LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Who will win? The Olmsted Park Conservancy is testing the work efficiency of grazing goats.
High atop Iroquois Park, David Neville is halfway through a six-week deployment to de-brush Summit Field.
“You can tell pretty quickly they are doing a lot of work,” Neville told Spectrum News 1.
Summit Field is the highest point of the sprawling 700-acre south side park and presently the trees and saplings are getting a little big for their own branches, so some of them have to go! But how?
“I guess you could call them research. I just call the browsing goats,” Neville said.
Neville is the owner of Capstone Farms. He’s a goat herder, and he’s brought 26 goats to Iroquois Park for a trial run. The goats have been ‘unleashed’ into the park to clear overgrown brush to make room for other types of greenery.
“It’s a little confusing for folks sometimes because you see them now and they’re just laying around chewing their cud and taking it easy but what they do is they go eat a little bit come back in the shade chew their cud, digest it, go eat a little more,” Neville explained.
Neville says if gone undisturbed, the goats get into a rhythm and are very efficient at clearing brush. Move over John Deere, because nothing runs like a goat! They’re like outdoor Roombas, making room for the wildflowers to grow, which is exactly what Olmsted Park Conservancy is after.
“Yeah, they’ve been busy eating all sorts of non-native plants and kind of stiffer material that we want to keep out so we can have all these incredible pollinators really thrive,” Layla George of Olmsted Park Conservancy said.
George says typically when parks need to dial back the invasive species, or even overgrown native species, they’ll perform a controlled burn, but for Iroquois Park that’s a little more tricky.
“It’s harder to do that here in the city. As you can imagine, we’ve got the airport not too far away. Sometimes it’s difficult to get that prescribed burn to happen,” George said.
So Olmsted Conservancy teamed up with Kentucky State University and David Neville to run a test. They are testing the efficiency of goats at clearing brush with manual labor.
“You know the good things about goats is they never have a bad ‘BL Friday Night.’ And what is a BL Friday Night? The boys go out on a Friday night, they drink too much Bud Light and you can’t get them to work the next day. They might even show up on the next Monday, right?” Neville said with a smile.
If this trial run is successful, Louisville’s other Olmsted Parks may very well be ‘goated’ too.
A quick note for Iroquois Park visitors. They will notice the goats are kept focused on specific areas with the aid of electric fences, so avoid feeding the goats and mind the fence, especially if your dog is along for the hike.