When Poppy clocks in for a two-week shift on the bank of the Henry’s Fork River in eastern Idaho, she’s multitasking. Between supervising three kids, she’s also hard at work fireproofing a backyard property a short drive from Ashton.
Poppy's a black and brown nubian goat. This spring, her compensation involves tasty treats, from sagebrush blossoms to choke cherry branches.
“Some of [the goats] will get up on their hind legs, but Poppy's an old girl,” her caretaker Caleb Slade said. “She's not motivated enough to do that.”
Her main focus, along with Slade’s 40 other “new hires,” is eating away at fire fuels and invasive weeds, like cheatgrass and houndstongue.
This is the Ashton resident’s first full season running The Goat Guy, where he leans on a tried-and-true conservation method known as prescribed grazing. Property owners around the Tetons hire his goats to help reduce their wildfire risk by cutting back on dry fire fuels and invasive weeds.
Slade charges roughly $600 an acre for a two week stint, though that figure can change based on the amount of foliage and specific asks from property owners.
Shooting Star in Teton Village has hired goats in the past for weed control, when staff was short and wildfire risk high, according to golf course Manager Tyler Shrum.
A few factors are prompting increased interest in Teton Conservation District and Teton County’s wildfire risk reduction programs that align with the mission behind Slade’s business, according to Bobbi Clauson, the county’s wildland fire prevention specialist.
This spring’s early fire season is one, along with fluctuating insurance rates. All private land in the county entered the Wildland Urban Interface boundary in 2025.
“[Jackson is] a little donut hole in the middle of public lands,” Clauson said. “Anything people want to do to be heartier and acknowledge that we live in a fire adapted community… is fantastic.”
Clauson is excited by growing interest in using goats to do just that, especially with the increased fire risk that comes with overhanging branches and dry vegetation near homes.
What’s unique about Slade’s fire mitigation business is that he doesn’t use barbed wire or electric fences to move his goats. His fences are virtual.
“I just go into the ‘Nofence’ app,” Slade said, pulling out his smartphone. “You can then go in and select the individual pasture.”
Each of the adult goats are fitted with a collar that comes with a sensor. Slade then draws a precise boundary on an app.
“It looks a little bit like West Virginia,” Slade said, referencing the acre Poppy and her peers are more than halfway done munching. “It's got some funky shapes to it.”
If a goat veers too close to the boundary’s edge, the caprine receives a series of beeps. If they don’t retreat, they get a shock. Slade’s job involves training the goats to adhere to the warning sounds to prevent any electric pulses altogether, which he compares to those used in an electric dog collar.
For Slade, virtual fences are a win in that they are far less labor intensive. But they’re also a win for the world of conservation: It means less barbed wire for wildlife to get tangled up in.
That’s a large reason why the Greater Yellowstone-based organizations, Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) and Ricketts Conservation Foundation, are investing.
American billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade, Joe Ricketts, has large landholdings near Jackson Hole and founded his namesake conservation foundation in 2013.
“What virtual fence is enabling isn't necessarily anything new,” said Travis Brammer, conservation director at PERC. “It's rotational grazing.”
But it spares labor and impact on migratory wildlife, like ungulates and sage grouse. Both species are more prone to entanglement in post-and-wire fences, often fatal to animals on the move.
Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation recently hit three decades organizing fence take-downs around the region, where volunteers help remove derelict fences that are out of use but still intersect with migration corridors.
Jackson’s town planning commission is also weighing whether to require stricter fencing that’s friendlier to wildlife.
Ricketts’ foundation funded two-thirds of a $600,000 grant, a scholarship now in its second year that supports eight ranchers in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. PERC contributed the rest. The majority of this year’s recipients have put collars on cattle, instead of goats.
Slade is the only grant recipient that is using the targeted grazing aspect for fire mitigation, weed control and habitat improvement, said Shari Meeks, project manager at Ricketts' foundation.
“What he can do with goats and virtual fencing is really a transformative thing on the landscape,” she said.
Meeks’ organization will check with grant recipients throughout the next four years to monitor conservation outcomes.
Though the technology has been slow to take off in the United States, it’s picking up steam. Sparse cell towers have made for spotty service that can be blocked by mountains, but recent improvements in satellites are helping expand access.
It’s also expensive. For the 40 collars Slade needs for his herd of goats, he would have paid upwards of $10,000. But with the grant, Slade was able to pull it off this year.
Slade is feeding two birds at once as he breaks new ground in both fire mitigation and conservation.
“People kind of look at me weird when I say that we've got virtual fences and that we run goats,” Slade said. “But when they start thinking about it, there's a lot of really good response to it.”
And this year is also a bit of a test. He’s still determining which are primed for work and which are better off as pets.
