LONDONDERRY — For a month at Magic Mountain Ski Area, goats have grazed spots that are difficult or impossible to mow.
Aimee Braxmeier, owner of Slippery Slope Goats LLC and Londonderry resident, hopes to bring the animals to more ski resorts where the they can be deployed using a new collar technology that creates virtual pastures.
“I would never be able to graze these places without this technology,” she said in an interview earlier this month at Magic. “The amount of labor that this has saved is absolutely incredible.”
With the expectation that the technology would work well as she went into the pilot project with the Agritech Institute for Small Farms, Braxmeier said she “went all in” and purchased a herd of 30 pregnant goats out of New York to add to hers. They had 60 babies “so we went from 50 goats to 150 in a hurry,” she said.
Slippery Slope Goats started in 2020 after Braxmeier had been managing a goat dairy farm in Vermont. She said she constantly received calls about bringing goats to people’s homes to graze.
“I was like, I think we’re onto something here, so I quit my job,” she said. “I’ve been on a couple goat dairies in Vermont, but I came from the ski industry, so it’s full circle that now we’re grazing.”
Paul Maitland, general manager at Magic, was Braxmeier’s manager when they both worked at Stratton Mountain Resort. She had been lift operations manager at Stratton after being in engineering and mountain operations at Killington Resort. She eventually left the ski industry and went back to farming.
Now, Braxmeier is collaborating with the Vermont Farm & Forest Viability Program to develop a business plan. She said she needs to charge customers for the grazing because of costs involving transportation and winter feed, and she’s adding other components to her company.
At first, Braxmeier began with 17 goats. By the end of the first summer, she had about 35 or 40.
Much of the work initially involved clearing invasive plants for private homeowners. After leaving Magic this week, she’s planning to bring the goats to graze on vegetation for public utilities in other parts of Vermont.
Braxmeier has gone without employees but hopes to hire or have interns for next summer. Before using a collar system, she relied on electric net fencing. She would go through with a weed whacker and cut everywhere she wanted to put up fencing. She called the work “super labor intensive,” as it required moving fencing around and lugging around a solar panel with a car battery on top of everything else.
The Agritech Institute for Small Farms, a nonprofit that came out of the 2022 dissolution of the Strolling of the Heifers in Brattleboro, approached Braxmeier about two years ago about the new collar technology from Norway. She uses an app on her phone to create pastures for the goats to graze then tracks their location and other data.
“Each collar has a SIM card in it. It has a solar panel on each side, a battery,” she said. “Some run off of AT&T and some run off of T-Mobile. It’s really interesting.”
At Magic, Braxmeier showed data for 56 collars although about 100 goats were on the mountain. Some are too young or big to wear the collars, she said.
A series of eight tones warn the animals that they are getting closer to being zapped. Braxmeier said the zap isn’t any hotter than one from a traditional electric fence.
“And once they escape from their pasture, they’re herd-bound animals and they typically return to their herd within a few minutes,” she said. “They don’t get zapped going back in. They only get zapped leaving.”
Braxmeier said the collars alert her if an animal hasn’t moved for more than four hours, as extensive research shows sheep and goats don’t typically sleep for longer than that. She also gets a notification every time an animal gets toned or zapped, escapes the pasture or the battery on their collar reaches a low percentage.
One goat had eight warnings last week but no electric shocks, Braxmeier said. In the first week, she noticed a lot of zaps.
“They learn so quickly,” she said. “It’s absolutely incredible.”
Goats initially were trained with the collars at an approximately 12-acre farm with perimeter fencing in Weston. There, they learned boundaries and tones.
Another feature of the app showed how a goat was 24 percent more active than the rest of the herd. Tracking movement can help to see if an animal is hurt.
With friends working in management at Magic, Braxmeier pitched the idea to have her goats graze their first ski resort there. The institute wanted her to try a ski area and provide data on the viability.
Dan Smith, executive director of the institute, said he had been asked by Roger Allbee to help with a new idea to establish a nonprofit to identify and promote technology that could benefit small farms. Allbee was the outgoing chairperson of the Stroll board when the organization dissolved and was figuring out what to do with its remaining resources.
Smith said he identified virtual pastures as the first idea for the institute. Funding for the project came from the Vermont Legislature, Dairy Business Innovation Center, Lintilhac Foundation, and Vermont Low Income Trust for Electricity, which advocates for innovation in utilities.
“The thinking is that if this works for ski areas and utilities then it creates additional business for grazers like Aimee so it can expand that small scale part of the economy,” Smith said. “We’re also trying to find more environmentally and climate oriented technologies as well. This would displace weed whackers at the mountain so you don’t have the carbon emissions … same with the utilities.”
Funding enabled Smith to purchase the equipment and loan it to Braxmeier at no risk. Pilot projects are being conducted by Braxmeier, and four beef and dairy farms in Vermont and Maine.
Smith said he researched how the collars would work but for the most part, they exceeded his group’s expectations. A major challenge has to do with the app being cellular rather than internet based.
If a community has “inadequate cell service then the technology doesn’t work as well,” Smith said. However, the technology itself has been deemed successful in doing what it’s supposed to do.
Smith called the system “a potential gamechanger.”
“I don’t think the technology is completely there yet but it’s pretty close,” he said.
Currently, he’s seeking more funding to extend the project. He’s also looking at potential projects that involve seaweed being used to reduce methane emissions and robotics helping small scale dairy operations.