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Goat Rental – Hire Goats
- samstave 4y agoThe head of HPE EMEA is married to the head of Palo Alto networks EMA sales... They have an amazing home in Auburn, and they have a LOT of goats. My friend, who is married to the ex chief of staff for Cisco also bought a ranch in auburn and they have ~100 goats or so. They rent them out for ~$800 per acre to clear bramble and what not. I spent a week helping them move goats between projects earlier this summer and its a hell of a lot of work. There are a lot of tech people that went and bought land with goats and have started goat businesses.
- widowlark 4y agoMy wife and I hired goats from a gentleman on Nextdoor to help clear our backyard in our newly purchased home (like ~10000sqft of overgrowth) - he dropped off 7 goats, and they performed admirably, were extremely calm and well behaved until they ran out of food, at which point they turn into food-hunting, petulant children. If you do this, make sure to get only as many as you need!
- leaflets2 4y ago> they turn into food-hunting, petulant children What more previously do they do then? (When in petulant children mode)
- robbitt 4y agoThis is amazing, good friend of the family rents out their goats to farmers and friends for the exact same purpose. Reduce pesticide use, naturally improve farm land all the while providing an ideal food source for meat goats, real ESG innovation at work!
- schainks 4y agoTried hiring a local goat rental to tame my parents' yard, the guy on the phone complained about "this thing called a living wage" that he has to pay his workers. He won't take jobs less than 10 acres or his business runs at a loss. Many cities need regular plant clearing, though, so by reliably selling services to local city and county governments, his business will never fail.
- ryanianian 4y ago> reliably selling services to local city and county governments And cities are starting to do this more regularly too. E.g. NYC's Riverside park was cleared with goats this year. (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/goats-released-new-york-city-park-eat-invasive-weeds-2022-06-29/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/goats-released-new-york-cit...)
- 11thEarlOfMar 4y agoFantastic. I've got 1-1/4 acres that I've paid yearly to have cut. I worry about the workers because they encounter rattlesnakes. I've searched for goats to hire for several years, but not been able to find them. Very glad to discover this!
- samstave 4y agoWhere are you? A friend of mine runs "https://www.scapegoats.net/ https://www.scapegoats.net/" And the head of HPE Sales has something like several hundred goats, but I dont know their site info.
- 11thEarlOfMar 4y agoAlameda County, Ca.
- Animats 4y agoThe list of services is blank. I've often seen this done. The Hetch Hetchy pipeline operator uses it to clean up their right of way, which goes up, down, and through hills. Someone puts up a temporary electric fence around the right of way, and they truck in about a hundred goats. The goats graze everything down to bare dirt, and are then moved on to the next section. I've seen this done with sheep, too. Those are easier to herd but not as agile on rough terrain.
- eminence32 4y agoMy office landlords hired some goats (not from this company) to tame some overgrown bushes by a river. They arrived in a gutted school bus (which is where they slept over night). As far as I could tell, the procedure is: set up fence around area to be eaten, let out goats, and let them wander and eat for a few days. The end result wasn't very pretty, but it was remarkably effective.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoFrom the perspective of the goats it must feel like they're on a luxury cruise. They get whisked around to new locations every day, they get out and gorge themselves on food, then back on board to the next location and plant buffet tomorrow. Nice lifestyle!
- type0 4y ago> to tame some overgrown bushes by a river. Hiring goats is one of the best methods to fight bush growth, especially if you clamp the high ones so the goats can reach everywhere. Sawing down on the other hand only gives more sprouts and stronger roots for the next years.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoI have my chromium browser window at half screen width - the map rapidly resizes itself in a busy loop. Makes you a bit nauseous to look at it.
- owlninja 4y agoSame for me at full screen. Fascinating service though!
- AdamJacobMuller 4y agoThey're better at goats than web design.
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- probably_wrong 4y agoFirefox too - a scroll bar appears and disappears in a loop until it eventually converges and stops.
- yreg 4y agoYep, the map is funky!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- frob 4y agoLawrence Berkeley National Labs uses goats to tame the brush on the steep slopes surrounding the campus (over 45 degrees in many places). More than once I've had to wait on a bus for the herd of goats to transition across the main access road from one slope to the other.
- e40 4y agoAnd those hills are filled with poison oak. Guess it doesn’t bother the goats like it does humans!
- AlotOfReading 4y agoThey're pretty common in most of the East Bay hills. I've always wondered how many different herds there are though. Is it like 1-2 herds per city that move around constantly, or are there dozens of herds that spend a week vacationing in the big city every couple of months before they go back to the farm?
- sdw1 4y agoThe East Bay Regional Park District publishes their grazing schedule with all of their contractors! I really like to plan trips to go see the goats. https://www.ebparks.org/sites/default/files/Goat-Grazing-Schedule.pdf https://www.ebparks.org/sites/default/files/Goat-Grazing-Sch...
- ketzo 4y agoI know there are at least two goat rental companies, because the one I see on my hikes is different from the one in the link!
- redconfetti 4y agoWhen a mower won't tend to those hills. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQEFH_8fka4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQEFH_8fka4
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoMuch more detail on one of the listed goat rental companies: https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/business/local-goatscapers-tidy-up-lawns-help-prevent-fires/article_04194d52-0905-11ed-9f22-a3bc617235ba.html https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/business/local-goatsc...
- gwbas1c 4y agoInspiration: Ask HN: Do you maintain a list of RSS links of GOAT blogs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191140 And, yes, my cousin's goat business is listed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191666
- Joel_Mckay 4y agoGoats are the future of transportation.
- adrianN 4y agoThor knew best all along!
- implements 4y agoIn Britain, because they're classed as farm animals you'd need a Movement Order from DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) to take one onto a public road, unfortunately. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/sheep-and-goat-keepers-how-to-report-animal-movements https://www.gov.uk/guidance/sheep-and-goat-keepers-how-to-re... (Yeah, I'd once looked into using a 'goat and cart' as a from of transport!)
- ericcholis 4y agoWe've got a service in Western New York (letsgoatbuffalo.com, clever play on Let's Go Buffalo!). They used an old school bus to transport the goats, which sadly burned down. But, the Western New York community raised $16,000 via a go fund me for a new bus!
- bleuchase 4y agoSame service OP is talking about? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32434474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32434474
- soledades 4y ago( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
- zbird 4y agoI know where you're coming from.
- lostlogin 4y agoI’ve rented bees, I would like to try a goat. Last one I met was great, but some are complete arseholes.
- gumby 4y agoLess than three weeks ago, goats as a service was a topic of discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191140 (A nice example of comments drifting away from the putative topic)
- rootw0rm 4y agoI have property in a pretty rural area (Anza, CA) and every goat owner I know says that they're actually picky eaters. But these articles I see pop up now and then pretty much prove the opposite...
- markdown 4y agoThey will eat all the grass and then shrubs and then small bushes and trees including stripping all the bark. Not animals you want around flora you care about.
- progre 4y agoYep, my neighbours keeps goats next to my propery, they escape once in a while. They go directly to the soft greens in my garden. When the fences hold they eat the area clean by type as you say. First the grass, then the leves of the small trees, then the bark (killing the small trees). Only when there is nothing else left will they eat the nettles.
- k_sze 4y agoI'm not familiar with goats. But this got me thinking: why would the goats even do that? Are they not well-fed? Are they hungry all the time? Do goats eat and poop 24/7 if left unchecked?
- progre 4y ago> Do goats eat and poop 24/7 if left unchecked Yes. Many grazing animals are like this. It's like they have no "feeling full" in their tiny brains. Grass and leafs are not very calorie dense so they kind of have to. Cows or horses can easily eat themselves sick if they are let into high grown grass fields. Where I live the horse owners will sometimes cut the grass in the fields before they let the horses go to it in the spring.
- frob 4y agoI have goats. They are picky eaters. They know what they want and what they don't. They will strip most trees and bushes to the branch. They will eat most grass, but not if it's too tall or has gone to seed or is too dried out. And they'll only eat it down to about 3-4 inches from the ground. There are certain plants I dig out of my pasture because the goats just won't eat them and I don't want them spreading and taking up more space. There's truth that goats will put most things in their mouths. Almost every time I bring something new into their pen, they check to see if it's food. They'll even check me every now and then just to be sure I haven't become food in the past week. So, sure, you might see a goat pick up a tin can for a brief moment, but you'll also see it spit it out 5 seconds later.
- jaimex2 4y agoSo you want me to pay you to feed your goats?
- gwbas1c 4y agoUhm, goats are by far the cheapest way to clear out certain kinds of brush and noxious plants. They're also cute and act like dogs. Pesticides are dangerous and still leave a dead plant, machines jam (and lop off fingers,) doing it by hand takes a long time and can risk major rashes from poison ivy or cuts from thorns. Part of my back yard is impenetrable from the kinds of plants goats eat.
- strickman 4y agoI think he has a point there. If he did not pay for, it may be an even trade. You'd just have to compare the cost per acre per month of machine maintenance vs the cost to maintain a well fed flock for a month; including land costs and property taxes if you own the land.
- happyopossum 4y ago> I think he has a point there. If he did not pay for, it may be an even trade. Not really - the cost of food for goats is fairly marginal all things considered. For this kind of service you have to account for transport, setup (usually fencing of some sort has to be put up), etc. as well as ongoing medical and shelter costs for when they aren’t working.
- bobthepanda 4y agoAlso, goats deal really well with sloped areas that machines and people struggle with. Where I live they get used a lot on highway embankments.
- jaimex2 4y agoElectric mowers and brush cutters solved that years ago. They weigh nothing.
- strickman 4y agoJust finished watching Clarkson's Farm; Jeremy got some sheep for this purpose. Recommend watching.
- jppope 4y agoperhaps one of the finest shows since streaming became a thing
- philjohn 4y agoIt really is - because not only is it hilarious, it also highlights just how difficult modern farming has become - razor thin margins, at the whims of the weather, dealing with vandlism from local youths with nothing better to do etc. etc.
- toast0 4y agoWhen was farming not on razor thin margins at the whims of the weather? At least US history is full of sharecropping where the farmers barely making ends meet and those with enough capital to own their own small farms not doing much better. Some of those who owned a lot of land with sharecroppers managed to do ok though. It's similar today, except sharecropping has gone out of style, I think. Big farms and little farms are on very thin margins, but thin margins on a small farm mean Clarkson made like a hundred pounds or something after a year (probably ignoring his capital costs).
- philjohn 4y agoHe makes bank on the Diddly Squat Farm Shop though - great produce, but not cheap. His hot sausage is AMAZING if you're a heat fan.
- sph 4y agoI second the recommendation. Don't be put off by Jeremy Clarkson and his persona, seeing a motorhead with a big ego trying to run a farm and make a profit is what makes the show. Thankfully, he's paired with someone that knows their stuff, with a sharp enough wit...
- dlgeek 4y agoI looked into this a couple of times for an urban-ish lot with an overgrown backyard. (I don't have a green thumb!). There were several services in my area, including the awesomely-named Rent-a-ruminant. Unfortunately, for smaller lots, it just isn't feasible - the way the pricing is structured, the setup fees get you. They are really for multi-acre lots where they set up significant fencing and leave the goats for several days.
- semi-extrinsic 4y agoHere in Northern Europe they just use GPS-enabled electric collars on the goats, and do literal geofencing with that. Then you don't have any cost of setting up physical fences. Of course you have to accept that the fence position has an inaccuracy 5-6 meters, so it only makes sense for large areas where there is nothing that will kill the goat if it strays a little outside the fence.
- Aperocky 4y agoWhat if the goat wanders into the wrong direction and get lost? Would it die of electric shock or would the collar run out of battery.. eventually
- semi-extrinsic 4y agoI'm pretty sure the collars can't cause deadly harm, just discomfort. I don't know anything about implementation details, but I assume that the shock strength varies such that the goats figure out they have to turn around.
- imwillofficial 4y agoYou had me at goat rentals!
- elliottkember 4y agoGoatscaping
- ggm 4y agoI thought we were opposed to the Nanny state?
- a_t48 4y agoI looked into this for my yard. Unfortunately given how bad of a shape it is, it still would cost multiple thousands to clear with goats. Fortunately, it only costs a few hundred to buy some goats and do it over a longer time, with the bonus of making my niece happy.
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- puchatek 4y agoThe "world" seems to be made up of Canada, the US and Australia
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- voxadam 4y agoGoat Ops[0] is real! [0] https://www.goatops.com/ https://www.goatops.com/
- sAbakumoff 4y agoWhen I saw the title, I thought that it's about hiring The Greatest Of All Times people. LMAO
- guiambros 4y agoHa, this reminded me of a similar service: goat rental for videoconferences [1] :). It was a hit during the pandemic, with everyone scrambling to combat screen fatigue in creative ways. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32435090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32435090
- probably_wrong 4y agoI visited the goat rental page and got a picture of an Alpaca. I want my money back.
- chris_wot 4y agoIf you think about it, this is probably the most ecologically friend method of clearing scrub and weeds. No chemicals involved! The only thing I wonder about is whether the weed seeds would regrow. But I’d imagine clearing it on the second round would be easier.
- CPLX 4y agoDoes anyone know how much this tends to cost in an actual direct X goats for X days tends to cost about this much sort of way?
- yitchelle 4y agoStory time - My dad asked the local school which had a goat if he can borrow it for a weekend. It was to tame his backyard. As the backyard was enclosed with no chance of the goat escaping, we left it by itself. The goat was be extremely hungry and ate everything insight including the roots, leaves and bark. By Monday, the backyard is barren and took months recover. Moral of the story - keep an eye on the goat.
- vitiral 4y agoGoats are excellent land management if you have enough land and don't mind everything getting eaten to near the ground
- briffle 4y agoour state DOT has rented goats to clean the sides of roads along highways in some rural areas, especially when there are large amount of noxious weeds. The person they hire strings up a bunch of short fiberglass poles for a mile or two along the highway with some wires, puts out some water, and then lets the goats in. Comes back and picks them up a couple of days later, and moves them to the other side.
- drjasonharrison 4y agoNot just some wire but a portable electric fence.
- vitiral 4y agoGoats LOVE poison ivy and oak, and it doesn't hurt them. Don't let them near hemlock though (it will do the same to them as it did Socrates)
- tlavoie 4y agoThey seem to like Scotch broom as well. Some red-leafed garden ornamental is brutally toxic to them though, and it can be a slow, agonizing death.
- mingusrude 4y agoMy sister has a small farm and in addition to cows and horses she also has rabbits. Every spring, parents show up to buy a rabbit to have at home. When the deal is done my sister takes the parents aside and tell them that if they plan or feel by the end of the summer that they want to let the rabbit loose, they can return it for free. What she does not tell is that our brother-in-law is a chef and happily makes rabbit stew of the returned rabbits. If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it.
- wszfahwbwbaha 4y agoYour sister is a bad person
- __dunder__ 4y agoDoesn't this produce a selection effect against cute rabbits? Parents are more likely to choose cute rabbits, those rabbits become pets, they either get returned and eaten or kept. So non-cute rabbits tend to live longer on the farm, and as such have more offspring and get selected for, and eventually the farm will be covered in ugly rabbits and your sister will not have any clients anymore.
- oynqr 4y agoUgly rabbits probably get the stew treatment first
- jacobriis 4y agoThis is not goat content.
- kinleyd 4y agoHmm, that does not sound right.
- KingMob 4y ago> If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it. Say what? She lies via omission to the parents, forcing them to make an uninformed choice. Instead of letting a rabbit loose in the wild, they might have sought another home for it, because they didn't want it to die. Your sister's lies mislead them into thinking they can safely return the rabbit.
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- 0xPIT 4y agoCouldn’t one also rent goats just to appear in video calls?
- Cockbrand 4y agoWhich reminds me of a very old joke: Two friends meet in a bar. Says one: "I've bought a goat." Says the other: "A goat? Where do you keep it?" "In the bedroom." "In the bedroom? What about the smell?" "Well, the critter will have to get used to it."
- walrus01 4y agoin terms of goat's ability to eat almost literally anything, even the things you don't want them to eat, they have a saying in afghanistan (translated from the dari): if you don't have any problems, buy a goat
- jppope 4y agoTIL Michael Jordan nor Tom Brady are featured on hiregoats.com... which is a shame
- jayzalowitz 4y agocame here for this joke.
- trissylegs 4y agoSeems that NSW has 1 in the northernmost area (Byron) and 1 in the sothernmost area (Bega). I'm sure there's probably some Goats in between.
- AndyMcConachie 4y agoThe city of Rotterdam has sheep that are owned by the city and shepherded by a city employee. https://www.rotterdam.nl/wonen-leven/grazers/ https://www.rotterdam.nl/wonen-leven/grazers/ I'm kind of surprised someone would use goats for this purpose instead of sheep. Sheep are dumb, docile and easy to manage. Goats are impossible to manage.
- Xylakant 4y agoGoats and sheep have different grazing behavior. Sheep are great for grasses, but goats will happily eat everything- shrubs, grass, name it.
- d_rc 4y agoAnother story from a fellow hacker with a backyard goat - It actually starts in a very subtle way. Goats have different tastes and moods, and it's not like they eat everything right away unless the density of a goat per backyard m2 is too high. I started giving mine some free "roaming" time with the chickens every day before the sunset. It looked very innocent - first few days she ate just some weeds, nettle and some low hanging branches of pear trees. No worries, I was planning to cut those anyways. After few weeks of not paying that much attention in the evenings, bottom third of all our ~12 trees were gone, she got into salads, potatoes, zucchini, pumpkins, peppers and cucumbers, all nettle was done, and she started checking out tomatoes (which seemed that she is really really not into at first). I am building a new goat house with it's own separate "backyard" with weeds that she won't be able to escape. :)
- toast0 4y agoFYI, we were letting our goats and chickens roam at the same time, but hanging out with the goats and it was fine... until the goats figured out how to squeeze into the chicken run and gobble up the chicken feed. Apparently they find it super tasty, but it's not vegetarian, so they shouldn't eat it. The chickens get into much less trouble and can roam mostly unsupervised; but we've got a lot of aerial preditors to watch out for.
- stefs 4y agoat least she didn't eat the chicks.
- ridgered4 4y agoWhen I was a child we had pigs and chickens next to each other. The chickens started sleeping atop the resting pig since it was warm. It was cute until the pig started devouring the chickens!
- h2odragon 4y ago> won't be able to escape I suspect you may be falling to overconfidence there. Also, single goat? That's tough, I've done it by running the goat with a pack of dogs and treating it as a dog, but witha lone goat, who doesn't feel they have herd, keeping them happy is difficult.
- andybak 4y agoThe map judders uncontrollably on Firefox for me.
- MaxBarraclough 4y agoSame here, it constantly alternates between two sizes.
- codebolt 4y agoSame here on Edge.
- moffkalast 4y agoAlso on Chrome, I'm pretty sure it's a joke.
- genezeta 4y agoIt does look like a bug. Like the iframe and the parent are sending each other a message to match the heights of the content document and the iframe element but it miss-calculates producing a vertical scroll to appear, which then posts another message back to adjust again and so on, back and forth.
- nvusuvu 4y agoSame here, Version 104.0.5112.81 (Official Build) (64-bit) Chrome
- omnibrain 4y agoAt my former working place we had a freelance consultant on retainer who looked into cutting his hours down for health reasons and thus explored new ventures. Because he already had a few sheep he decided to offer sheep rentals as a "biological" lawn cutter. But there were 2 problems: Sheep can be somewhat picky eaters, so they let some grass stand. But the bigger problem was, that while his prospective customers liked the idea of having their lawn cut "biologically", they pretty much did not like the sheep droppings the sheep left behind in practice.
- vishnugupta 4y agoAh nice seeing something like this on HN. In India, it's common to hire goats for another, lets just say complementary reason. Their droppings are really good natural fertiliser. So farmers pay sheep/goat herders to get them to visit their farm for a few days before the sowing season.
- fluke53 4y agoI'm from India and I never heard of this. I'm pretty sure people do this, but it's the "it's common" part that bothers me. It's like saying Indians are vegetarians. All Indians aren't.
- showerst 4y agoWhenever I hear someone say "(X) is common" in any country with more than about 20 million people, I just mentally append "in my area".
- yesilyurt 4y agoWhere to hire tyson
- pjmlp 4y agoIn the same vein regarding tackling invasive plants. In Germany, I came to realize that many cities have unpaid "employees" to tame the city gardens, namely wild ducks, gooses and rabbits. Thankfully people leave them be, back home they would have been snaped in less than a week. However as they are used to humans, it also means they make themselves invited guests to any picknick if one doesn't pay attention to the "teams" taking care of the grass.
- klik99 4y agoThis has become pretty common over the last few years in Atlanta for clearing out larger wild areas - they make short work of it
- djmips 4y agoI thought this would let you would hire 10X programmers...
- lwhi 4y agohttps://www.cronkshawfoldfarm.co.uk/goatsonzoom https://www.cronkshawfoldfarm.co.uk/goatsonzoom You're welcome!
- fnands 4y agoGaaS - Goats as a Service
- fredsmith219 4y agoWhen goats eat weeds will they eat and destroy the whole weed? Or do they eat just down to the surface level of the ground which will let the weed grow back immediately?
- toast0 4y agoDepends on the goat and the weed. My goats only like the flowers of dandelion analogues, but for some other weeds, one will try to get the whole thing out and the others just eat the leaves to the ground. If you put them in a small space, you'll pretty much get bare earth either way though.
- dingleberry420 4y agoYou don't rent a goat, you lease that surly bastard
- flerchin 4y agoMy dad hired goats to mow down his entire lot in the Hell's Canyon area of Eastern Washington. Saved his cabin from a wildfire, and got the dang thistles reduced to nothing. It was a bargain too, $400.
- flerchin 4y agoThe map on this page has some sort of CSS issue in Firefox. It constantly resizes and shakes. Using the page zoom function is enough to get it to eventually stop.
- keyanp 4y agoSame issue for me, I'm on Chrome Version 104.0.5112.79
- pineconewarrior 4y agoIt jiggles in a most unpleasant manner for me as well. I love these types of bugs. If these guys are going for a "Goat Simulator" vibe (notoriously buggy, part of the charm), they've nailed it.
- kraquepype 4y agoHa, that was my first thought too. It immediately reminded me of the absurdly buggy feeling you get playing Goat Simulator.
- phkahler 4y agoThe map got all jittery on me and would not stop. All I did is scroll down the page. Running some version of Edge on Windows 10.
- bluelightning2k 4y agoI am waiting for GaaS
- dont__panic 4y agoNo goats in New Hampshire or Vermont? I guess those farms don't have internet access...
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- twawaaay 4y agoMy parents had goats. The problem with goats for your nice landscape is that they will nibble at everything including your trees and any shrubbery.