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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."
Now they are outsourceing our jobs that usually get outsourced to illegals to animals!!
Methane is a much stronger green house gas than CO2.
On the plus side they will also "fertilize" the grass at the same time.
The real "green" thing to do is get rid of the grass and use native plants and grasses for the landscape. That would also cut down on water use.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Just curious how they were transported back and forth (and how far)? I'm imagining the overall amount of fuel used would be less than using mowers, but there have been plenty of cases where good intentions didn't pay out in the end.
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
Yeah, a friend of ours has a housetrained pygmy goat (it works surprisingly well!). Its waste looks kind of like oversized rabbit pellets.
You're not made of Tuesday!
There's a jail I know of where they don't have money for... well, anything. The wire fence used to get cut all the time as people came in to break prisoners out. Things like guards, walls, etc... cost a lot of money and just weren't going to happen. There isn't the room in the budget--hell, the guards last got new uniforms so long ago that no one owns one, they just own the thing they can buy at the store that sort of looks like how the old guards remember the uniform looking like.
Eventually, they solved the problem of escaping prisoners by putting chickens around the jail. The chickens go crazy whenever someone comes to bust a prisoner out, so problem solved. Officially the chickens showed up on their own (i.e. less liability and no red tape).
Chickens or goats, the low-tech solutions are sometimes better.
as long that they are regularly rotated among the fields. Left to their own devices, goats (unlike other ruminants) will eat the plants clear down to the surface, often killing them.
There is a fairly hight correlation between the introduction of mass goat-herding in an area, and the encroachment of desert 100 years later.
...and kindergarteners. Oh hell. Wrong forum. Sorry!
Makes a big part of their land agricultural (lower tax rate) rather than commercial. Not to mention the Federal Mohair subsidy.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I got that fact in a biology class filled with hot young coeds with whom I tried to practice applied biology. Also I currently live in the Gulf and there are no basements in the country that I can detect.