Goat-powered weed-whacking

Replace pesticides and gas-guzzling garden tools with hungry goats:

The patch of weeds behind Steve Holdaway's Chapel Hill, N.C., home grew so unkempt that he hired outside help. For six hours, the crew's members tackled tall grass and thorny blackberry plants and toiled without a break — other than to chew their cud, that is.

His workers: seven hungry — and carbon-emission-free — goats.
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Internet rivals Google and Yahoo hired herds to clear around their Northern California headquarters in 2010. So did the Vanderbilt Mansion, a national historic site in Hyde Park, N.Y. And in April 2010, nannies and billies were deployed at the U.S. Naval Base Kitsap Bangor in Silverdale, Wash., to annihilate pesky scotch broom plants.

While predators, poisonous plants and peeved neighbors can test goats on the job, the small livestock are well-suited for such labors.

Easy to manage, they relish prickly brush and weeds, and their agility makes them "popular employees" for navigating steep slopes that can thwart humans and machines, says Brian Faris, president of the American Boer Goat Association in San Angelo, Texas.

It cost 55-year-old Holdaway $200 to clear a 1,700-square-foot swath on his land with goats, pricier than the weed-whacking he's been doing himself for a decade with a gas-powered trimmer.
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At Vanderbilt Mansion, where a small herd has grazed on seven hilly acres, the job's $9,000 annual price tag is about two-thirds what hired manpower would run, says Dave Hayes, the estate's natural-resource program manager. "And the goats are a lot more popular."
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In Vernonia, Ore., Lewis Cochran started Vegetation Management Services Inc. with his dad in March 2010 after he lost his truck-driving job. He studied goat management online and is now the boss of nearly 50 critters, charging between $6 and $10 a head per day.

Time to build that goat-shed, buy some goats and rent them out as weed-whackers? Free food for the goats and free milk for us.