Rent A Goat in the news: a decade of media coverage

Few land-care ideas photograph as well as a herd of goats munching its way across an overgrown hillside — and few have stayed newsworthy for as long. Since the late 2000s, Rent A Goat® and goat grazing more broadly have turned up everywhere from the front section of The Wall Street Journal to prime-time television. The appeal is easy to understand: it's charming, it's genuinely practical, it's eco-friendly, and — as wildfire seasons grow more severe — it's more relevant than ever.

Part of the reason coverage keeps coming back is that goats work on two levels at once. They make a great story, but they also solve real problems: clearing brush and weeds on steep terrain, avoiding herbicides near waterways, and reducing the fine fuels and ladder fuels that help fires spread. That combination of delightful and useful has kept goat grazing in the headlines for more than a decade.

A decade of coverage

Here's a walk through some of the outlets that have covered Rent A Goat® and the goat-grazing trend over the years:

• Shark Tank (ABC) (2014) — Rent A Goat pitches the Sharks
• The Wall Street Journal (2010) — Free-Range Landscaping: Rent-a-goat.com and Others Bring in Herds to Trim the Yard, Get Rid of Weeds
• The Today Show (NBC) (2010) — Hate Cutting the Grass? Rent a Goat
• Live! with Regis and Kelly (2010) — Rent A Goat on Regis and Kelly
• CNN (2013) — Apparently This Matters: Rent a wife? How ’bout a goat?
• Entrepreneur Magazine (2013) — 100 Brilliant Companies
• TheStreet (2013) — The 5 Strangest (and Best) Lawn and Garden Care Tactics You Can Buy
• AP News (2009) — Need a Lawnmower? How ’bout a Goat?

The Wall Street Journal put goat rental on the map for a national business audience back in 2010, profiling the rise of herds brought in to trim yards and clear weeds. That same year, The Today Show ran a "Hate cutting the grass? Rent a goat" segment, and Live! with Regis and Kelly gave the idea a burst of daytime enthusiasm — Regis Philbin summing it up as: "Rent a goat from RentAGoat.com! You bring them in, in little herds… I love it!"

The momentum carried into 2013, a banner year for coverage. CNN's tech column took a lighthearted look at goat rental going mainstream, Entrepreneur Magazine included Rent A Goat® in its "100 Brilliant Companies" roundup of businesses shaping the future of farming, and TheStreet named goat rental one of the best unconventional lawn-and-garden tactics you can buy. Earlier still, in 2009, the Associated Press covered the early days of goat-powered land clearing — "Need a lawnmower? How 'bout a goat?"

In 2014, founder Matthew Richmond and partner Mike Canaday brought the business to national television with a pitch on Season 5 of Shark Tank (ABC). The Sharks passed, but the company kept growing — going on to manage thousands of goats across commercial, government, and fire-prevention contracts.

Not just Rent A Goat

The broader trend has drawn its own share of high-profile attention. Google famously brought in goats to mow the grass at its Mountain View headquarters in 2009 — a story that helped introduce the concept of "grazing as a service" to a tech-savvy audience and lent the idea a certain Silicon Valley credibility.

More recently, the coverage has taken on a serious edge as goats have become a recognized tool in wildfire-fuel reduction. National outlets including NPR and National Geographic have reported on research showing that targeted goat grazing can reduce the brush and fine fuels that help fires spread — one reason California fire departments, counties, and utilities increasingly fold grazing into their prevention plans. To be clear about the limits: grazing doesn't make a property fireproof, and it works best as one layer within a broader defensible-space plan. But the science behind it has moved the story from novelty segment to prevention strategy.

Why the story keeps growing

What started as a quirky alternative to the lawnmower has matured into a legitimate land-management category. The early features leaned on charm; the newer ones lean on results. Together they explain why goats have stayed in the news for well over a decade — and why coverage seems more likely to grow than fade as fire seasons intensify and interest in low-impact, chemical-free land care keeps rising.

Want the full picture? Head to our press hub for the complete list of coverage, with links to each story.