Don't toss your live Christmas tree. Hungry goats and llamas at LI farms would love a post-holiday treat

Don’t drag your live Christmas tree to the curb just yet. Some farms across Long Island are accepting evergreens to feed their animals a tasty post-holiday treat.

Goats, sheep, llamas and other critters chow down on leftover trees, giving holiday celebrators an alternative way to recycle the holiday centerpiece rather than tossing them.

Goodale Farms is one of several Long Island Farms accepting donations of the trees through the end of January, giving residents a cost-free way to keep their tree out of a landfill and giving farm animals a change in diet. The trees have been found to be a natural dewormer for animals and a source of vitamin C, farmers said. While Goodale Farms allows donors to drop off the trees without an appointment, some farms require appointments prior to drop-off.

The Riverhead-based goat farm has accepted trees for the past decade, owner Hal Goodale said last week. The North Fork farm, which started in the 1800s as a cauliflower and potato farm, now focuses on dairy products and is home to dozens of goats.

Last year, the goats chowed down on more than 200 trees, Goodale said. By the farm’s entrance, visitors can drop off their trees or wreaths, where they’ll sit in a pile until it’s snack time.

"They like the needles," Goodale said. "For a month or two, they get to enjoy something a little different."

Dozens of goats, separated in two pens by ages, wait by the gate to descend upon the firs as soon as they’re tossed in by a farmworker. With horns shaved down to little nubs, the goats head butt each other and crane their necks to get the best nibble of pine needles. After just a day in the pens, a seven-foot pine will more closely resemble a sad Charlie Brown tree.

Holly Browder of Browder’s Birds in Mattituck feeds her sheep the trees for health benefits. Last year, donors dropped off an estimated 50 trees at the farm stand, where the sheep sometimes wait to grab the pines.

Along with poultry, Browder raises Cotswold sheep for their wool, a breed that is considered "threatened" by The Livestock Conservancy, an organization that protects endangered livestock and poultry breeds from extinction.

"It’s good for their diet to eat pine," she said. "It’s good for them to get that pine going into winter. And it just gives them variety in their diet, too."

Long Island Yarn and Farm owner Tabbethia Haubold also accepts trees, but only from tree vendors rather than the public, to ensure they are safe for her animals to eat. She asks vendors to call before dropping them off at her Yaphank homestead where the animals, which she raises for fiber for her yarn business, live.

"Usually if somebody sells Christmas trees, if they have any left over, they have to pay to be able to get rid of them," she said. "So we’ve always been happy to take that."

Haubold’s herd of llamas, alpacas, sheep and goats dine on the fragrant trees in the weeks after Christmas. The llamas not only munch on the pine, they use the branches as a scratching post. The only animals that don’t indulge are the angora rabbits, she said.

Live trees should be free of decor and not treated with preservatives or chemicals that can hurt animals. The farms will dispose of the trunks.

Correction: The Suffolk County Farm and Education Center in Yaphank is not accepting Christmas trees for its farm animals. Due to incorrect information provided to Newsday, the listing was incorrect in an earlier version of the story.

By Brinley Hineman

brinley.hineman@newsday.com

Brinley Hineman covers the Town of Hempstead and the City of Long Beach for Newsday. She previously was a reporter in Nashville, Tennessee, and is a West Virginia native.