Rancher Maggie Repp has unleashed her 15 camels in Loma, Colorado, on tamarisk clusters and noticed that they managed to obliterate every one of the hardy shrubs, Lisa Song reports in the High Country News.
Tamarisk is also known as salt cedar and came to the U.S. in the early 1800s as an ornamental shrub that quickly got out of hand. The small trees greedily absorb water and deposit salt, messing with soil chemistry. They also spread rapidly, creating impenetrable thickets that edge out diverse flora. Burning the plants didn't work, and chemicals proved too expensive (not to mention scary) to be sustainable. Beetles work, but they take a while.
While goats have been known to eat the plant, camels love the stuff and can plow through about half an acre of it in two days. My friend Dave Burdick brought the camel approach to my attention with a piece about it today on the Daily Camera's BigGreenBoulder. He writes, "People in California have been cutting back dry fauna with goats for some time now, so why not try a camel up here?" Repp is planning to do a tamarisk demonstration project with the camels in the spring. In fighting the terrible tamarisk, I'd take camels over fire, bugs, and chemicals.
Photo: A camel in India has a snack. Credit: Felipe Skroski.
Tags: Conservation, Green Tech
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