Aug 14, 2009: Boeing's Grifftopia

[xoxoxoBruce]

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey...
but goats eat every damn thing they can reach.

Boeing's Renton, WA, plant had acres of undeveloped land, overgrown with blackberry briars, weeds and saplings.
Clearing that mess would be an expensive, labor intensive job... or take a lot of really nasty chemicals.
The solution was to hire a herd of 120 goats.


(Marian Lockhart photo.)

Goats are capable of eating an enormous amount; the herd worked in acre-sized plots
over approximately three weeks, clearing each acre in approximately four to five days.

(Marian Lockhart photo.)

Goats also thoroughly remove all debris -- seeds, seed pods, grasses, branches, bark, stems --
effectively controlling brush, tree suckers, and weedy trees such as alder and poplar.
According to Dunakin, goats' digestive process sterilizes weed seed pods, so there is no danger
of them being passed through the digestive tract and re-rooting in the soil.

Even the birds benefit;
as the goats lazily munch their way across the lot they stir up bugs that the birds love to eat.

Sometimes being politically and environmentally correct, is also cool.