Google: Mowing lawn with goats | Hacker News Reader

Google: Mowing lawn with goats

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94 pointsropiku76 comments

Regardless of the carbon impact of this move, the fact that such an idea was not laughed at and quickly shot down is pretty cool.

There are actually plenty of businesses that rent goats for clearing property

I'm somewhat surprised by this. Do you have a source or news article?

i realize it sounds like i'm setting you up, but just google the phrase "goat rental."

It is very trendy in the bay area right now. My old company Agilent did this last year.

Last month I visited Rhode Island for the 1st time. I went to the posh coastal town of Newport and I saw llamas clearing some properties' lawns! One of the weirdest things ever!

Is this really lower-impact in climate change than traditional mowing? I think it's far from obvious.

With the goat solution, we must count the cost of the goat transportation. And I suspect that the methane emitted by goats -- a worse greenhouse problem than CO2 -- may actually have a greater effect than the exhaust from a lawnmower.

The carbon emitted by the lawnmower came out of the ground, where it had been for millions of years. Net effect, more carbon in the atmosphere.

The carbon in the goat methane comes from the grass, which took that carbon out of the air a few months back. Net effect, nil.

I hate it when people get anxious about cow farts contributing to global warming.

But the thoughts about the transportation of the goats are worth exploring.

However, if you want to go that route you also have to add the net carbon emissions for construction, maintenance, and transportation of the lawnmower, which are non-trivial.

I strongly suspect the goats are a net win.

"The carbon in the goat methane comes from the grass, which took that carbon out of the air a few months back. Net effect, nil."

Can you explain this? The grass absorbs CO2, and the goats turn the grass into methane. Except that methane is a way more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. So how could the effect be nil?

Well okay, not nil. But the methane eventually oxidizes back to CO2, half life 7 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane.

Contrast with fossil fuels, which take a looooong time to get (permanently) back into the ground.

From looking at the wikipedia page, methane is converted to water and ethane with broken down ozone. Ethane is a much milder greenhouse gas. Not sure what ethane half life is. If I understand this correctly, the net result will be putting carbon and hydrogen into the atmosphere (via ethane) and taking oxygen out of the atmosphere in the form of water and maybe reducing atmospheric ozone. With a side effect of 7 years of methane.

Regardless, this is not a closed carbon loop, and it results in global warming.

It is a closed carbon loop as long as the grass the goats turn into methane ultimately regrows. It's true that you have a sustained amount of methane due to the flux through this loop.

The same is true for fossil fuels, in principle the loop is closed because eventually plants will turn the CO2 back into fossil fuels. It's just that because the time constant of that loop is thousands of years and we burn it much faster than that, most of the fossil carbon will eventually make it into the atmosphere.

Even though methane is a more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2, the time constant on the CO2 cycle more than makes up for that difference. When making these calculations, you can't just look at the amount of emission, you need to look at what sustained amount of atmospheric level results from that emission.

The carbon will be used by the plants to regrow where the goats grazed. Goats turn grass into stuff and the grass will turn it back into grass. Net effect: zero. The difference with mowers is that they turn fossil fuels and grass into mowed grass. Other organisms will turn the mowed grass into stuff (like the goats) and grass will turn this back into grass. Net effect: burned fossil fuels.

It also depends somewhat on what you do with the grass from the lawnmower. If you just throw it on a landfill, as it decomposes, it too will release methane. This is why many (although not nearly enough) landfills have small methane-burning power plants next to them.

The problem with methane is that it's more efficient at keeping heat in than carbon dioxide is. So while the net carbon effect may be nil, the carbon is producing more trouble because of the cows.

I don't disagree that livestock are a serious greenhouse gas factor, but goats may have multiple uses as a stock animal, including mowing, meat, and dairy. If these animals are raised as, say, a dairy herd, and incidentally feed on grass at corporate offices rather than private ranch land, that would seem to me to be a net win in terms of carbon emissions.

That's correct. If the goats are being raised anyway then there's no net addition from the creatures themselves.

But as I said, I suspect that the truck(s) that move the goats around emit more CO2 than a lawnmower would. I'm guessing that per-mile emissions from a mower are much higher than a car, but that the truck is moving a much greater distance.

This may be inaccurate. Due to the simpler engine design of a mower combined with the pollution curbing technology in use in cars and trucks (such as catalytic converters), mowers can be much worse.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=98532&page=1

How do you propose to get the lawn mowers and crew to/from Google HQ?

A couple people in a truck with a couple lawn mowers would produce fewer emissions than a goat transport.

In any case, I believe the point he's trying to make is that it's not an obvious net win in terms of carbon emissions.

Then again, if you eventually sell the goats a for food into the local market you are likely to reduce emissions on food transport.

Of course, I have no idea what the demand for goat is in that area (surely there are some Indian restaurants that can do a "mutton" curry), or whether the US has the same idiotic regulations that the EU does that forces the shipment of animals for slaughter.....

A smaller herd of goats perpetually maintained on the grassy area in question would do the trick.

Upkeep of this smaller herd may be an issue however. How much husbandry do goats need?

Not much. As long as you have a fence to stop them running out into the road, goats will just wander around and munch grass all day. As will sheep. They need to be checked by a vet a couple of times a year.

You guys are confusing the requirements for industrial farming (where you're committed to deliver a certain amount of milk or meat every x weeks) with the basics of animal husbandry. As long as you don't have so many goats that they eat the grass faster than it grows back, everything will be just fine.

Keeping animals on a free range basis is extremely low-maintenance and low-impact. They just eat, poop, sit around and reproduce every so often.

"They just eat, poop, sit around and reproduce every so often." - where do I apply?

Yeah, but goats are escape artists

I raise chickens and have looked into having goats for milk (not this year: don't have the time) and fencing is a major issue. One of my neighbors has goats and they are always getting out.

It's not a multi-day journey for the truck, whereas the lawnmower is likely to be running all day for several days. The distance is irrelevant, since a lawnmower can't travel at the same speed as a truck. Additionally, lawnmowers generally use 2 stroke engines which are inefficient and extremely noisy.

> Additionally, lawnmowers generally use 2 stroke engines which are inefficient and extremely noisy.

I can't find any 2 stroke mowers at Home Depot, Lowe's, OSH, or Sears. (The vast majority use Briggs and Stratton engines. B&S makes a few 2 stroke engines, but AFAIK, they're only used in snow blowers.) Where are you finding "generally"?

The trucks driven by lawn service folks generally get around 10-20 mpg. They don't spend hours on most job sites - most jobs are much less than an hour of mowing, with an hour or so doing other stuff. Then it's back in the truck for 15-30 minutes. The mowers less than half a gallon during that time and the trucks use about a gallon between jobs.

Methane argument I wonder what company or organization is raking in the dough with that one? Who is living off the hog by preaching animals and people farts are killing the environment?

Being green is great and it's big business. I agree with most of it, but the fart argument is ridiculous.. though not to the people making a living from it!

If you want to go down that route, you must include the CO2 emitted by the manufacture of the lawn mowers and their transport from China (we can assume) to Mountain View.

Regardless of whether trucking a load of goats around uses more gas than running the lawn mowers (a hypothesis I seriously suspect is incorrect), goats manufacture themselves whereas making steel and aluminum uses a lot of energy.

And if you want to argue that demand for goats breeds more goats which increases their methane emission, shouldn't you also include the fact that demand for more lawnmowers makes the lawnmower factory hire more people, which then have a salary to do things like buy cars that they wouldn't if they were unemployed?

It's effects like that that people appeal to when they say corn ethanol leads to a net increase in CO2 compared to running gasoline directly. Somehow assuming a baseline that implies that people would be homeless bums living at 3rd world level unless they are employed by the ethanol industry seems like a dubious calculation to me.

Goats are already alive, they would fart either way,

That's just like saying the gas has already been processed and would be used anyway.

Higher demand for goats leads to more goat breeding.

Indeed, unless the goats are walking to Google, I imagine more fuel would be used. Maybe the goat transport vehicles are electric?

FYI, electric does not mean green. Most electricity is generated from dirty coal so there's no net benefit from using electric cars until we can generate cleaner power production.

You get greater economies of scale at a central power plant than with numerous distributed motors, plus you only need to install one set of scrubbers. Joule for joule, it's cleaner to run an electric motor on AC than to run your own generator.

The point I'm trying to make is that converting cars over to electric right now is not a green solution. I believe there is less pollution by running an efficient combustion engine than running an electric card that's powered off a coal plant. There's a lot of efficiency lossed from starting with the coal, to converting to electricity, to charging the batteries. With a gas powered car, the bulk of the efficiency is in the last stage. Wish I had some more numbers to back this claim but I've read it before...

>I believe there is less pollution by running an efficient combustion engine than running an electric card that's powered off a coal plant.

I'm pretty sure the numbers go the other way. Current voting on comments would put the burden of proof on you to change the minds of the rest. Here is one I googled up very quickly from an industry source. http://www.pluginamerica.org/images/EmissionsSummary.pdf I didn't read it, so I am by no means trying to hold it up as definitive and without any fallacy.

Well I did a little research and it looks like when gas powered cars reach 40-50mpg they achieve the same level of pollution as an electric car in terms of net BTUs required to run them.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-schildgen/evs-vs-gas-power...

Assuming you're not using solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear power sources.

Goats are really good at eating just about anything. Much better than sheep. Problem with sheep is that they will eat too close to the ground and kill the plants.

I was under the impression that goats present the same problem? Here's an interesting article from a couple years ago on some effects of overgrazing of goats in China, including desertification, starvation, and dust storms.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003498352...

If you leave any animal with minimal amount of food, they will consume it all. The difference is how close to the ground they eat. The sheep will take the stem all the way to the ground, while goats, cows, and horses will leave a little bit. This allows it to grow later.

Yes, but are the goats required to sort a list in place in O(n log n) before they can graze?

How about using a reel mower? As a bonus, you would save gym on fees.

Google's gym is free.

Not for Google.

Something like this once happened at National Semiconductor. I remembered it wrong--turns out Widlar used sheep: http://www.national.com/rap/Story/widlar.html

Back in January when I was on my honeymoon, we stayed at a wonderful eco-friendly place on the island of Bohol in the Philippines. They use goats to keep the place they have carved out of the jungle tidy and free of weeds. After seeing how little impact this involves, I was duly impressed; it looks like a tropical garden:

http://bit.ly/HzqRF http://bit.ly/glO6K

Nuts Huts, Loboc, Bohol Philippines: http://www.nutshuts.com/

N.B. I'm in no way affiliated with them, but it's a great place to visit and relax.

Mowing, putting the cut grass in plastic bags, and then burying them in a landfill would probably be the most "green" way to go, if you were irrational enough to think it would have a big impact.

Ah! I think you get it too.

Although the greenest way would be to just let the grass grow and have a hayfield outside the building.

screw grass and the compulsion to turn everywhere into the Savannah, let the forest grow.

Thank you. This is a PR move. They could mow the grass, let the goats eat it, send employees out with scissors, or burn the field twice a year and none of it would have any impact on global temperatures.

Flawed argument. Nothing any single human does has an impact on global temperatures. That does not mean that if everyone does it, it still has no impact. It's the usual "tragedy of the commons" dilemma.

Do you also think that caring about prices is a "PR move" because any given purchase is unlikely to make a big impact on your wealth?

I remember my elementary school did this once. They set up a (weak) electric fence right next to the playground. We had fun with that...

The Swiss have been doing this for a while. Saw a herd back in 2000 in Thusis munching on the grass near the railway station.

they used to do the same thing in santa cruz around the lagoon. it was pretty wonderful. one saturday morning walking through i saw a goat give birth. it was at once the most disgusting and cutest thing i had ever seen. LIFE!

I'm getting goats to mow my field. They make great pets! They're about like dogs, with more human eyes. The hard part will be keeping them out of the crops, and from escaping. Goats are highly intelligent escape artists.

In 2001, I visited some friends in Cologne. One afternoon, two of us cycled down to a big stretch of open parkland along the right bank of the Rhein. It was a warm spring day, and "everyone" was out enjoying the weather. Lots of groups camped out on the grass with picnic lunches.

Along came a herd of sheep. Yes, sheep! (I said to myself, after a double-take.) Nobody got upset; neither people nor sheep. The sheep slowing munched their way forward, the herd casually breaking around the various groups.

I got some great pictures. Not online, unfortunately.

I was biking past there the day before yesterday and saw those goats. I wondered: what sort of a PR stunt is this? Now I know.

I believe there's a guy who rents out his herd. I've seen goats in other fields (near Yahoo, in the past)

yeah, that's what the article says

UC Berkeley uses goats, too: http://oep.berkeley.edu/programs/fire_mitigation/index.html

Mekmitasdigoat ?

http://www.sigmasoft.com/~openbsd/archives/html/openbsd-misc...

The Idea seems to be taken from Surfer Dude (2008) movie, staring Matthew McConaughey.

If you substitute sheep for goats, you'd get tasty mutton as a "side" product...

If I remember correctly, which is a big if, part of the reason they use goats is that goats eat the sapplings of low-value trees while mostly leaving the sapplings of high-value trees intact. This way you can graze goats in a freshly clear-cut forest and you will get a lot of the high-value trees growing back, with less of the low-value trees, so that in 20 years when you reharvest you get the maximum profit. Sheep don't do this.

Cornell did a lot of the research on what sapplings the goats would and would not eat, but it's been five years since the last time I visited Arnot forest, where this research was being done. Thus my knowledge of this all is very hazy, but what I do know is that there is a lot of research that's gone into validating the system.

You can also eat tasty goat.

I made this a few times recently. Goat curry:

   ~2lbs cut up goat meat, browned in a small amount of oil
   4-6 potatoes, peeled and cubed
   2 onions, diced
   5-10 dried red chilis, crumbled
   Lots of curry, garam masala, coriander, cumin, chili powder to taste
   Salt and pepper to taste
   1 bag frozen peas, added 30min from the end

Add water and stew. Keep adding water as time goes by, adjusting to desired consistency. Stew for at least three hours.

Tasty goat!

How many people are you feeding?

Two. Then myself, for lunch for a few days.

Having had fresh goat, it's pretty good. Mutton, on the other hand, can be quite gamey at times, IIRC.

Not a fan of chèvre?

Or barbacoa? (not the crappy beef stuff chipotle sells - the real stuff)

Whoa, I have a new goal in life. One of my favourite things ever is pulled pork and barbacoa looks like it could give it a run.

Does much grass even grow around there without watering it? I thought it was quite dry. If they're wasting fresh water with a sprinkler system this whole thing is pretty funny.

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