In what absolutely reads like an April Fools joke, Google has a post on its blog today explaining how it has rented a herd of goats to replace the lawnmowers that normally cut the grass in the fields around its headquarters. This is Google’s “low-carbon” approach to maintaining its property.
Google is renting the goats from a company called California Grazing. Apparently, every so often a herder will bring about 200 of them to the campus and they’ll roam around for a week eating the grass. Not only that, these goats will fertilize the land at the same time — yes, that way.
Google claims the goats will cost about the same as lawn mowers would. And a border collie named Jen will be brought onto Google’s payroll to help with the herding as well, apparently. No word on how the maintenance workers who previously had this job feel about losing work to goats.
We’ve contacted PETA about the news (the first person I talked to initially chuckled), and they’re going to get back to us with an official comment today.
Update: PETA has gotten back to us with its official stance on the Google Goats. Read all about it here.
huh. i didn’t see that coming.
I bet the maintenance workers who previously had this job didn’t either.
screw em. we’re saving the earth here, people.
But will it scale?
This is fantastic! Love it!
Nicely done, Isaac! Ha!
Gotta agree, though… it’s a different kind of world we’re moving towards, though. Saving the earth could create a lot of jobs, too. Overpopulation (hence NEEDING so many jobs) is a bigger cause of unemployment than environmental initiatives.
there will be A LOT to safe if all those people laid off from work will get together and grab guns and torches….
really Mike are you sure? Saving the world. This is a PR move, but probably not any more sustainable than lawn mowers
1) how much does it cost to transport the goats to MV?
2) Where does the goat shit go? In the Bay for sure, that is not very eco-friendly.
A few answers:
Where does the goat shit go? :
Goat shit goes on the lawn as fertilizer. Avoiding the neccesity for petro-chemical synthesized fertilizers.
How sustainable is this?:
The goats are transported with a vehicle, but when comparing that to lawnmowers there is no question it’s better. An average lawn mower doesn’t have the regulations that car engines do. Statistics point to the fact that running a home lawn mower for 30 minutes is the equivalent emissions of 100 mile trip in an SUV. You do the math.
Peace,
Chris
screw them? and you are saving the earth? hope that is sarcasm
Using goats to mow lawns is nothing new. Yahoo did it before MG learned this shocking detail, and companies up and down lame old Marin county have done it for more than a decade.
Get your fanboi heads out of your collective asses.
If you really want it so bad, get the worms to thoroughly aerate your plot while they take care of you.
Even if goats are replacing workers on the front line, there is a whole “down stream” affect with this move. The goats have owners that have to hire people to take care of them, transport them, etc. When they are “off duty”, I’m sure they have to be fed, which means they buy or grow feed, which… yada yada. Growing up on a farm that had goats, I had the (dis)pleasure of knowing that they aren’t self sufficient. Where one job may be lost, another is born in this case.
Warning to Google – I hope you know your days of having flowers or any gardens is over. Expect anything 5′ tall to become a game of “King of the Hill”. Expect lots of sneakers filled with turds – goats don’t just go in the grassy areas like dogs. I hope you only plan on having a same-sex herd, else plan on plenty of “goat activity” in plain view… lots of it.
Good luck with them!
Yeah – the goats would much rather eat trees, flowers, shrubs, etc, than grass! Goats are not Grazing animals (sheep and cows are). Having grown up on a farm with a herd of goats – they stripped the bark of all the trees in the wooded areas and let the grass grow 6′ tall.
I can’t wait to see how long this actually lasts before they realize it just isn’t going to work?
Likely not long Tricia. It will end up in some harassment case against the goats because they are continually showing PDA and humping in plain view – not to mention all the other items we touched on
// Growing up on a farm that had goats, I had the (dis)pleasure of knowing that they aren’t self sufficient.
Grazing goats are. I have had goats for years and know from my research that meat goats are not considered worth having in most productions if they cannot live off the land. People even say that feed is bad for them and they are best foraging.
// Goats are not Grazing animals (sheep and cows are).
That is quite true. The advantage of this arrangement is that the goats will eat the weeds first and the grass last. Of course they would also eat whatever nice plants and young trees they can get their mouths on, which may be a problem if such plants are wanted, but they probably are not in this case. I have a goat-lawn, and it is about the best-looking grass you could want.
The biggest problem is that when goats are mowing grass, they are eating so close to the ground that they might be getting parasitic worms. That is a problem on the goat-owners’ end, though.
// I hope you only plan on having a same-sex herd…
Most commercial herds are all female.
What I mean is that you can’t just let them run around free and expect everything to be okay. They know no bounds.
… and if this herd will be all female, who will be doing the milking? I hope Google doesn’t go to goats milk on campus. If you want to know what that tastes like, leave a glass of milk on the counter for an hour or so and have at it.
These are my memories, don’t spoil them
Interestingly, this has been happening for the past several months along CA-237 near the Zanker/McCarthy exits. There is a lot of grass there in the open areas and they are using sheep there apparently!
Tim and Allen have the only sane responses on this topic I have seen so far. Just like a Google or Yahoo for that matter, to try and use goats for grazing. Goats are ruminants. They like things that we like: rose bushes, boxwood hedges, small trees, almost any flower and anything else they can reach standing on their hind legs. They make forests look neat, like a park. Let see; eat trees and shrubs, kill roots, then eat the grass(starving), nothing to hold the soil, hard rain and flash flood. Great idea. If they want to mow the lawn get sheep or cows, they are the grazers. This is just too funny:)
It’s not very often that i LOL when I read something on TC. This did it for me.
ok…
so you can’t spell ‘laugh’ now…
Apparently he’s also forgotten how to spell TechCrunch.
Or maybe he was just abbreviating.
TC is tartar control.
Now I know why Gmail added that poop emoticon.
I have never been to their campus, so don’t know how it’s set up, but it would be great to have lunch on a picnic table with a couple goats lazily wandering around in the distance (not TOO close!) for a nice, relaxing, ambiance.
“Green” or not, it sounds like a good idea!
My family raised sheep and goats as I was growing up. Trust me, you do not want to be eating anything near a flock with the potential of your being downwind.
Jaime Lerner, the ex Mayor of Curitiba, Brazil saw it coming in 1989…
http://www.yout...h?v=hRD3l3rlMpo
minute 9:55 and onward
Over ten minutes of Portuguese without Lani Hall?
That’s NOT RIGHT.
hmmmm, I wonder if that would get rid of the drunks in the park in the summer? With any luck it might slow them down, nothing like waking from a drunken nap to find a goat munching around you.
The drunks tend to have knives….
No more cheese for Mama.
Good stuff. Love it.
But who is gonna cleanup goat shit? Oraganic fertilizer? what do they do with 200-goat-shit-stink?
folks have been doing this for years in the high-fire regions of the east bay hills. of course, they dont have google’s sense of self-importance….
No, but that side is kinda weirder than the others sometimes.
I think the use of power and water to maintain grass will lead more and more properties to install fake grass. The new fake turf is pretty amazingly realistic and never requires maintenance.
That’s a bit more realistic than bringing in 200 goats. I mean they exhale CO2 and they also fart methane. Then they leave turds all over. So, I would estimate that they release more CO2 than a lawnmover with a modern engine.
And they have to be transported in by truck too, I’d assume, if we really want to nitpick the whole scenario. I like the idea (mainly because it’s novel), but I have to laugh at the short-sightedness of so many green efforts.
yeah, because the lawnmower arrives on a flying carpet.
dumbass.
You’re the dumbass, Sam. They have to cart the goats in and out every week. 200 goats probably require several trucks. Trucks require gas and maintainance and produce pollution. Google surely stored its riding mowers on-site.
Sardonic fool.
but the solution is not in how we humans go about doing things, it’s that we’re alive which is the real evil, right Green groupies?
There’s a big pink elephant (UN Agenda 21) in the room and it will make more of a mess of things than the crap will from the goats.
Let’s all watch the movie ‘The Secret’ and ignore the real issue.
Of course the truck situation could just be averted if Google obtained it’s own herd, or rented the field out to just one rancher who left his herd there all the time.
If the goats aren’t shared with ebay, Yahoo! and the cafeteria the it’s not goat shit but bullshit.
well technically the goats will be exhaling co2 and farting methane whether google uses them as lawnmowers or not. the lawnmowers, on the other hand, while not in operation, will not create pollution.
You don’t think lawnmowers fart?
. . . wow. i really dunno how to comment. O_O;;
that’s awesome. unless i step in goat poo. then it’s not awesome.
obviously the PETA people will now be forced to liberate these slave workers.
Does feeding count now as making them work? Only real issue I think they’d have is how they’re treated in the trucks and when they’re not ‘on duty.’
GO GOOGLE GO!!!!!
Google, Starbucks and Wal-Mart are goign to take over the world.
I’ll warn Yahoo, Pepsico and Kmart. It would be so damned hard for them otherwise.
MG, for a follow up story, can you be there when they arrive and do some live video? Maybe this time you’ll actually get some footage.
http://www.tech...-hands-meeting/
i will absolutely do that. i’ll try to interview a goat too.
if you time this right when the PETA people arrive, you may get some awesome footage.
hahaha, looking forward to the Peta pinup gals footage
Now THAT I want to see. An interview with a goat would be sweet!
Don’t get the mike windsock too close!
I have a feeling this is how your interview with the goat will go down.
http://www.hulu...alks-to-animals
maybe they should start herding goats as a business?
No way. That is fantastic. Google Farm all the way.
I’m a liberal and even I think this is a pretty silly publicity stunt.
This is becoming somewhat common. WA DOT has done this with overgrown areas along the freeway. It’s quite a site to see.
google herds; another beta project? expect a google herds farm for this project it is will be open source.
I thought that perhaps as a cost-cutting measure, Googlers were going to be forced to eat the grass themselves for lunch. Organic *and* cost-efficient.
first the free lunch for all employees, now they fire hector the landscaper. whats next? water rationing to save the whales?
Why would you ration a whale’s WATER???
Facebook needs get on board and figure out a way to use goats to cut down on that $20m/month burn rate!
It could be argued that the methane produced by goat belching and farting may indeed be more harmful to the environment than the exhaust components of gas-fueled lawnmowers. Methane is in fact a much more potent greenhouse gas than co. The true environmental play here would have been to hire any local homeless (aka: engineers) for a small sum to push rotary mowers across the property. NO emmisions, lower cost and contributing to employment (albeit on a tiny scale). Don’t be evil.
Last I checked, even unemployed engineers fart, thus releasing methane. And they do that whether you hire them to push a hand mower or not.
And they drink a bit, have to be paid Google wages or at least California minimum wages, they must deal with OHSA, workman’s comp, health insurance benefits…rehabbing
Taking a homeless person and making them someone is so much to do. Explains the goats as well as the poop icon in Gmail.
My god, I’m Sherlock. Fly me.
Regarding GoogleGoats eating GoogleWeeds and producing CH4 and CO2 — the net result on this earth’s atmosphere is a big GoogleZero! These goats lived, ate, shat and farted somewhere else on this planet before becoming Googlers (are they really on the payroll?). The only way to reduce their liquid, solid and gaseous output is to kill them all–and that would really attract PETA’s attention.
LUNCH! It does a body good.
The Getty Museum in Los Angeles uses goats on their hills too – it’s cheaper and safer than humans with lawnmowers.
After they do their jobs, can the goats be served as lunch?
LMAO!
There’s a hill near the Yahoo Sunnyvale campus. And similarly, goats were brought in to “mow the lawn”. I think the land is owned by the city of Sunnyvale, but the point is that they also use goats. So this isn’t an original idea.
regardless, I’m betting we can get the PETA people worked up over this.
Easily since most of these goats are kept hungry for many days so they can mow maximum amount of grass.
In my experience, goats don’t need much encouragement to eat, even when not hungry.
PETA sucks.
Are you trying to say that Google regularly gets points for “innovating” where it doesn’t deserve them? Blasphemy!
It’s not cool if Yahoo does it first. What gets MG and Mike jizzing over each other is that Google does it, now.
I believe the first place to do this was a redevelopment agency in Downtown Los Angeles last year. I was there, it was pretty neat.
http://articles...local/me-goats9
The transportation of the animals might emit more carbon than the lawn mowers.
well, they might walk the herd here, but PETA will be so all over it.
I like how not one of those “green” enthusiasts are in here. And when Earth Hour can gain so much traction, why can’t a “silly publicity stunt” like this be looked at from a different perspective?
I think it’s a fabulous idea! The lawnmowers won’t be gone completely (you need it to “even” it out so the grass doesn’t look uneven and unkempt), but still a small step to a green future.
Kudos to you Google!
this is actually a very common practice, the City of San Francisco uses goats as well. They are quick, efficient, cheap and can eat things that a lawnmower can’t. Its very environmentally friendly as well so good for them.
Chrisv has it exactly right:
http://www.yelp...francisco-goats
http://www.luba...n-francisco.php
I can see PETA up in arms:
“Google orders herd of defenseless Goats into Slave Labor to Beautify their Soulless Headquarters”
Me…I think it’s the kind of lovable kitsch we expect from big G.
layoffs in disquise. definitely not a worker friendly agenda.
WorkerLocator.com – hire humans
Actually, Lawrence Berkeley Labs was doing this back in 2002. The hillside is very steep and goats were the only way to keep the grass down short of X-Games-like lawnmowing. There are shepherds that offer this. We spent 4th of July once looking at fireworks and feeding the goats on the other side. This is a very green way of keeping the grass low and fertilizing (the grass has to somewhere).
I think sheep and goats and becoming common “eco-friendly” replacements for grass and weed cutting equipment.
City of San Jose had recently rented sheep to clear the weeds and grass from the open fields near highway 237 and I saw them for at least a month, by the hundreds, merrily chomping yellow wild flowers and tall grass that had grown after the rains.
The fields are now clear – no weeds and no sheep.
If I didn’t think my basset hound would treat a goat like small game, I’d get one. A goat would be perfect for the size of our yard, and pretty cool to have around, period.
how supreme. awesome tech news!
I drive by that intersection on Garcia & Amphitheater every day on the way to work …. The goats have been there since the beginning of the week … just sitting there being goat like. Looks like they’re getting pretty fat on Google grass.
This WSJ article really puts things in perspective for goat herders during the credit crisis. 6 degrees of separation? http://online.w...6553612633.html
Goats are sooooo last year!
Yahoo’s moved onto sheep — they graze slower and are more thorough.
Goats do release quite a bit of methane. I seriously doubt how well this cud work.
BRILLIANT
Who’s gonna pick up the poop? This probably seems like a good idea, but it probably won’t last.
It’s been done for years by other companies/entities. Siegler is a Google fanboy, and Google are masters at getting PR for stuff like this.
1986: http://news.goo...pg=3010,4903070
2000: http://www.bizj...editorial2.html
2002: My Lawn-Care Advice to You: Get a Goat or 2
Date: March 12, 2002
Publication: Salt Lake Tribune, The (UT)
Article ID: 100E420B77CE57DA
Suddenly it’s “OMG WOW AWESOME” when Google does it? If they wanted to be environmentally friendly, they’d move the fuck out of Mountain View so that their thousands of employees didn’t have to run carbon emissions-intensive commutes from SF to get to work.
See also: http://www.reut...?videoId=101798 (April 8, 2009 — something tells me the widespread coverage of the NY Park story is what turned Google PR on to the option.)
Stuff like this is what makes Google amazing.
So Amazon creates Mechanical Turks and Google responds with Mechanical Goats.
When will this competition stop?
Amazing, but you begin to suspect Google has better things to do with their time than herding goats.
Farting Goats notequal Lower Carbon {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/U720U982ny_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Farting Goats notequal Lower Carbon ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/qMphplrSBT”}}}
This is neither new nor PETA-worthy; people have been doing this for years.
Correction. For hundreds of years.
actually, thousands
They’ve done many OTHER things in that time too!
If they haven’t made cheese by now they are morons!
200 goats seems an extreme number to me. But the idea has been put to use for a while now in Switzerland:
http://www.char...eeeps-are-back/
how much does it cost (gas, carbon emissions) to move these 200 goats back and forth?
Hey I used to work at the Berkeley National Lab and they did the goats there too.
Sergey and Larry could have also gotten the idea early on while starting the company in Menlo Park. We have goats brought in every year to grub on the hills up Valparaiso.
i’ve considered renting a goat to do just that, the pricing is pretty fair but they eat *everything* so you probably need a collie.
This has been done for years at the Historic Ardenwood Farm in Fremont, CA. More eco-friendly, and kid friendly to boot – My kids used to be mesmerised by the goats when we lived opposite the Farm.
AWESOME
This reporter has been living in a cave. This practice has been common throughout the Bay Area for a long time. There is a park 6 blocks from Sand Hill Road that has been doing this for close to 10 years.
Yahoo has actually been doing this for years at its sunnyvale campus. you could see the goats from the conference rooms.
Once again… Google steals Yahoo’s thunder and first-to-market position!
Here’s a picture of it:
http://www.flic...itis/152389687/
I for one, welcome our new goat overlords.
Goats don’t have an off switch — they’re going to fart out methane whether they’re on Google’s lawn or not. Gas-powered lawnmowers, on the other hand, do have an off switch and take a lot of power and resources to manufacture, transport, and operate. Go Goats!