Goats on the Go Rolls Out an Unconventional Landscaping Crew
Date Posted: August 19, 2019
Posted In: News,
From St. Louis Magazine: Clad in pants, wellies, and a plaid shirt damp with sweat, Erika Streeter stakes a fence (not yet electrified) around the hilly tangle of honeysuckle, kudzu, and poison ivy at the back of the Ashers’ deep lot. In a nearby trailer, 26 Kiko goats wait to forage—and thereby clear a mess that’s resisted human intervention.
“They’ll really eat poison ivy?” I ask.
“Oh, that’s their happy place,” Streeter says. The males in her herd are in Ladue today for a job that’s entirely poison ivy removal; it crept into the owner’s English ivy, and she is both allergic and organic.
Streeter runs this Goats on the Go franchise with her son, Willem Smith, who, she warns me, “speaks dry, fluent sarcasm.” Though he feigns reluctance, Smith has been learning fast. A polo player, he was already easy with the horses stabled at the family’s Wildwood farm, and they’ve had pet goats for years. But those are “lap babies,” he explains, pulling up a photo of a chubby short-legged dairy goat named Rosebud.
This is a more pragmatic partnership.
“See, I thought letting this go would be the answer,” sighs today’s client, Cathy Asher. “I didn’t know about honeysuckle.” She wanted this ranch house in St. Peters before she ever saw the interior, simply because she’d fallen in love with all the towering shade trees. Plus there was a woodsy hollow at the back of the deep lot that screened away the neighbors and would make a lovely vista…or, at least, it would if it hadn’t gone so wild.
Last summer, Asher recalls with a grimace, she and her husband tried (and failed) to remove it themselves. Trundling in heavier equipment could have hurt her beloved trees and would have left all sorts of debris to haul out. When her husband learned about landscaper goats, Asher found Goats to Go.
“We can do about an acre a week of clearing,” Streeter says. “They defoliate a plant, like, 95 percent, from 6 to 8 feet down, which weakens and stresses it. In some cases, if you want a full elimination, you have to do three grazings. This should only take one.”
Giggling, Asher pulls up a lawn chair to watch her new crew work: “We have grandkids coming in from Nevada, and my son’s coming over. This is going to be a party!”