Slashdot Mirror
Google Mows With Goats
Kelson writes "Google's Mountain View headquarters has fields that need to be kept clear of fire hazards. This year instead of mowing them, they took a low-carbon approach: they hired a herd of goats to eat the grass for a week. 'It costs us about the same as mowing, and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers,' wrote Dan Hoffman."
Goat poo isn't as bad as cow pies or dog crap.. It's mostly small hardened pellets that deform or crumble rather than stick or squish.
Excuse me but, don't goats emit carbon in the form of CO2 just by breathing - and methane by farting?
All of the carbon they emit is initially gained through eating grass. If you mow with a powered machine, all of the grass's carbon will end up back in the atmosphere through decay, and you also free carbon that was trapped in liquid form (oil) to the atmosphere. The goats are carbon neutral.
That said, I'm surprised it worked. I once got a goat to eat the grass on a hill I needed mowed, but it refused to eat the grass. It preferred pieces of metal and fence posts to grass. What it really wanted was its expensive goat chow, though. Maybe we spoiled him.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Are you under the impression that the goats would have otherwise not breathed and farted** if they hadn't been used to trim the lawn? I assume they're being used for milk and/or hair in addition to grazing services; it'd be a waste not to. Or they could be males left over from breeding for milk-producing goats.
** -- Ruminant methane emissions are primarily through "belching" rather than flatus. Belching in quotes, as that's not exactly what happens; they transfer the bolus (cud) back and forth between the mouth and rumen. It is in the rumen that this methane is primarily produced, and it gets released in the mouth. Most of the remaining emissions come mainly from the decomposion of the manure. Flatus is only a small portion of their total methane emissions.
You're not made of Tuesday!
Bikini clad girls are a lot cuter to watch than robots.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Stupid shit like this makes me homicidal. Do you really think that the ~.9kg of CO2 a goat exhales per day is going to cause an eco-catastrophe? Contrast that to the gas and energy that go into an industrial lawnmower, and there is no comparison.
Goats create CO2 as a waste product from their O2 burning lifestyles...Just like us. Where does that C come from? Goats may eat a chunk of coal every now and again, but that's not really their primary source of carbon. They get their carbon from plant matter. They eat it, digest it, and crap most of it out as fertilizer.
That's what they call "carbon-neutral": they use "free" carbon, that isn't buried in the earth, and they produce fertilizer that increases the growth of other carbon-absorbing plants.
As for methane, who gives a shit? It's got a short shelf-life. Methane drops out of the atmosphere in a mere decade, as opposed to C02, which can hang around forever.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Try here. It's a company that specializes in goat lawn mowing. They mainly use border collies to keep the goats from wandering away, but sometimes they also use electric fences and nets.
It doesn't look like they are hiring new goatherds, but they sure seem to need a web designer, so maybe you can volunteer and have them teach you something about goat-herding in exchange.
Qxe4
Benefits include reducing the amount of poisons (herbicides) used in sensitive areas. In addition the goats provide fertilizer and till the ground with their hooves,
http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/jun/20/grazing-mowers-herd-of-goats-takes-on-the-rez/
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
Hey, don't single out Google! When I worked at Yahoo! in 2006 I noticed they did the whole goat-mowing thing in the summer months as well. I imagine it's a fairly common practice here in the valley.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Goats are browsers, not grazers. They'll eat grass, but typically prefer only the tender bits. That said, hunger works charmingly -- if you'd held out on the kibble for a couple days, it probably would have started on the grass.
If you really want to use ruminants to mow for you, sheep are a much better choice than goats. Though more annoying to deal with, IMO.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers"
They clearly haven't seen the guys who mow the lawn for one of my neighbors.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Yeah, it seems like the only truly "green" thing to do is simply pave over the entire property for zero carbon emission maintenance! Let's hear it for concrete and astroturf, your only rational choice for a "green" lawn! Gets rid of pesky gophers and moles once and for all! You can even park your car on it! No mowing or herbivores required!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There are lots of places in the Bay Area that do this. It's much more than a sop to carbon neutrality: the goats can "mow" slopes that are far too steep and uneven to wrestle a mower across. They also make short work of areas that are filled with rocks, brush and stumps and have no objection to a dessert course of poison oak (that's a good reason not to pat them on the head, though).
I used to watch them arrive at the Lawrence Hall of Science up in the Berkeley hills. Trailers pull up; the goat wranglers set out a low fence and then unload the goats and a few working dogs. Over the next few days the wranglers move the fenced area across the slope and the goats eat and fertilize their way across the landscape. A few days after they arrive the brush is gone and some very nasty terrain has become a fire break, with roots still in place to prevent land slides. What's not to love?