August 2018
On August 3, 2018, roughly 100 goats got loose in a residential neighborhood outside Boise, Idaho and went house to house eating everything in front of them. The photos and video spread fast enough to reach The New York Times and The Washington Post. Two and a half weeks later, on August 20, a pair of goats turned up on the New York City subway tracks, prompting the transit authority to reroute southbound N trains onto the D line while employees — with help from comedian Jon Stewart — retrieved the animals and moved them to a nearby sanctuary.
The Boise herd had a mundane explanation. It had been trucked to a nearby drainage area by a local operation called We Rent Goats, hired to clear weeds and overgrowth, and some of the animals worked out how to leave the enclosure. Local reporter Joe Parris, among the first to post photos, described the reaction: “The funny thing is, when you have a group of people watching their property get destroyed, you’d think they’d be pretty upset. But everyone had such a good attitude about it.”
U.S. News covered the moment on August 24, 2018 under the headline “Rent-a-Goat Companies Gain Traction Across the Country.” It is worth revisiting not for the escape stories but for what the reporting found underneath them.
The silliness hurdle
Aaron Steele, co-founder of the Iowa-based Goats on the Go, had been running the operation out of Ames since 2012 — from what he called a handful of goats at a hobby scale to more than a dozen affiliates across several states, with an expansion into California newly announced alongside its existing footprint in Iowa, Oklahoma, Missouri, Ohio and Texas. His company put out a press release that same week describing goat grazing services as a burgeoning industry in need of an upgrade in the professionalism department, and a recognized national brand, if it was going to go mainstream.
“To be perfectly honest, that’s my worst nightmare, that (a goat escape) would happen to us. But the response from the public is more thrilled than angry,” Steele told U.S. News. “Just here in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been so surprised by how much people love goats. If we ignored the fact that people love goats and that goats are all the rage right now, we wouldn’t be very good business people.”
And then the sentence that has aged best: “I have to admit, there’s kind of a silliness hurdle to get over. We know that for many of our customers, part of the appeal is the novelty and the fun of having goats do the job. But at some point, we have to get beyond that and demonstrate to the customer that this is not just a gimmick. This is a real service that has real value for our customers.”
Machetes, not lawn mowers
Steele described a sales process built on site visits — a “goat quote” — precisely because the wrong job makes the whole service look bad. “It makes for good headlines to say that our goats are lawn mowers. We often get calls from folks asking us to do grazing on their lawn or turf grass or some small area of landscaping,” he said. “But really, the goats shine in places where they’re more like machetes than lawn mowers or weed whackers. Places that are a horrible, overgrown jungle — often of woody vegetation but also broadleaf weeds. Steep slopes, rough terrain.”
He was also willing to talk customers out of it, noting that the environmental impact of firing up a truck and pulling a trailer full of goats is probably greater than an hour or two of work a homeowner could do themselves or hire more cheaply. Where goats did earn their place, the argument was terrain: “Some of these landscapes are really steep, so using any kind of mechanization on them would cause erosion and runoff into streams, that sort of thing. There are also some great safety benefits. Some of these places would be really dangerous for workers if they were trying to wield chainsaws and sharp objects while trying to navigate steep slopes with vines tangling around their feet.”
Government was already buying
The 2018 reporting establishes something the current wave of coverage often misses: institutional buyers were already there. Google brought goats to its Mountain View headquarters in 2009 and Yahoo did the same in Sunnyvale. The Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. had goats working its grounds against weeds and invasives. For a stretch, it was even possible to rent a goat through Amazon. Portsmouth, Virginia bought its own herd outright in 2013.
A Federal Highway Administration spokesman told U.S. News that at least eight state departments of transportation were using goats for roadside vegetation management. Washington State DOT spokeswoman Barbara LaBoe described a trial that began in 2014 near Vancouver and expanded in 2015 to Olympia and Spokane, using rental services rather than an in-house herd to avoid the cost of feeding and maintaining animals year-round. She had been on site in Olympia and remembered the goats “standing up on two legs to take down tree saplings.” Her summary of their appetite: “They’ll go after everything they see.”
The honest objection, then and now
LaBoe also gave the clearest statement of the limit, and it has not changed in eight years. “They’re certainly a valuable tool, but you want to look at them as one tool in your toolbox. It’s unlikely any state DOT would be able to stop all other types of vegetation management and just buy a herd of goats.” Cost was the deciding factor: roadside work often means hiring traffic control, and temporary fencing adds more. Part of why the Vancouver site worked, she said, was that it was already fenced and not immediately parallel to a major roadway. “In most cases, even with the environmental benefits, the costs are so much higher that it’s not a great trade-off.”
That is still the right frame. Where goats win is where the alternative is expensive, dangerous, or restricted — steep ground, herbicide buffer zones, sites machines cannot reach without erosion. Where the alternative is a mower on flat, accessible turf, goats lose on price, and any operator telling you otherwise is selling novelty.
What eight years changed
The vocabulary changed. In 2018 the pitch was invasive species and roadside vegetation — Steele noted that a lot of what his goats were hired to eat was invasive whether the customer knew it or not, and that browsing puts a natural stress on the plant that sets it back and gives natives a chance to compete. “We’re losing native landscapes quickly, and with it, native habitats and native wildlife,” he said, arguing the scale of the problem would require judicious herbicide, some mechanization, “and it’s going to have to involve some goats if we’re going to get on top of that problem.”
By 2026 the dominant framing is fire. Grazing shows up in defensible-space requirements, in fire safe council budgets, in federal land management plans, and — as this year’s California wage fight made clear — in state legislation written specifically to keep herds in the field. The silliness hurdle Steele described is largely cleared. What replaced it is a harder set of questions about labor, cost per acre, and whether the results hold between visits. Those are better problems to have.