COLUMBIA, S.C. — In Columbia, you might start to see goats helping maintain vegetation in people’s yards or at commercial properties.
On Tuesday, the Health, Social and Environmental Affairs Committee got together to establish guidelines and brainstorm ideas about changing a livestock ordinance to allow “goatscaping.”
“I’d like for this to attract bees and butterflies and you know the trees grow up naturally,” Columbia resident Mary-Green Brush explains about her property. “So the no chemical part was very important to me.”
It’s why Brush hired goats to clear out the vegetation this past spring.
“They got here and they had things they loved. They loved reaching up into the trees,” Brush remembers. “Over about three days, the goats had all of this cleared to the ground…there's a lot less vegetation that's grown back now.”
Additionally, Brush says using goats was more cost-effective than more traditional landscaping.
“The surprising thing, even though these are live workers, animals of course, the cost was so much less than having you know some major landscaping,” Brush says.
More residents like Brush might have access to this service now that a committee is working to develop guidelines for "goatscaping."
“We do feel there should be some structured guidelines included in the ordinance idea,” Columbia Animal Services Superintendent Victoria Riles said at the committee meeting. “We're proposing structured guidelines through an ordinance for this practice and that would include the permit process issued to the homeowner with a permit fee.”
In the meeting, Riles clarified that this permit would apply only to goats, not to any other livestock. She presented ideas to committee members, alongside Jacob Porter with Green Goat Land Management.
“Columbia wants to be innovative. Columbia wants to be green. Colombia wants to be pro-business,” Porter said. “I want to help them do that in a way that satisfies their needs to be protective of their environment, protective of the people but at the same time, allow business to business.”
This entails creating a separate permit: one for homeowners and one for commercial property owners. It also aims to address nuisance issues that set parameters for topics like fencing signage and proximity to schools to address concerns from residents like Vivian Nelson, who lives in the Burton Heights-Standish Acres community.
Nelson says she doesn't want goats in her neighborhood.
“They don't make the yard look any better. They might, you know, eat the grass and keep the grass down. When it comes to edging and cutting hedges and things like that, goats can't do that,” Nelson says.
In addition to the land, Nelson is concerned about the electric fence that Porter puts up to keep the goats in place.
“I don't like the fact that you know kids everywhere very, you know, they want to know things you want to test that and I don't approve of that,” Nelson says.
The fence in question is a temporary installment that Green Goat Land Management uses to keep the goats in place. According to Porter, the fence is “low voltage, low impedance.”
At last week’s City Council meeting, other residents from Nelson’s neighborhood vocalized their opposition to this new ordinance, citing concerns about the goats’ smell and noise.
However, Porter says this wouldn’t be an issue because his company does not use males that have not been neutered, which typically have an odor.
Based on her personal experience having the goats in her yard, Brush says smell — either from the goats themselves or their excrement — was not an issue.
“These tiny little pellets that are their poop that dry up and blow away. I mean, you wouldn't even notice if you saw it,” Brush explains. “So you're not going to have goat droppings causing a problem. You're not going to have any smell.”
Dealing with concerns like this is why Assistant City Manager Clint Shealy is working with the committee to establish guidelines,
“We certainly do think there's a way to apply this type of vegetative management properly and to do it in a safe manner,” Shealy explains. “Putting parameters around how this is done, I think will certainly take into account the objections that were presented the last council meeting and any other objections that we might foresee and there will be appeal processes and those sorts of things for any permit that we would issue, so there'll be an opportunity, again, for the public to speak either in favor or against this as council considers any such ordinance. And then the permitting process itself and those guidelines will be set up to where there's some flexibility there that can be modified moving forward if there are some serious objections.”
One of those parameters involves setting a maximum number of goats that can be used. In Porter’s case, he recommends no more than 10 goats per half acre.
“There is a point where too much of a good thing aint a good thing. I think when we put more than 10 in a small space, it's dangerous for the goats, dangerous for people, dangerous for the environment,” Porter details. “It's the right number for the right amount of time, there's some math that goes into doing it correctly.”
That said, Green Goat employee Carrie Swink says it’s important to have flexibility to tailor the vegetation management to the specific property in need of clearance.
“There's no way to know for sure how many goats it's going to take for how many days to get a job done until we get there to measure anyway,” Swink explains. “So having a preset arbitrary number will really impact the quality of work we'd be able to give to our customer.”
Shealy says the council will vote on this ordinance change next month. If it’s approved, Shealy says the permit will have 90 days before it goes into effect, leaving the committee time to continue creating these guidelines.
“That gives our staff 90 days to formally develop that,” Shealy says. “That ordinance hasn't been presented and approved to council yet. So we got a little few weeks of a jumpstart on that. So we're gonna start working on that immediately, developing that process should Council consider and pass that ordinance in September.”