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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."
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!!
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.
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.
Or brush fires.
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"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
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.
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.
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!
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.
Nevermind the news. Google's grass is eaten by goats.
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?
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.
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/
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?
"News for Herds... Stuff that Matters."
There, fixed that for you.
+ 3.14 Transcendental
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?
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]