(SALEM STATESMAN-JOURNAL) — The city's experiment with getting goats to do its dirty work has failed the smell test, literally.
It seemed like an environmentally good idea at the time: Set 75 rented goats loose on 9.1 acres of city park to chomp and chew invasive plants such as Armenian blackberry and English ivy that were choking native flora out of Minto-Brown Island Park.
So the city, responding to community interest, launched a pilot project last October, contracting with Yoder Goat Rentals out of Molalla to remove the invasive species. But in a report submitted this week to the Salem City Council, the public works department revealed that the six-week project cost the city almost five times what it would normally have spent had it removed the vegetation using more conventional, and less odoriferous, methods.
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