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The 75 billy and
nanny goats were supposed to eat Armenian blackberry and English
ivy and other invasive plants choking native vegetation across
the 9.1-acre Minto-Brown Island Park, the city's largest, in a
pilot program last fall.
But the program ended in November after six weeks, and Salem has
no plans to renew it, Keith Keever, the city's parks
superintendent, said Friday.
The goats "had a barnyard aroma" and cost $20,719, including
$4,203 for drinking water and a workers' toilet, and $2,560 for
monitoring, city staff said in a report to the city council this
week.
The cost was nearly five times the $4,245 for a normal parks
maintenance man backed by a prison inmate work crew to do the
job, the report said.
Rachel McCollum, owner of Yoder Goat Rentals, the company that
supplied the goats, praised the work of the animals, adding:
"The public response was very favorable."
While the goats were "almost universally welcomed by park users
as a pleasant, pastoral addition to the scenery," they also
greedily devoured native flora right along with invasive
targets, choosing tasty maple and hazelnut trees. In one area,
they ate all the leaves from blackberry stems but left the
prickly bramble.
It is not the first time goats have been used as gasoline-free
lawn-mowers. They have been used at Alphabet Inc's headquarters
in Mountain View, California, and at the Historic Congressional
Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
Keever did say that Salem is not ruling out using goats in the
future for certain landscaping projects, such as maintaining
steep hills.
(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Sharon
Bernstein, Leslie Adler and Lisa Shumaker)
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