Sally's World

My kids loved this!

Do goats really grow on trees?

Apparently it’s not as strange as you might think in certain parts of the world.

Goats on trees are found mostly only in Morocco. The goats climb them because they like to eat the fruit of the argan tree, which is similar to an olive. Farmers actually follow the herds of goats as they move from tree to tree. Not because it is so strange to see goats in trees and the farmers like to point and stare (and take pictures for people like me), but because the fruit of the tree has a nut inside, which the goats can't digest, so they spit it up or excrete it which the farmers collect. The nut kernels can be ground to make argan oil used in cooking and cosmetics (yikes). This oil has been collected for hundreds of years, but like many wild and useful things these days, the argan tree is slowly disappearing due to over-harvesting for the tree's wood and overgrazing by goats.

Lovely to know that some of the stuff we eat of put on our face may have passed through a goat before it got to us…yuck!!!