Flail mower or eco-friendly goat mowers?

Head to YouTube and there is not a thing you can’t find a goat doing in a video. They jump on trampolines, wear sweaters, tap dance, backflip and even scream like humans. It seems that we all a little obsessed with these crafty, nibbly creatures.

Aside from making us laugh, and melting our hearts with their cuteness factor, goats do have some very practical uses. One of which is apparently mowing lawns. So if you have a large lawn or large area of land, cast aside your flail mower and rent a goat.

Are goats really good as nature’s lawn mowers?

Surely if they are good enough for the internet search engine giant Google, then they are good enough for us. Yes, that’s right Google used a herd of some 200 goats to mow and weed fields at their Mountain View headquarters.

What are the advantages of using goats as lawnmowers?

Whether you have a flail mower or rotary mower there are always places that you can’t quite reach. Not goats, they can climb into every hard to reach nook and cranny.

When weeds are destroyed and eaten by goats they take longer to grow back. This is thanks to their digestive system which sterilises any seeds. So not only do they get rid of the weeds but they slow down any regrowth too.

Goats are of course eco-friendly, eliminating the need for the use of fossil fuels for ride-on mowers and tractors with flail or rotary mower attachments. There is no noise pollution either.

The use of harmful herbicides is a popular, although controversial, method of weed control. The use of these harsh chemicals could be avoided by employing a friendly herd of goats.

Goats also fertilise the land as they go. What goes in must come out right? Then as you would expect, the natural fertiliser gets trampled back into the ground, saving you another job.

Above all else they are much more fun to watch than a man driving around a field on a lawn mower.

Are there any drawbacks to using goats?

Well as with most things there has to be a flip side. With goats, it is that they will eat or destroy anything and everything. Which means that anything you want to save needs to be protected.

As with any animals taking on your own means constant care and provisions, so you can’t just buy them and dump on your lawn and forget about them. However, this can be avoided if you “rent a goat”.

eCommerce and eco-friendly goat mowers

No idea where to look? Head to Amazon, that is where you can find almost anything you might need.

eCommerce store Amazon has trialled renting goats as part of their Amazon Home Services. This new arm of the giant eCommerce platform allows its users to book online when they need a plumber, electrician and soon even goats to mow your lawn.

Not in the UK

Amazon providing Home Services is available in the USA. Is it something you would like to see offered in the UK, with or without the goat mowers as a service? We trust them with delivering a vast array of products to our door, so why not services too?

As for goat mowers, I have not read about these being available in the UK either. Oh, except for one occasion in the Oxford Mail on 1 April 2015. It suggested that the city of Bicester was banning lawn mowers in favour of goats, sounds very feasible except the whole article was an April fool.

Maybe this eco-friendly goat mower service is something for the future here in good ole blighty, but for now we best stick to our flail and rotary mowers.