Google Goats: The Organic Lawn Mowers

Google takes pride in its ‘green culture’ and tries its best to be as environmentally conscious as possible, for a large corporation, anyway. It’s using green energy, whenever possible, to power its data centers and its headquarters, the Googleplex, is ‘littered’ with solar panels that provide some of the electricity requirements. Some of its green choices are a bit more eccentric than one might have thought.

The Googleplex is a huge place and there are quite a lot of empty fields around it, which get covered with all sorts of grass, weeds, and so on. Normally, a company would hire a bunch of guys with lawnmowers to get rid of that, but Google took an alternative approach last year and it’s doing it again this year. To quote Google, “The goats are baaaahk!”

“Last year, in our quest to minimize our carbon footprint (and keep people on their toes), we turned to an unlikely solution for mowing an overgrown field: goats,” Dan Hoffman, director of Real Estate and Workplace Services for NorCal and occasional chief goat herder at Google, wrote.

“More than 200 goats from California Grazing have once again arrived at our Mountain View headquarters where they’ll stay for over a week chomping away on grassy goodness. The cost of bringing in the goats is comparable to hiring lawn mowers for the same job and the green benefits are clear: the goats eliminate mower emissions, reduce noise pollution, restore plant species and fertilize while grazing,” he added.

The Google goats visit the company’s headquarters regularly and it’s that time of the year again. Now, it’s an interesting choice for sure. The goats get their fill and Google gets clean, and naturally fertilized, lawns. And most Google employees should be getting a kick out of their, temporary, colleagues. But is it really a greener option? After all, transporting 200 goats is no easy task and it’s not like they’re going around Silicon Valley on foot (or hoof). Still, for the cuteness factor alone, it’s probably a better choice than sweaty men with noisy lawn mowers.