If you visit Athens’ North Oconee River Park later this month, don’t be alarmed if you see a few sheep gnawing on the scenery. Just think of them as the landscaping crew.

Thanks to local farmer Jennif Chandler, these sheep may become as indispensable as lawnmowers and pesticides in the fight against invasive plant growth in Athens-Clarke County. And all it takes is just letting them do what they do best: eat everything green in sight.

“Before bulldozers, they used livestock to clear and maintain land. I was always interested in it,” says Chandler, owner of Shady Brook Farms, LLC in Madison County. Letting cows, goats and sheep control vegetation on farms is old-school. But in recent years, farmers have found ways to hone grazing so livestock essentially become landscape architects. The practice is called targeted grazing.

With more than 20 years of experience raising sheep, particularly the United Kingdom-native Bluefaced Leicesters, Chandler has seen the effects of targeted grazing firsthand.

“It’s phenomenal what they do,” she says. “There used to be spots where the green briar and honeysuckle grew so thick you couldn’t see anything but this wave of green. Now you can see the ground.”

Chandler began letting her sheep “mow” her neighbors’ properties for free while she researched the wider-ranging benefits of targeted grazing. After discovering how successful grazing had been when used to eliminate invasive plant growth across the country, she approached Athens-Clarke County government with a proposal to try it out on public land.

Local officials were intrigued. Roger Cauthen, administrator of the city’s Landscape Management Division, formed a committee to investigate the necessary parameters and ordinances. Among various city departments represented there was the Natural Resources Division of Leisure Services, where staffer Mike Wharton helps oversee the maintenance of many ACC parklands. “Ten years ago, you might have had just a few patches [of kudzu] on public or private lands around Athens, but those patches have grown and are now deforesting parts of the area,” Wharton says. After several months of debate and research, Chandler was officially hired last month to test the grazing on a steep, overgrown section of North Oconee River Park near downtown and North Avenue.

“It’s a beautiful park, but if you walk down the river a ways, it becomes a jungle. All that land is lost, and that’s valuable city property,” says Chandler.

The sheep will graze for several days during the last week in September, a timing decision Wharton says was crucial. “By the end of September, kudzu begins the translocation of sugars back into its root system, then the stems and leaves die off and it’s all ready to go for spring. You can sometimes get what they call ‘robust re-growth’ if you cut it down in summer, but with the right timing, you can eliminate growth by 80 to 90 percent in one year,” he explains.

Chandler says the grazing process is divided into two parts: the initial “knock-down” phase, followed by the maintenance phase. She already has the trailer, truck and loading equipment necessary to haul roughly 30 sheep to and from the park site. A series of fences will control where and how intensively the sheep graze, and Jesse, a border collie who handles herding duties at Shady Brook, will be on-site every day.

“Basically, what we want is indiscriminate mowing, with no selectiveness to it. We just want them to graze it down,” Wharton says. Along with the ever-present kudzu, the sheep will eat Chinese privet, honeysuckle and grasses threatening to take over the park. The grazing will be more cost-effective than using chemicals or heavy equipment to clear the area, Wharton says. Payment for Chandler’s services was still being negotiated at press time, but she estimated it would be equivalent to the cost of removing a large tree.

Additionally, this method will create unmatched environmental benefits. “By not using petroleum-based products, we’ll see improved air quality and less impact on noise,” Wharton says.

Targeted grazing is at the top of the list of business ventures Chandler is ready to launch now that her farm as been established as a limited liability company. Last month, she made the first wholesale delivery of her locally-grown gourmet lamb meat to clients including the Athens Country Club, Harry Bissett’s, Last Resort Grill and East West Bistro. Retail cuts of the meat, which is state-inspected and processed at Happy Valley Processing near Augusta, will be sold on athenslocallygrown.net and at the Oconee Farmers Market. Chandler will continue selling the wool she spins at Shady Brook, which is home to 90 lambs born in May and more than 80 adult sheep. She’s often taught felting classes around town, and she’ll lead a series of classes at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair in Asheville, NC in October.

But for now, targeted grazing is the priority. “If the grazing project took off, and I could do that full-time, I would love to just focus on that. Everything looks like sheep food to me. I know I could do so much good,” Chandler says. To that end, she is meeting with officials from the city of Decatur to develop a grazing contract there, and she wants to explore with UGA the possibility of going to work on the privet at the State Botanical Garden. And like many farmers who have seen how the practicality of targeted grazing can produce aesthetic results, Chandler also hopes to offer her sheep’s services for private property and homeowners, barring any local ordinance hiccups.

Then again, she might wind up having her hands full with public land in Athens-Clarke County. “If the pilot project goes through, Roger implied that 2010 would be the first year of doing serious grazing and putting into effect a solid grazing plan,” Chandler says.

“When you look at it long-term, this is going to be one avenue, one tool, we can use as we build a comprehensive land management effort and plan,” Wharton says. “This isn’t one of those things where you plant a flag and say, ‘We conquered it, let’s go home.’ This is about trying to keep the invasive plants to a level where they don’t totally limit native habitat.”

Tamara Gaskin