If you need your property cleared of weeds and tall grass, you could hire a landscaper. Or, you could commission a herd of goats to do the job instead.
Syndy Clark keeps a lot of animals on her Wild Acres Farm in rural Roanoke, including three sheep, a couple of pigs, several chickens and geese, and Honey, the mini heifer cow.
But her passion — and her business — mainly lies with her herd of 14 goats.
It all started when Clark was browsing one of her goat group pages on Facebook, and discovered a link to Goats on the Go. She was instantly hooked.
"I had like four goats. Four little milking goats that I had plans for, that I thought if my goats can work for me and make us a little money, then I think we should be doing that too," Clark said. "So, and then it was an excuse to get more goats."
Founded in 2012 in Ames, Iowa, Goats on the Go now has affiliates across the country.
Clark's goat herd is hired by businesses and residents across the region to clear properties of invasive and nuisance brush and weeds. Goats are well-suited to the work, despite having a reputation for their willingness to eat just about anything.
"They will taste almost anything, but they will not eat it. They're actually quite picky," she said. "What we do is called browsing. They are going to look for their favorite thing on the property first and eat it first, and then they're going to go down the list of the things until they get to what they don't want anymore."
Clark said their favorite plant to munch on is wild honeysuckle, but anything with thorns or vines is typically on their radar. Their appetites also extend to nuisance plants like poison ivy, poison sumac, and wild parsnip.
But just because the goats won't eat everything doesn't mean they don't like to trample about. For more fragile environments, Clark said the gentler touch of a sheep is ideal.
"They're more grazers, the sheep are, than they are browsers. So we primarily like to use the sheep for solar farms. People who have solar arrays on their properties or bigger solar farms," Clark said. "They can come in and they will graze underneath your solar panels and they don't damage your panels. They won't chew on the cords like a goat would or try to climb like a goat would. They're just going to eat the food."
Clark's Goats on the Go region technically covers Peoria, Tazewell, Woodford, and Marshall counties, but the herd has been deployed for jobs as far away as Champaign, Macomb, and the Chicago area. She said it's a more environmentally-friendly alternative to traditional landscaping.
"We do use a weed whacker sometimes if the brush is really thick, to cut our fence line. But for the most part, we're just using the animals," she said. "They're really good. As far as getting up higher, if you have some trees that are bothering your area, they'll graze for about six feet down. They're really good if you have a place that has a lot of erosion, so creek beds, ditches, things like that we do a lot for places that have really steep inclines. And they also fertilize as they go, as well."
Clark's business is a family affair. Her 17-year-old son Connor helps her run the business, and her husband Chris also pitches in when he's not working his full-time job.
The goats have built up a substantial clientele in the four years since Clark started her business. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is hiring Clark's herd for the third time this spring to clean off the sides of the dam at the Farmdale Reservoir in Washington. Another regular gig includes grazing on 18 to 20 acres of land near the 182nd Airlift Wing's base at Peoria International Airport.
ComEd also uses the goats to clear out unwanted vegetation near its power lines in northern Illinois. Clearing out the areas around high-voltage lines is a job often deemed too dangerous for humans, but Clark has a method to keep her animals out of harms' way.
"They're pretty much walking around eating stuff. We fence them in a specific area with solar electric netting. So there's an electric fence around them all the time. And that keeps predators out and it keeps the goats in their own space," Clark said. "And then when they need to move. That's when my crew comes in. We set up a new fence, we let them through, and it's just a conveyor line of fencing."
Clark said herding the goats isn't particularly hard, but there is a learning curve.
"You have to learn animal behavior a little bit. Okay, they're looking at me. That means they're not going to go that way. They're going to come this way. You know, just different things like that," she said. "I was like, 'that one has the bad look on its face. It's going to go left,' you know. Try to go that way."
The goats can clear out about an acre a day. For some of the bigger jobs, Clark borrows a herd of 200 goats from an Iowa farmer to pitch in. But her goats have their own names (like Banana and Hercules), and their own personalities.
"They're just so sweet. When I was a kid growing up, the only time we ever saw goats was at a petting zoo. And I kind of thought they were just okay," Clark said. "But having my own goats, they just have their own personalities. They're really sweet. They just really, I don't know, I find them enchanting."
In a lot of ways, Clark says goats don't differ much from cats or dogs. Some love to be petted; others, not so much. And she usually knows who's going to be first in line when treats are being handed out.
Find out more about Goats on the Go Peoria on the Wild Acres Farm website.
