24
votes
California goat grazing faces crisis after wage change
Link information
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- Title
- California relies on goats to combat fires. A wage change threatens the industry
- Published
- Aug 2 2026
- Word count
- 1533 words
Typical Ag propaganda.
"Oh no we couldn't get enough Americans at slave wages, we need Visas. But we still need slave wages."
So what I'm really hearing from this is that we need to ensure there is an unlimited supply of visas, so that each worker only needs to do an 8 hour shift.
And remove the exemption for sheep herders.
Stop respecting farmers so much
Yeah this is a “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” situation
I forget where I picked this up, but:
If your business model falls apart when you start paying your employees a proper wage, you didn't have a business model.
Somehow, every time political will builds behind some pro-worker initiative, be it safety, wages, or time off, there is a torrent of "this will destroy the sector!" followed by absolutely nothing bad happening after the improvement is in place.
The problem is that they DO have a business model, its indirect theft, stealing from the community.
If a business isn't paying a living wage the rest of the community has to fill in the gap with social services, food banks, housing subsidies, homeless shelters, etc. etc. etc.
As the employers tell it, they provide everything to their foreign workers and the they don't interact with the community at all. They claim that the cost of living is nothing while they're working, and then they go home.
This reminds me of someone getting a job on a fishing boat in Alaska.
Maybe it doesn't really work that way, though? It would be nice to hear from the goatherds themselves.
They're legally required to provide room and board for their employees because they're on those specific visas. It's not a kindness thing. My former job also had to provide me room and board and not consider it compensation because I was required to live there and respond.
The goat herders were interviewed in said 93 page report.
On the one hand, when a business shuts down because they can't make it work, sure, that's capitalism. There will be other businesses.
But on the other hand: when a factory lays everyone off and shuts down, that is not good news for the people who are out of a job and it seems rather heartless to cheer about it. It seems like the same thing here?
Overly generalizing here, but best I can tell factories are rarely closed because they are unprofitable, but rather that it is more profitable to move them. It is the greed to perpetually pad margins and a lack of consequences for ignoring the disrupted communities that fuels this.
In this case, yes a jump from $60k to almost $300k is high. But I'll bet that could easily be shaved to $180k total cost by adding a second shift, because a huge percentage of that gain is due to the overtime.
And when you bear in mind that we're talking about an area where the median household income is $60k, I do not consider it unreasonable that people doing utterly hellish work get paid on-par with the difficulty of the work that they are doing.
What I am saying is that those exemptions shouldn't have been put in place to begin with. I doubt there wasn't a phase-in plan to account for this and raise contract pricing accordingly. Some transparency about margins would certainly help their case, but I have a nagging suspicion that the volunteers to do so are few and far between.
It seems like it's bigger than any single business. If they double their prices will they still get customers, or will their customers decide that, at that price, they can do without the goats?
They seem to believe they won't have a business anymore. Maybe they're wrong, but...
And the point made by @vord stands.
Maybe they don't need 24 hour goatherds, maybe they need a pen with some livestock guard dogs. But if they do need them, they need 3-4 shifts of them, to cover weekends.
But I could as easily ask why not let them cut their costs in half and not pay their workers as much as they are? Why not let them abuse their employees more?
(Because generally we don't want employers to abuse their employees)
Plus they have literally not tried it. Might as well, since it's the law and see how it goes. They can "claim" what they want, whatever they actually think. Lets see.
One thing that strikes me is that the article doesn't include any interviews with the goatherds. I wonder what they think?
It's a traditional occupation. Have goatherds been abused for centuries?
There is a 93 page report that contains at least some of the answers to the questions you ask. It was interesting to skim through. I found it via Google very easily!
And your second question is context dependent and nonsensical when comparing modern commercial herding to "centuries" of herding but answered as asked, of course.
The answer would be "of course" to any group of employees over the course of centuries. Because you're not asking if all of them were abused, nor are you delineating the herders who worked for themselves or families vs for private commercial business, or who were immigrants vs in their home country.
But yeah, of course herders have been abused for centuries.
I think the article said the county was paying for it?
In a lot of places the clearing is done by controlled fire, that seems way more expensive in labor and pollution than goats.
It is very interesting how farming seems to be one of those last bastions of "corporate can't touch me here!" fields. Meanwhile, Agriculture was not only compromised long ago, but was probably one of the first fields to be incorporated. Doesn't matter the economy; everyone needs to eat. So of course corporate interests would establish themselves there as early as possible.
This is all to say; the people making this case are probably billionaire companies that can easily 1) pay the overtime if needed, especially in California where the alternative is a costly wildfire or 2) can hire more labor to rotate out into shifts, like any other reasonable company. I don't exactly have much sympathy here. Pay you labor.
From the article:
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It seems pretty understandable that if your labor costs go up $150k+/employee overnight, you'll have a hard time making payroll. The charges to your customers were calculated considering the old wage and the new wage is so much higher that you'll have to go convince customers to pay way more before the next time you need to pay your employees. Maybe they will and everyone will be happy! Or maybe they won't because wildfire risk is a cost that everyone bears but unless everyone's paying then why would I suddenly pay a shit ton more?
I hope you guys remember this when we get the next major wildfire in California and someone says "why don't they just have goats graze the hills". Who's going to pay $240k + room&board to a goat herder when they could pay $60k + room&board for a sheep herder? Lol.
The normal response to requiring overtime pay like that is to turn it into shift work.
If it's truly a 24/7 job, then 3 shifts of 8 hours just multiplies the current cost by 3, which brings the cost to about the same. It's probably going to be some mix of shift work, more goats per herder, an "on-call" dedicated herder, and even then it's not clear this would work. The study itself notes that only "sometimes" is it possible for there to be a dedicated herder in an on-call system where one herder manages multiple flocks. If it's 1 designated on-call herder per flock, we get back to the same expensive problem.
page 16
I would also like to copy this comment from the article's comment section:
Wow, sounds incredibly important and the price increase is justified.
Weird that sheep are somehow immune to these issues.
Our entire society is predicated on the idea that some jobs require 24/7 on-call while not paying 24/7. The concept of an hourly wage and overtime derives from jobs that are hourly, but some professions are outside of the traditional 8 hour structure. Paying overtime based on that has no moral grounding any more than not paying overtime based on that. It's just about desired outcomes. In this case, the government desired that goat herders should get paid consistent overtime with other professions. If the result is that goat herders get paid more but the same amount of goats grazing is the same, that's a win-win. If the result is that there are fewer goat herders and less grazing, it's a lose-lose.
EDIT: And the reason sheep herding has an exemption is because sheep herding economics probably wouldn't support it. Either it does and it should follow goat herding or it doesn't and goat herding should follow it.
If the cost of wildfire damages is still higher than the cost of labour, wouldn't local governments pay? Or perhaps this will incentivize the private sector to develop AI/robotics solutions to go manage the fields (or goats, whichever is easiest), since now they can realistically provide a cheaper solution -- it is California, after all, which is the tech centre of the world.
Alternatively, this could be addressed by allowing insurance rates to increase, driving down the cost of land, which would force residents to move (or burn to a crisp). But that's a natural consequence of living in a disaster prone area.
You'd think so (and I would too), but the California government hasn't done a great job up till now and I doubt increasing expenses would make that better. Said government is also the power preventing the insurance premium increases you mention so.. it's not looking great.
Labor/operating costs need to be paid now, wildfire costs need to be paid later (or never, they might just get covered by the state or the federal government).
Matt Levine wrote about California goat herding business risk hedging on Friday. I saved a quote here.