Hired goats chew on arboretum’s scenery
Rue, Ariel, Moon Pie, Nelson, Wynona, Aunt Callie and more than 150 of their four-legged co-workers are chowing down on deep-rooted sedge around a pond at the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center, pretty much oblivious to the city slickers gawking from the other side of their electric fence.
It’s about 9:30 a.m. and some of these goats, frankly, look like they are already sitting down on the job. Their owners, Kyle and Carolyn Carr, aren’t worried.
“They started grazing before sunrise, and they lay down to chew cud,” Kyle Carr explains. “So, they are
technically working.”
Through Saturday, the goats from the Carrs’ company, Rent-aRuminant Texas, also will eat poison ivy without getting an itchy rash. Gobble up thorny stuff without a scratch. Scramble up slopes. Muck through weedy mud. As they digest green stuff, it comes out the other end, fertilizing the soil. And they work pretty much 24/7.
So, no kidding — is it any wonder that goats, aside from being adorable, have become the darlings of the mowing business? More properly, it’s called sustainable grazing. The Rent-a-Ruminant Texas crew is clearing about an acre and a half of landscape around the arboretum ponds near Woodway Drive.
This isnot a petting zoo; the animals are working, and they are behind a portable electric fence.
They mostly police themselves. “They kind of work in shifts,” Carr says. They can clear an acre in about 2½ days.
Booked through 2021
This job is pretty easy, requiring just one move to the boardwalk wetlands pond midweek. At larger sites, Carr has to race to stay ahead of the goats, installing fences. “They clear brush better than we can with tools,” he says. “We’ll take a day and a half to get a fence up, and once we let them in, they’ll clear the land in a couple of hours.”
He and Carolyn knowall of their goats by name.
They started with a herd they raised as “bottle babies,” like pets. Another group they bought at an auction last year are more skittish, and 65 rescues that were lost during a hurricane in Florida do not want to be touched at all, he says. “We work with them and train them many months before they’re allowed into the traveling herd.”
Mother goats and their kids don’t travel, either, until the kids are about a year old. “We don’t necessarily need to have the babies every year, but they’re so cute, and we like to take pictures of them,” Carr says. He has a noslaughter policy, so retired goats spend their days on the ranch enjoying an all-they-can-eat buffet.
The herd contains goats of all sizes, from Nigerian Dwarf and other pygmy types that are particularly good at getting under brush, to larger Boers and Nubians that get up on their hind haunches and pull down vines and branches.
When Carr’s herd isn’t out gobbling up overgrowth around the state, the goats live in Brownwood, near Abilene, on land where his grandparents ran cattle when he was a kid. When he inherited the overgrown land a few years ago, Carolyn suggested they hire a grazing company .“She was jo king ,” he says. But online research led her
to Tammy Dunakin’s Rent-a- Ruminant company in Washington state, where managed grazing is popular as an eco-friendly wildfire prevention measure. A franchise was born.
Carr says his herd is now so busy they’re booking through 2021, with a grazing season that usually lasts from March until about October. This is their second trip to Houston, following a brief visit last fall to Hermann Park, where they worked the 30foot mount in Centennial Gardens as a demonstration.
The arboretum area they’re working is not that dramatic, but it’s full of “pimples and dimples,” small elevation changes in the topography that hold and absorb rainwater. Arboretum staff often have to wait for dry spells to mow.
“It’s always a control game. You’re never done as a conservationist,” says Christine Mansfield, the arboretum’s marketing and development manager. “We do a lot of mowing and hand-weeding and rely on a lot of volunteer hands to help us maintain the site.”
Volunteer work has been reduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, so there’s a lot of fall cleanup to do. Along with invasive species, some native plants can quickly smother others, reducing habitat diversity.
Better than bison
Thousands of years ago, before settlers arrived and disrupted nature’s flow, roaming bison and occasional burns sparked by lightning kept overgrowth in check across what is now the southwestern corner of Memorial Park. “We’d love to do burns, but it’s not realistic,” Mansfield says. They can, however, replicate the historical grazing.
People ask Mansfield all the time when the arboretum will bring back bison. It sounds fun, but bison have a big footprint, and they are slow. Goats are more manageable.
Goats are not entirely indiscriminate eaters. In fact, they are selective browsers. Carr says they eat what they enjoy first. And he doesn’t know how they know it, but they avoid plants that are toxic to them, including boxwood shrubs and certain ornamental plants and flowers.
Onthe other hand, the goats absolutely love poison ivy. This is another reason visitors should not try to pet them. Urishiol, the oily resin from the plants’ leaves, stems and roots to which many people are allergic, gets onto their coats, Carr says. That’s a job hazard he deals with daily, since he touches the animals all the time.
The Carrs set up water troughs for the animals to stay hydrated and a “mineral lick” that keeps their diet balanced. “During hot weather, we give them electrolytes, which we call goat-er-aid,” Carolyn Carr says, grinning. But seriously, goats do need to eat a more varied diet than, say, sheep, which only forage grasses. So they are perfect for a weeding job.
Along with deep-rooted sedge, Mansfield expects the goats to help clear over-vigorous native vines such as morning glory and trumpet creeper and blackberry brambles that have overtaken desirable wetland plants added to the arboretum’s environment during several years of intense habitat restoration work. Of course, the goats will chomp it all.
All good, Mansfield says. They don’t pull roots. She knows the plants will come back. She hopes the arboretum has funds to bring the goats back for regular maintenance to work the savanna and prairie areas, too.
“We would mow no matter what,” she says. “Seeing how the land responds is the most exciting thing.”