Billy (wall mount)

In sculpting “Billy” I played into a classic stereotype of goats being able to eat most anything and portrayed him as such with a tin can in his mouth......that fact being a “good thing”. This piece was created in honor of this unique and amazing farm animal.

I recently saw a Youtube video of a lady who created a business of hiring her goat herd out to go into various landowners’ overgrown weedy properties for a day or for weeks. She tells of having goats that have been hired out over 500 times and working in 15 different states. In researching this subject, I discovered numerous folks have goat herds that hire out to farms, homes, businesses, cities and other government entities to reclaim land, and regenerate sites for plants, insects, birds and animals. Kudzu, an ivy plant that has overrun 7.5 million acres in the southern United States, is actually being controlled by goat herds.

When goats eat noxious weed seeds (poison hemlock, cheatgrass, kochia, sunflowers, tumbleweeds, lamb’s quarters, Russian thistle, halogeton, mullein, houndstongue and dyer’s woad), the seeds of these weeds are killed off in their digestive tracts; hence, stopping them from spreading. As a side benefit this allows a land owner to not have to use weed killers/pesticides. Goats happily eat hemlock (poisonous to humans), and even strip off ivy from trees, preventing them from being smothered by that plant. Goats are browsers when it comes to eating and consuming grass is their last choice; hence, they work well sharing pastures with cattle and horses.

Contracting out goat herds for ‘contract grazing’ is becoming more common for vegetation management, flood mitigation, bank stabilization, fire fuel mitigation, tilling the soil and weed control.