When Garrett and Gina Fickle arrive at a customer’s house to tame an overgrown landscape, they bring a weedwacker, a mower, and ten goats.
The Fickles started their lawn care service Munchers on Hooves, LLC, last fall after the idea came to Gina Fickle while she surfed the internet late at night. Since their moment of inspiration, the couple has rented goats to anyone who needs an eco-friendly way to clear their land of overgrown, invasive plants.
Their goats have grazed all over Michigan, from Grand Rapids to Whitmore Lake, and they completed a pilot landscaping project at Western Michigan University last July.
“Last year, we ended up figuring our goats traveled over 3,200 miles,” Gina Fickle said. “We were running two groups, and we had 20 goats on the road.”
The project at the university resembled most of the Fickles’ jobs. They released ten of their goats, females and fixed males, into an electric, quarter-square-acre pen, and let them polish off the thicket of weeds during a week-long stay.
“They have a lot of oriental bittersweet weeds up there at Western, and they were doing a test on it to see if it would save them money, and if it would work,” Gina Fickle said.
The trial run went well, according to Western Michigan University horticulturist Nicholas Gooch. He said the university plans to invite Munchers on Hooves back sometime this year — the project not only succeeded in removing weeds from overgrown parts of campus, but also gave the college a boost in their public relations.
“Using Munchers on Hooves at a university where we have a very diverse community, the public relations component and how much people got involved with the project, how we got people thinking outside of the box — that was a huge success,” Hooch said.
According to Gina Fickle, using goats to remove large quantities of weeds has many advantages. Unlike machine removal, goats don’t spread seeds, and they don’t inflict the same environmental consequences as chemical weed killers.
“When a goat eats, one of the first things it eats is the seed heads of the plants, and the goat’s digestive system will kill that seed,” Gina Fickle said. “Unlike cattle and sheep, when they pass it, they’re not re-spreading it for new germination. So that, in a way, helps prevent new growth because they’re killing the seeds.”
And aside from their environmentally-conscious and efficient benefits, the goats are low-maintenance and enjoyable.
“The only thing the homeowner has to do is make sure the fence is set up, the goats are still alive, and the water tank is filled,” Garrett Fickle said.
Munchers on Hooves has serviced four homes in Hillsdale County, all of which are on the same street.
“We live up to just past the hospital on Warren Avenue, which backs up to the huge pond. We have a lot of wisteria, grape vines, and poison ivy, and it was just a thicket. So I wanted to clear it and enjoy the pond,” Hillsdale resident Earla Carver said. “The goats were able to go in and eat all of that. I only had them for two days, and they had half of my hillside cleared. They were awesome.”
The Fickles said they hope to expand their goat rental business until it can serve as their full time jobs — not that it doesn’t already demand a comparable amount time from them.
“If you’ve got livestock of any kind, it’s a 24/7 job,” Gina Fickle said. “Animals get sick like people, and you’ve got to be there for them.”