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."
Que obligitory Goatse.cx joke in 3... 2... 1...
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
I use penguins to keep my servers cool. Seriously. It works.
Now they are outsourceing our jobs that usually get outsourced to illegals to animals!!
Wow. That might actually be worse than a GNAA troll first post.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Excuse me but, don't goats emit carbon in the form of CO2 just by breathing - and methane by farting?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Google employees no longer have to worry about tall grass during fire drills!
...now, they have to worry about goat shit.
I respectfully disagree.
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.
Not sure about goats, but cow flatulence is a major source of methane, an even worse greenhouse gas than CO2. I guess we can't so anything right. We are doomed
Or brush fires.
Best Slashdot Co
Or, rather, Meh'eh'eh'eh (for those of us who've been around goats).
I wonder if they allow the goats near to where the workers are. Male goats are some stinky animals (and sometimes very aggressive).
In reality, though, this is just a clever business mooove by Google. Pretty soon we're going to see targeted advertising in our fresh chevre.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers" How much time do you spend watching lawn mowers or ..now.. goats ?
I can't believe google would do this, don't they know goats emit methane? It's so unhealthy for the environment. And what's worse, they keep thousands of walking carbon emitters that they call employees, and what's worse they actually pay them. Some of these do nothing all day except emit carbon. When will people wake up and realize that Google really is evil?????
Qxe4
They should all just go back to goatland and stop stealing our jobs!
So let me get this straight, not only does the owner of the goats get to feed them for free but Google will actually pay them for the right to eat their grass?
Where can I sign up?
Hiring only one herd seems very un-google like. Perhaps they should have hired a second herd for from a proper RAIG (redundant array of inexpensive goats) array. Scottish researchers have already proven technologies that could be used to form a common RAIG-1 array. Simple genetic manipulation with the common Equus quagga would create a RAIG-10 (Stripped - Mirror) array.
I would say that a RAIG-5 array would offer the best performance, but I am wholly unaware of any current methods for calculating goat parity. I also have no desire to try and troubleshoot RAIG-Controller corruption...
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
GOATS can work for Google?!?! Screw college!
If they think goats are cuter than lawn mowers, then I think they're hiring the wrong people to mow their lawn...
They should have just put ads out: "Wanted: cute people to mow lawns." They could arrange to get some kids dressed up like they're out of a Rockwell painting, or some tasty co-ed types... I know these aren't the usual things one looks for in a lawn mower, but if you're taking goats as the aesthetically pleasing alternative then I have to think you can do better.
Bow-ties are cool.
It's been done, although it was a prank by a Real Engineer, Bob Widlar. http://www.national.com/rap/Horrible/sheep.html
Regardless of any questions about carbon emission of goats themselves or the transport of goats to and from different work sites, this farmer has a sweet deal!
Feed for farm animals cost a stack of cash and this guy has turned what is normally an expense into a profit.
So he gets food from excess goat production, valuable goats milk, and profit from selling a slightly green-washed grass control method.
The guy's a frickin' genius.
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
People have been using goats for vegetation control around these parts for many years--probably back to the Spanish colonial days.
This ain't rocket surgery.
With cows.
First Google shows how to rank pages using pigeon technology. Now they're using goats?
What are the illegal alien gardeners gonna do for work?
Seriously, my city uses goats asw ell. We loved watchign them crawl over the hillsides to clear the brush. In California, the rain falls from November-ish to April-ish. The open fields and hilsides gets 4-6 feet of grass and weeds. If they're not cleared, they becom fire hazards for the six months of no rain. The goats do a great job clearing and fertalizing. Also, my kids love watching them.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
These sheep provide some dating opportunities, not otherwise available, to some of the really nerdy developers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Goatherd: 'n this here be Thor, the 'erd's Alpha goat.
Larry (leans in): Why hello there, Thor! And aren't you just the cutest thing...
Thor: BAH! (headbutts Larry and storms off.)
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
So why didn't you submit it to Slashdot then?
Nevermind the news. Google's grass is eaten by goats.
you need to hire hot lawn girls instead of middle aged male migrant laborers.
Wow what an amazing feat of Photoshopping.
-- Cheers!
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.
...Native plants still produce a fire hazards ...
Fire hazards are part of nature though. If your home or office building isn't burned down in a lightning-caused brush fire every 10 years or so, you're not doing your part for the environment. Why do you people all hate the Earth so much?
One goat at a time. :) Work it, Baby!
My uncle used to have goats on his farm, and they were right bastards. Of course, so was he.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Actually using goats is common in the SF Bay Area. In the East Bay goats are regularly used to "mow" the steep hillsides in Berkeley and Oakland where mowers can't go. This keeps fire hazards down.
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.
On reddit 2 days ago!
That's cool and all, but who reads reddit? I have an account, but stopped checking it after about 2 weeks because it's so lame.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
What the fuck is $h17?
Isn't it the contents of the h17 variable in a PHP script? Or something like that; I'm not a web developer, I'm just married to one.
Granted, it'd be better to use less cryptic variable names, but as long as you document properly...
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
I guess he hadn't heard yet that the new slogan was "News for Nerds... Stuff that Natters."
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
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.
Goats are browsers
So I can use goat in place of a flaming fox to view webpages?
"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/
Turning up the soil helps loosen it and spread seeds, which keeps the vegetation healthy. Goats are a healthy animal to have wander a field once in a while.
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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?
Not to dis Google or anything, but many people in the Bay Area hire goats for munching grass. There was a herd (probably the same one) "mowing" a hill near my office in Sunnyvale last week.
This works well around here. Wild grass grows only from December to April, at which point it dries and turns golden brown (to goats: golden, brown and delicious.) If they eat it now, it doesn't regrow until next winter.
Google may have forgot about this part, they will get rid of all their grass but have a field full of goat crap.
Reminds me a bit of the Simpsons episode where snakes take over the town and they find some predator of snakes to kill the snakes off only to have too many of the predator.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
The goats don't live at the Google site, they're brought there when the fields need trimming. I've gotta assume that they're not herded there.
What's the fuel consumption of a large truck full of goats versus conventional lawn mowing?
Get off my lawn.
"News for Herds... Stuff that Matters."
There, fixed that for you.
+ 3.14 Transcendental
I always knew that campus was full of shit, but I wouldn't have guessed which kind.
How much CO2 does it take to transport the goats to and from the site? They must weigh a hell of a lot more than the grass clippings or the lawnmower equipment.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
they are lying dead on the ground from all the poisons they ingested from the grass they ate that was sprayed with weed killers. Also, is Google planning to let people walk on the grass afterwards? Look out for the goat turds (round pellets). Should make for some good pranks, though. Boston baked beans anyone? How about some fresh brewed coffee?
Amazing little buggers.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'm trying to tag this story "goat" (because I would like an easy way to track goat stories... like the one with the mutant spider silk milking goat created by the US Army, possible future stories about Thor's chariot, etc.) and the gorram web3.suck slashdot system keeps appending a horrible "se" at the end, and I object!
It's not even april 1st, come on /. UI, dont goatse me! :'(
You can't take the sky from me...
Left to their own devices, goats (unlike other ruminants) will eat the plants clear down to the surface
They're rent-a-goats, they won't stay long enough to desertificate the area.
You can't take the sky from me...
Parent post is actually rather funny! :D
Aside from lower CO2 emission, there will be a higher methane emission, but I'm sure that goats are still a good alternative.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I thought barn-yard animals had to be in specially zoned areas, particularly in the city or industrial complexes. I think out in the 'burbs, where you have residential owners, you can own them as pets, but not as livestock?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
When in reality, most people when asked "What greenhouse gas contributes the most to the green house effect?" don't know the answer.
Those who buy into the current panic will reflexive say "Carbon Dioxide".
The correct answer is "Water Vapor".
But water vapor can't be taxed and vilified. So carbon dioxide gets the blame.
Anyone who's truly interested in Global Warming (as well as many other things) would do well to read the book "Kicking the Sacred Cow" by James P. Hogan. It's a rather interesting collection of articles on different subject. And to the best of my knowledge, very well researched.
Goats emit previously unsequestered carbon, that is, carbon that was extracted from the atmosphere by plants. They add nothing to the total amount of carbon in the running system.
Lawnmowers emit previously sequestered carbon, that is, carbon that was locked into the bowels of the earth aeons ago, which created the conditions necessary for mammalian life forms to exist.
So, 2 facts only are needed to understand the whole shebang:
1) Plants do not take carbon from the ground (they get it from the air) and
2) All but the very richest humans die as soon as all the carbon in the ground is put back into the air.
All this noise about "saving the earth" and "global warming" is just noise. The real issue is just a simple variant of don't shit where you eat, easily phrased as don't fart in the bathysphere.
At the SVL lab in San Jose, IBM also has employed goats for at least 4 years (that was when I first saw them). Sure they might produce gases, but they would just be doing it somewhere else. I say employ as many goats as necessary!!!
If you'd said "look like a goat" you'd be at +5.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
From Buy More!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The use of goats for weed control is fairly common in the SF Bay Area. I often see them munching away at various hill-sides. At work (no, not Google), they have been regular visitors for years and several farmers rent out their herds for this.
Amazingly (at least to me), I have seen a goat munching away on leaves of a tree WHILE STANDING ON A BRANCH of the tree. I have no idea how it got up there, but it seemed totally unconcerned with its location.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
... they also got free fertilizer, so that next year's meadow will grow even taller and require more goats. Bah, humbug!
I've always thought it would be cool to have a sprinkler-like system of laser beams mow the grass once a day.
Downsides:
1) Lawn must be perfectly flat
2) Safety precautions needed
3) Possible fires
But still. Lasers, eh?
CowboyNeal employs a hurd of gnus. There's somewhat more shit lying around, and their attitude really stinks, but hey, it gets the job done.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Caltrans, the highway agency, has been using goats to clear brush from beside freeways too. It has caused a few problems with gawkers slowing down to look at them at commute time causing massive backups, but apparently it's very economical. Cutting the stuff manually and then chipping it and hauling it away is hugely expensive, goats dispose of it in their own way and help to fertilize the ground.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
...two Jordanian soldiers were evacuated from [timor] with injured penises after attempting sexual intercourse with goats.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I saw 'Goats' in the subject and automatically hesitated pretty badly before clicking.
This IS google we are talking about. Why don't they just ditch gas powered mowers and use push mowers instead? They could start a fitness class called "mowing" which is kinda of like rowing except in reverse. And then they could offer this class for free to their employees as an incentive for working for such an awesome company.
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]
that only happens if you leave the goats in the same pasture for far longer than is intelligent. in the same scenario, sheep do the same damn thing. i've seen far to much land that looks like the surface of the moon nearly, because of overgrazing by sheep, as well as goats.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Silly nerd, goats don't throw chairs.
not a conventional lawn. large trucks with large trailers with large tractors with large brush-mower attachments to mow these large fields they are referring to. its not your 10x15 plot of Kentucky bluegrass in front of your house, its acre upon acre of semi-native grass and weeds.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Ok all the methane comments, seriously, these Goats were not bread for google, and will not die without it, thus the methane they produce would have been produced no matter what. In other words, until they make it to my plate, they are gonna sh!t somewhere.
that Google Goes With Moats.
Yes, they weren't bread for Google.
It's shopped? :O
Ezekiel 23:20
So what is the GoatView URL?
solution if they got a field full of black slaves to do it, since that country was built on the backs of slave labor anyway, why stop now??
Good one ...!!! They are well known for amazing and new approaches to the traditional problems.. :D
I've heard of a farmer who would sell pot-bellied pigs to people as pets and then offer to take them back for free "when they got too big".
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Over 2 decades ago I worked for a very large chemical company, and they used sheep to graze between the storage tanks.
There were two arguments for that:
1 - it works pretty much automatic, although you have to shield any cabling (sheep are apparently not terribly selective), and uneven terrain is not a problem. And you have to manage how many you have..
2 - tank leaks (and a chemical environment) can yield combustible circumstances, a sheep is less likely to produce sparks than any mechanical device. Gives you a bit more time to address a problem when it shows up on the detectors.
I don't think they were farmer for the meat, heaven knows what they ingested in the process..
I like the idea of grazing animals, I'm not into lawns anyway (until they find animals that can graze as evenly as a mower :-).
Insert
For the past 7 or 8 years we've used pet guinea pigs to keep our lawns trimmed. All you need is a secure hutch to keep them in at night, and a 15-25' roll of strong 4' high mesh to temporarily fence off a section of lawn. Use a couple of clips to hold the ends together, and peg it down well if there are dogs around. We put shadecloth over the top to deter cats, and use a couple of big plastic garden pots for shelter. (Cut down the middle and placed with the cut side down.) They need water, too.
If you use thick straw for their bedding and feed them veggie scraps from the kitchen you'll also end up with lots and lots of natural fertiliser and mulch.
And the big bonus is that you never have to mow the lawn again. Plus you can get the kids to move the guinea pigs to a new patch.
Just one tip: make sure all the guinea pigs are female. They seem to get along better than all males, and if you mix them you'll be renting the offspring out to the entire neigbourhood.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
So what low-carbon-emission tech are they going to use to get rid of the goat droppings? If they let them be there, the grass might grow back...
My sig is better than your sig.
Methane is a far worse global warming gas than is carbon...
Yeah, but if people start breeding goats to act as lawnmowers, then the increased methane production needs to be thought about.
Ditto bio-diesel vehicles... if you're a symbiotic user of waste from fast food restaurants, you're being green, if you're encouraging Big Corn to convert food into fuel for you, then you're not.
(You want a truly green solution to the lawn mowing problem? Stop mowing lawns.)
You have won this round, Anonymous Coward.
*Shakes Fist*