In the wild, goats would primarily eat tree leaves, which tend to be higher in minerals than grass and carry a lower risk for spreading internal parasites. So it's no surprise that when people talk about winter fodder for goats, they often talk about feeding them dried tree leaves. I love the idea, but, unfortunately, that's all it is to most people --- an idea. Only one website that I've found so far has provided actual information on how to gather tree leaves for goats, so if you want the long version, feel free to follow that link. For the short version, read on....

First of all, I should mention that, while goats will sometimes eat fallen autumn leaves, this isn't the kind of high-nutrition foodstuff that the goat owner should be looking for. As you probably learned in elementary school, tree leaves turn color in the fall as the plant sucks many of the important nutrients back out of the leaf and into the trunk, so fallen leaves are more akin to straw than they are to hay. A goat might eat some fallen leaves, but they're not going to fare very well on a diet of fallen leaves alone. Instead, if you opt to save tree leaves for winter feed, your goal should be to strip the leaves from the trees while they're still green, dry them, and then store the leaves like you would hay.

Okay, so how does one go about this process, which I've seen called "shredding," or making "tree hay" or "pollard hay"? Since trees leaves are often out of reach, the first step is usually to create a coppice or pollard system --- which we luckily have growing up in our powerline cut at this very moment. (No, we didn't create it. When the electric company whacked down all of the big trees after a storm, many small sprouts came up from their base --- instant coppice.) Once you have a coppice system, you harvest the small stems and their attached leaves in the summer at two-to-six-year intervals. At this time, the young branches are usually around four or five feet long, and they can be allowed to dry for a day on the ground, then are tied up into bundles (a bit like corn shocks) to dry another two or three days in the field before being moved to the barn.

The trick seems to be finding tree species that handle coppicing well and that also hold onto their leaves when dry, since you don't want to be stuck raking dried leaves out of the summer grass --- it's much easier to simply carry leafy branches to winter storage all in one bundle. In Bulgaria, maple, hornbeam, ash, mulberry, some oaks, willow, linden, and elm are most frequently used and are harvested any time between mid July and the end of September, while in Italy, farmers focus primarily on ash and harvest in late August.

This process of harvesting tree leaves for winter fodder is often called shredding, probably because the leaves are plucked from the twigs in the winter before feeding. Then the branches that are left behind can be used for firewood. I love the elegance of the system, and am curious to see how time-consuming it would be to pack away fodder for two small goats. The biggest stumbling block at the moment is where to store the tree hay --- I guess we'll need to put a hay loft on our winter to-do list!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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