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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."
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!!
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.
But, they taste better than lawnmowers...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Oh, please don't start that. All that stuff is just baaaaaaad.
Alright. Sorry for the stupid joke. I'm feeling a bit sheepish now.
Okay. Seriously. I'm done ramming these jokes down your throat.
What? Don't be angry. You're just mad I got this in before ewe.
Or brush fires.
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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
Yeah, but they use quite a bit of carbon making more goat mass. What do you think goats are made of?
They just need to sequester the goats in a salt mine or something once they reach a certain size.
Net-zero carbon output. Fossil fuels release CO2 that has been trapped for quite some time. Goats are releasing CO2/methane that was recently stored as energy in grass.
Goats are made of food, just like cows, chickens, sheep, and pigs :)
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
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.
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)
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.
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!
Not finding the sickly nerds in the google office cute, female google employees spend most of their day staring at muscular Miguel driving the lawn mower with his shirt off...
Have you ever tried to milk a lawnmower?
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.
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.
Yeah - curried lawnmower is awful.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
I learned something today !
My plan to make a cow-dragon is now one step closer to reality.
\u262D = \u5350
Same as the trucks that transport the lawnmowers to the field.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
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
"and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers"
How much time do you spend watching lawn mowers or ..now.. goats ?
Aren't Google employees required to spend 10% of their time staring out the window?
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.
it does have a fuel nipple, and you can milk anything with a nipple.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
"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/
Qué?
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
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?
These jokes really get my goat.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No, you use cows to carry the goats to the field, and you get Gorillas to herd the cattle, then winter comes and the Gorillas freeze to death.
Circle of life.
I *do* know what you mean!
Goat hair (mohair) is terrible for making sweaters from unless you use a breed specifically bred for the purpose, and those breeds are even worse for mowing than the meat or dairy breeds.
I'm so glad there is someone else on slashdot who understands the advantages of sheep over goats. You've really made my day.
[rolls eyes]
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
There's no pulling the wool over your eyes!
Don't be silly. Six minutes later he's back at the bar, and won't return your phone calls.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Relax, he was just kidding.
We're just going to keep milking this one, aren't we?
I am officially gone from
They must have switched to goats after the GNU Hurd ran away...