Sometimes it seems like all our goats do is eat hay and cost money. I felt like that a lot over the winter when both Pepper and Flora were dry. Yet, even though it may feel like that after cashing out at Runnings, this is simply not true. These goats very much pay their own keep around here and then some. There’s the dairy aspect (which alone makes them worth it) and there’s the manure aspect that I’m sure a lot of you reading have picked up on. Their manure makes for highly rich fertilizer once composted, and both the new Northern Spy Apple Trees and the Forsythia hedge were grateful benefactors of last year’s compost.

But, what most people don’t know is that goats are also great for poison ivy control. Goats adore poison ivy, and we’ve got a lot of it. While people break out in a burning red rash from the plant, goats plow through it like a box of chocolates. How do they eat it without getting a reaction? I don’t know. I’ve looked it up through Google. Google knows everything, and but even the search engine didn’t quite know why goats can eat poison ivy without getting a rash. For whatever reason unknown to us, goats have the proper enzymes to neutralize the toxicity of poison ivy.

Indeed, whenever I let the goats out to mow down some of the brush they seem to show preference to the poison ivy over the other broad leaf plants. Forget about the grass – they won’t eat the grass. I often hear people say that they’d like a goat of their own to mow their lawn and I chuckle. The fact of the matter is they’re much more into browsing than grazing. They’ll eat anything with a broadleaf and anything stemmy, woody or weed-like, but goats are not lawn mowers. You’d need sheep or a cow for that job.

That’s ok. One day Rachel will let me get a couple of Shetland Sheep that I can use in lieu of the lawn mower, but for now I’m content to just have the goats to clear out the poison ivy. After only a few minutes they’ve not only cleared the poison ivy in the area I’ve selected, but we’ve also saved on the feed bill in the process. I’ve said it several times before now, but it always beats repeating: anything that saves on the feed bill is a good thing!