Shepherdess Briana Murphy herds goats at the Portland International Airport in Portland, Oregon, as Mount Hood is seen in the background, April 17, 2015. In a city that loves its goats, the Portland International Airport now has a temporary herd. Forty goats and a llama started munching this week on invasive plants such as blackberries, thistle and Scotch broom near the PDX airfield. The llama’s job is to keep away predators like coyotes. Picture taken April 17, 2015. REUTERS/Steve Dipaola – RTX19KH0

The aroma seems like a small price to pay, under the circumstances, but we appreciate Oregon for trying this novel approach nonetheless:

Oregon city fires its grounds-keeping goats with ‘barnyard aroma’

BY ERIC M. JOHNSON

A crew of goats brought in to devour invasive plants at a popular park in Oregon’s state capital, Salem, have been fired because they ate indiscriminately, cost nearly five times as much as human landscapers and smelled far worse, a city official said on Friday.

The 75 billy and nanny goats were supposed to eat Armenian blackberry and English ivy and other invasive plants choking native vegetation across the 9.1-acre Minto-Brown Island Park, the city’s largest, in a pilot program last fall.

But the program ended in November after six weeks, and Salem has no plans to renew it, Keith Keever, the city’s parks superintendent, said Friday.

The goats “had a barnyard aroma” and cost $20,719, including $4,203 for drinking water and a workers’ toilet, and $2,560 for monitoring, city staff said in a report to the city council this week.

The cost was nearly five times the $4,245 for a normal parks maintenance man backed by a prison inmate work crew to do the job, the report said.

Read the whole article here.