Made Local Magazine, Sept/Oct 2024

With a knife sheathed in her belt on one side and a bright orange mallet on the other, Paigelynn Trotter traverses a steep hillside with a baby strapped to her back, and a livestock guardian dog at her side. She’s studying how 140 goats just grazed down the spring forage where they’d been the day before. Using solar-powered mobile fencing, she moves this herd from one patch of grass to another multiple times a week, escorting them not just around this one property but between several properties throughout the county.

In the summers, these goats are joined by 600 rented sheep, and Trotter is joined by a team of four more women and two more livestock guardian dogs, all part of her grazing business, Coastal Land & Livestock.

The art of shepherding, one of the oldest professions in the world, began long before the conception of private property. Nomadic cultures all over the world moved with their animals based not on permanent fence lines or property rights but by patterns in nature. They’d follow rivers and valleys, grazing more temperate bottomlands in the colder months before leading their herds into the mountains in summer when the grasses up there grew in.