MAY 23RD, 2010
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For the past few weeks, I’ve been waking at 5:45 am to a sound not often heard in Brooklyn, New York: the soft, and then loud, and then louder, cry of goats. It’s a truly storybook bah, the kind that trembles in the still morning air with a cartoonish vowel-wobble. But then, quickly, it becomes not-cute as the upstairs windows in my building start to slam open, and as my own sash flies up, so that I can climb out the first-floor window to run out into the yard and feed them. My roommate’s got the room with backdoor access, so every morning I climb out in my pajamas like a reverse break-in to bring Nightmare and Pilgrim their hay and goat-kibbles.
I borrowed the goats at the beginning of the month from a farming friend at Liberty View Farm, a two-hour drive north of the city. Billiam was wisely flexible about the loan, probably well-aware that their sugar-sweet faces masked a really operatic capacity for noise. My plan was to use the goats as living lawnmowers for a week, letting them tear up the mugwort that occupied the lot behind my house. Billiam picked out two 11 month olds, both already a petite breed. With five highly-amused friends in tow, I loaded the two boy goats into the back of a van and drove them south to the city.
Very quickly, the mugwort-removal operation fell apart in two ways. For one, unlike sheep, goats don’t eat things to the quick–they defoliate. Devouring the lower leaves of all the plants leaves my yard full of lanky, stick-skinny weeds. Secondly, the boys are enormously untidy in their bathroom habits. My plan to collect the manure to use as garden fertilizer has been foiled by their uncanny capacity to hide gobs of poop in the stalky clumps of mugwort. It’s as if the goats were able to fulfill all my dreams, but only halfway: yes, they eat (but only so much), and yes, they poop (but only where they please).
Goats are used in San Francisco to eat lawns. I’d love to see how they do it. Probably not letting the goats overnight on the property is the big perk. A friend of mine recently suggested I package the goat’s food in brown paper bags, and thrown them out the window when the goats begin crying at dawn. Like a snooze-button bomb, the packets would ensure me an extra 20 minutes of quiet. I laughed, but then went home and started figuring out the logistics. I have at least another 2 weeks before the goats have eaten at least most of the yard.