are goatherders from Peru admitted to the U.S. as temporary farmworkers under the H-2A visa program — and as such lack job protection and English proficiency. Business owners note countervailing factors: while they’re paid $4,000 a month, they also have their food, housing, and phone needs covered.

I’ll add that if the goatherds’ work calendar allows them to work in only some months during the year, that monthly salary for half or a third of the year may actually constitute their annual salary!

But those labor costs are set to jump sharply in January. The story is muddled about this, but it seems that goatherds have been allowed to contract for “exempt” positions not providing overtime, but last year a state agency ruled against that practice, subjecting goatherders to the same labor laws as other farmworkers — despite dissimilar working conditions such as working individually on hillsides rather than collectively in a field, where centralized water and toilet facilities were feasible. (Note that shepherds have apparently not been found to be subject to overtime laws; this change only applies to goatherds. Yes, the regulators successfully separated the sheep herders from the goat herders.)

The agricultural interests seeking change in the law assert that pay for goatherders would rise to perhaps $14,000 a month — though that’s a big “perhaps” because the agricultural interests lobbying for a change in the law are engaged in a PR campaign aimed at lawmakers, of which their participation in this very article is a part. But as a matter of simple math, we can concede that it’s going to be a big rise, possibly enough to make this ingenious fire-prevention program economically unfeasible. (And of course, they not just paying for three months of pre-summer veggie chomping; the herds have to kept alive and healthy for the rest of the year when they aren’t in action.) Legislation last year delayed the pay requirement for a year; but as things stand it’s still scheduled to come into effect on Jan. 1..

Goatherding companies say they can’t afford to pay herders that much. They would have to drastically raise their rates, which would make it unaffordable to provide goat grazing services. A policy director for the “California Climate and Agriculture Network,” which seeks to “catalyze the powerful climate solutions offered by sustainable and organic agriculture” — which, put simply, means that they’re not bad guys trying to exploit workers and despoil the land, but good guys seeking to make creative and environmentally beneficial program like this work. (That, or they’ve bamboozled me.) He says that they agree that goatherd compensation needs to increase, but that $14,000/month would kill these programs — that’s too much cost to pass on to the cities and counties using the goats.

So: this is a situation where there are two seriously legitimate opposing interests in play: maintaining the best imaginable way of protecting California against the waves of mega-wildfires we’ve been having versus protecting workers from exploitation by agricultural business owners — which for those who don’t know has been a real thing. What to do?

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that this fire-mitigation program must continue. Wildfires as that threatening to the state and its residents. But continue at what cost? Not at the cost of forcing prisoners and homeless to do this (although if they truly can learn the ropes to herd like the Peruvians mentioned in the story, that’s wonderful: they should get that opportunity and be compensated accordingly.) Nor should the cost of compensation be set so low that it won’t attract qualified goatherds — or, worse, will attract them only out of deep financial desperation.

Is there a way to balance these interests? I can think of one — and at least one of our regular commenters will not like it.

Left to their own devices, it’s not hard to imagine that employers will abuse workers in terms of pay and working conditions. (I’ll spare you the zillions of examples.) The worst (lawful) thing a worker can do, from an employer’s perspective, is to blow the whistle on employer wrongdoing, because it leaders to costly and embarrassing consequences, and in some situations (less often than I’d like) even criminal penalties. So we need to have a way that employers who are vulnerable due to their visa status can get away from bad employers practices but still provide the services.

The clearest way I can think of is: the state can rent the goats, but hire the goatherds. The state can take over as the visa sponsor for goatherds who have been experiencing maltreatment by employers. This would take most of the bite out of the threat of summary deportation that Gonzalez Fletcher cites.

I don’t mean that the state should hire all of the goatherds, of course! I see no reason to put the grazing industry (“Big Graze”?) out of business. But just those goatherds who are being abused by employers. (Possibly, they’d have to report it — and it would have to be investigated. Or maybe not.)

But here’s a problem: wouldn’t all if the goatherds then move to the public sector? No — because the public sector would pay less, specifically to give an incentive for goatherds to work for private suppliers and for private suppliers to treat the goatherds well. (Yes, I believe that the state could do this while, exempting itself from the overtime standards.)

But I’ll go further than that. If this truly is a critical industry, with needs beyond California alone, then the state should get into the business of breeding goats and training goatherds. (Protections for existing goat-renting providers, at least while they remain under their current ownership, could and should be implemented. They’ve done the state a real service, but they simply can’t scale up the way that the state could.) As it is, California became the first in the state to use goat for clearing dry brush in 1990, and they are used for such vegetative plagues as thorny blackberries, kudzu, and poison ivy — and obviously (judging from a glance at the Puente Hills just now) our current work-goat supply does not meet demand.

The state should consider creating programs through community colleges or extension programs to train people in managing hill vegetation-clearing goatherding. This is distinct from programs training people to raise goats for meat, milk, their hair, or their body parts (such as their intestines, called “catgut”). If for some reason this is impossible, then the state could arrange to sponsor H-1A visas (which may require some changes to federal law or regulations) to bring in goatherds from South America, southern Asia, and Africa — President Obama’s father was a goatherd as a child! — in exchange for which we could provide them with shipments of ample goat meat and milk.

This may sound fanciful — actually, I’m pretty sure it does — but I maintain that it makes a lot more sense than bankrupting the goat rental industry that can protect our state from wildfires, and it’s an alternative to excluding goatherds from some important employment laws.

This is your early-and-late Weekend Open Thread; talk about these nimble odiferous creatures or whatever else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of dignity, decorum, and discretion.

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About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)