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It’s a warm July day. Jonathan Bartley and Adrian Lacasse are on Telluride’s Valley Floor — with over 80 bleating companions.

“That’s Duce 2.0, and then you have Cookie over there, who looks like cookie dough ice cream. He’s one of our lead, favorite goats. Mumu over there munching on the thistle,” Bartley said.

Bartley and Lacasse are the owners and managers of Durangoats, a Durango-based fire and weed mitigation company. Their method? Goats.

“We take a regenerative approach to the land management. It’s all about regenerating the land. From the beginning of every site visit we always say, this is not about getting rid of the weeds, or destroying the weeds, or anything like that. Even in the mentality of that, you’re entering into the destructive, extractive methods that have gotten us here,” Bartley said.

“The goal is more to create an environment that the weeds can’t thrive in.”

Bartley started Durangoats after four seasons of wildland firefighting, looking for a regenerative way to fight fires. He started with six baby goats: Fanta, Cola, Barg, Spirit, Dewey and Pepe — named after the soda bottles Bartley bottle-fed them from.

“They’ve been there from the beginning. They’re everything. It’s cool to have this relationship with your stock where you provide for them and they provide for you,” he said.

Rather than wildfire prevention, the town of Telluride hired Durangoats for weed mitigation. The goats are eating thistle and yellow toadflax on approximately four acres of land.

“We’re down on the Valley Floor, and there are a bunch of thistles that are blooming big purple flowers everywhere,” Lacasse said. “We’re enclosing those blooming thistles within our electric fence and trying to keep as many of these invasive plants in the fence and as many native plants outside the fence as we can. We always have the pen where the goats are in, and they’re just about done with their area right now. So, we have their next pen set up. So, we’re constantly leapfrogging them from one pen to the other.”

On this morning, the goats have been in one pen for about 24 hours and are ready to move to the next. Lacasse and Bartley use a herding dog named Kippy to shuttle the goats to the new pasture.

Once in the pen, the process is quite simple. The goats eat the plants — seeds, leaves and all — preventing them from photosynthesizing.

“We time out our management of the weeds with the biocycle of the plant, so when we eat down these flower heads, it’s in its seeding season so it’s less likely to go into another bloom,” Bartley said.

But the goats aren’t only removing the weeds — they’re fertilizing the ground.

“They ferment whatever they’re eating in their stomach, and spread this micro-rich and nitrogen-rich manure. It’s incredibly good for the soil,” he said.

Durangoats is a business, but for Bartley and Lacasse, it’s more than that. It’s small and meaningful steps toward healing the planet.

“When you compare these things that are the worst of the worst carcinogens, and then you compare it to a goat eating down this plant, then using that plant — that you would have sprayed chemicals on — to fertilize your earth — which is actually the solution to getting rid of those weeds, it’s healing that earth. So, fertilizing it. Then they can be turning it into goat milk. It’s wild that this isn’t more common,” Bartley said.

It’s about making intentional, and historic, efforts to have a more reciprocal relationship with the land.

“It’s pretty wild to see how many vast impacts can happen just by trying to replicate nature and using a natural path,” he said.

While climate change and creating a healthy planet is a multifaceted, complex conversation, the Durangoats are doing their part — munching on thistle.