
Grazing for Good
As you drive along back roads in Sacramento, Placer, Butte, Yolo, and El Dorado counties, you’re likely to see herds of grazing goats and sheep as they help to restore the natural balance of California’s open spaces while keeping neighborhoods safe from wildfire.
These hardworking herbivores are becoming a common and welcome sight among communities living in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) — that transition zone where people have built communities within the natural wild environment.
The herds and their American, Peruvian, and European shepherds are an instrumental part of the team called Integrazers, a Pleasant Grove-based business organized and run by Lee Hazeltine and his life partner, Laura Gunderson.
“Well-managed, quality grazing is necessary for land,” Hazeltine says. “It is the grazing animals that keep the land healthy.”

For 30 years, the University of California, Davis-trained scientist has used experimentation to forge a regenerative grazing path, developing a model that is attracting a following.
“I’m a pioneer. I’m a figure-it-out guy,” Hazeltine says.
Grazing in California dates back some 200 years to the arrival of Spanish settlers, but an actual ranch industry did not take off until after the Gold Rush. Before European settlement, herbivores such as ground sloths, bison, mastodons, camels, and oxen dominated the early California grasslands for millions of years. Later, pronghorn antelope, black tail deer, and tule elk kept things in check. Early explorers documented 500,000 tule elk in the Central Valley.
“What we do is mimic large herds that were here before all of us,” Hazeltine says of Integrazers.

Native Californians burned, dug, tilled, and pruned native vegetation to maintain the biological resources they used for food, medicine, and construction materials. A natural, healthy cycle of small fires kept vegetation levels in check. But for the last 150 years, a focus on fire suppression has led to a buildup of vegetative fuels in populated WUI areas — that beautiful but dangerous place considered at great risk of catastrophic wildfire.
Providing a Solution
Hazeltine started his vegetation management business in 1994. He was 30 years old, with a family to take care of and a mortgage to pay. At the time, Hazeltine was known as “Dr. Death” for his ability to kill plants with herbicides on timberlands owned by big names such as Sierra Pacific Industries.
“I was a brush killer. We were killing brush to grow trees,” he says.
The work paid his bills and provided a modest living for him. In 2006, he bought 700 goats, his first commercial herd, to complement his brush-management business. He continued to use expensive chemical sprays to manage plants but began to come to the realization that, instead of killing the nutrient-dense brush with poison, he could use the vegetation as a steady feed source for the animals and, simultaneously, protect the health of the land.
“Originally, it seemed really simple. We just needed to get critters in the woods,” he recalls, but he adds that convincing land managers it was a good idea took a few more years.
When the economy took a dive in 2008, Hazeltine was forced to shut down his vegetation-management business, and he scrambled to find a consistent source of feed for his herd. He was losing money rapidly with a large number of animals that still required feeding.
By sheer luck, he ran into an old acquaintance, Patrick Shea, executive director of the Wildlife Heritage Foundation, and soon Hazeltine embarked on an experiment that would shift his future. He agreed to take a herd of 570 sheep and 70 goats to 500 acres of failing conservation land overgrown with invasive weeds and a thatch burden, on the perimeter of a high-density housing development in Lincoln Hills, to begin a managed grazing effort on 22 acres of it.
For Hazeltine, who was accustomed to working alone in the woods, the idea of working in such a populated area terrified him, but he knew he was on to something.
“Everyone was motivated to figure this stuff out. The goats [and sheep] just kind of made sense,” Hazeltine says.

The experiment was intended to determine whether grazing could work to satisfy both the conservation requirements and the varied concerns of the residents. It did. By 2012, Hazeltine had gone from that first 22 acres to grazing more than 5,000 acres and managing 14,500 animals in Lincoln and Rocklin. Integrazers provided an affordable, holistic, large-scale strategy for managing landscapes.
“Everyone was broke and had all these weeds. I provided a solution,” he says.

A Systems Thinker
Hazeltine says that in the early days, hiring a goat herd was seen as a “necessary evil” to managing invasive weeds and ladder fuels, or low-lying vegetation that allows fire to climb to the tree canopy. But there’s been a paradigm shift. That experiment in Lincoln Hills has turned into an annual grazing model that is being duplicated at housing developments, schools, churches, conserved lands, levees, fire districts, vineyards, and orchards throughout California’s Central Valley.
“Lee is so hands-on. He is a systems thinker,” says Gunderson, who began her ranching history in the Midwest and is an important part of the Integrazers team.

With a longtime conservation background, she, like many in the conservation movement, has shifted her views of livestock.
She has witnessed how efforts to protect wild places and keep them behind fences can have a disastrous effect. Land needs animals to stay healthy, Gunderson says. Without the help of ruminants eating weeds, spreading beneficial seeds, and dropping fertilizer in the form of manure, land can become overgrown and fire-prone — in other words, unhealthy man-made deserts, according to Gunderson.
These days, Integrazers is in such high demand, it’s common for Hazeltine and Gunderson to travel 200 miles in a single day. Always curious, Hazeltine continues to learn new techniques and fund his own research into the interactions between animals and the land. Fast-talking with an almost mad scientist vibe, he enjoys thinking outside the box to solve problems. Observing nature gives him the edge. Fostering relationships with landowners has helped him secure key grazing lands and walkable herding corridors that connect them — a benefit for animals, shepherds, property owners, and the lands they protect.

Meanwhile, climate change is creating a hotter and drier world. Wildfire season is longer, more intense, more destructive, and costlier than ever before. With 30 years of experience, Hazeltine’s Integrazers model offers promise to landowners who want to proactively take control of their futures by employing regenerative agriculture, a comprehensive approach designed to strengthen the health and vitality of a farm by increasing the biodiversity of the topsoil and improving the land’s resilience to climate change. Conducting grazing for ecological restoration and fire mitigation, Integrazers provides financial sustainability (it is more affordable than the cost of chemicals) and regenerative solutions, giving landowners some peace of mind in a precarious time. The vision statement on the Integrazers website reads, “One day, when we see smoke, we will be able to say, ‘We should go put that fire out at some point.’ Not ‘Run for your lives.’”
With the state reeling from destructive wildfires in recent years, the work Hazeltine and the Integrazers team is doing has become increasingly important. In September 2021, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention (CAL FIRE) announced it was directing nearly $138 million in funding to 105 local fire-prevention projects to protect communities throughout the state. This funding was part of a $1.5 billion package to build wildfire resiliency in California.
With the rising prices of fertilizer, equipment and vehicle fuel, herbicides, and labor, the demand for regenerative grazing continues to soar.
“Literally, what we do is take stuff people don’t want,” Hazeltine says, referring to the weeds, brush, and tall grasses that are fuel for wildfires, “and figure out how to make it [useful].”
Life On Life
Unlike other fire-management tools such as chemical, hand, or mechanical work — including the thinning of dense stands of trees or use of such equipment as chainsaws, wood chippers, or bulldozers — or controlled burns that create a dynamic of humans working to control nature, grazing works with the land. The idea behind systems-managed grazing is that grazing should not replace anything but enhance everything. The lands are healthier because of the animals, and, in turn, the animals are healthier because they are feeding on plants with higher nutrient contents than your standard feed.
“Grazing is life on life,” Hazeltine says.

Quality grazing takes skill, experience, and hard work. It requires a complex knowledge base of crop and livestock wisdom, relationship building, partnerships, and planning. High-density, short-duration grazing involving multiple species helps to turn unhealthy landscapes into thriving ones.
Coming from a long line of scientists and educators, now at 57, Hazeltine has stepped into another role. A sought-after public speaker, he now mentors and opens doors for young people who want to learn how to run an efficient operation and do better for the earth. Young people have come from as far away as the United Kingdom, Chile, Maryland, and Southern California to learn from him.
Young veterinary students and ranchers travel from afar to join Hazeltine for ride-alongs; they listen to his charismatic storytelling, meet with other farmers and shepherds, and observe the Integrazers process for monitoring diverse land-stewardship projects, in urban wildland and rural landscapes.
“The best way to educate is to use yourself as an example. I keep raising critters, and I raise them well,” Hazeltine says.
For details visit, Integrazers.com