The Gorse Project

Jokingly, I said to a group of friends “Since we seem to be farming gorse, we need to find a way to make a profit from it.”

One then told us about a gorse mill they’d seen on a trip to the UK.  Gorse is apparently very nutritious for many animals, the problem is in the hard prickles.  Grinding it up makes it more edible for horses and cattle.  This reminded me of a conversation held with the breeder we’d gotten our Dexter girls from.  Hubby mentioned that we had a lot of gorse, and the breeder said “Don’t waste a resource.  It’s a nitrogen fixer and the cattle love it.”  He pointed out a gorse bush growing up beside the fence that looked as though it had been trimmed about 6 inches from the fence - his dexters had done it, that was as far as they could reach through the fence.

We very quickly found out that they’ll eat the young soft shoots happily enough, but the harder older growth only when there was nothing else to eat (like many other “great gorse clearing animals”).  And as we usually were cutting honeysuckle with the gorse, seeing my girls sift through the gorse to pull out the honeysuckle (they’re anyones for an armload of honeysuckle), gorse as it is wasn’t practical.

Gorse is Moby Dick to Hubby’s Captain Ahab.  He is so passionate about getting rid of it, it’s become almost an unhealthy obsession.  One morning he left for work, only to be back home about 20 mins later, vomitting and tucked back into bed.  He woke from about an hours nap telling me that he now felt fine and was going to go out to the back paddock with the scrub-cutter and clear some gorse.  Uh huh. He came with me as I fed our pig, gang of unruly chooks and two young weaner calves. He then needed another hour long nap.

So mention of milling the gorse and using it as fodder caught my imagination.  A little bit of google fu showed me that no one is really doing it, but it has been discussed a time or two.

Perhaps that should be that no one is doing it in New Zealand.  This webpage shows that it is grown in the UK deliberately (the page author talks about how difficult it is to propagate!!) and talks about coppicing it and hanging it for his horses who love it and will carefully peel it and eat it.  This is almost unbelievable to us, here in New Zealand where Gorse is a noxious weed and there are penalties for not keeping your gorse under control.  Arguments rage over the best way to remove, dispose of it and then keep regrowth manageable. Contractors make a decent living out of clearing gorse.

I have absolutely no chance of spending the money to buy a mill to try it out (I’m struggling to buy the food for the animals at times which is why the gorse fodder seemed like a plan) so I put the idea out there to my engineer/farm-raised Dad and my engineer/gorse-hating Hubby.  Hiring a wood-chipper for a day was one suggestion, as was trialling it by putting it through the old food processor and then a mouli.  Labour intensive but workable for a trial.

I filled a fish crate with youngish stems of gorse and put them through the food processor.  What came out smelled quite edible even to me.  It took a very long time to have only a small amount though.  The girls loved it.  The first day they seemed more interested in playing with the crate, but the second day I gave them some, they were shoving each other out of the way to get to it.

We’ve talked about using a wood chipper to process it.  We don’t have one, and they’re fairly expensive to buy.  We’d need a petrol powered one to process it as we cut it.  I keep seeing the Tree Tech trucks around and wishing I could get one of those.  They have the big towable chipper that fires the chips into the back of the covered truck in front.  Might have to hire one first and test the theory.