Pesticides are dangerous and still leave a dead plant, machines jam (and lop off fingers,) doing it by hand takes a long time and can risk major rashes from poison ivy or cuts from thorns.
Part of my back yard is impenetrable from the kinds of plants goats eat.
I'm not saying they are bad, I'm just saying you're being a schmuck if you pay someone to have their goats graze on your land.
Get your own grazers or let them do it for free.
Where I live they get used a lot on highway embankments.
(Also, because their method of destruction is eating, they also go for root systems and clear them whole; this is a very important feature in my area, as they’re used to kill blackberry, which does not die if you leave the roots.)
You prefer two stroke gasoline engines (Very environmentally unfriendly) vs goats because???
I've never seen city employees using "electric mowers"??? Probably because the battery life is simply useless for anything beyond a small yard?
On top of this, you prefer to pay unionized city worker wages to remove weeds instead of an environmentally friendly goat do it for almost nothing?
I saw 2 city workers trying to clear an area the other day. 3 hours later they were still there, gasoline burning trimmers screaming away. I'd say they had at lest a day of work left. Two workers, there all day - probably a few tanks of gas as well...
Personally, i'd prefer they had Goats as an option.. but that is just me.
You'd just have to compare the cost per acre per month of machine maintenance vs the cost to maintain a well fed flock for a month; including land costs and property taxes if you own the land.
Not really - the cost of food for goats is fairly marginal all things considered. For this kind of service you have to account for transport, setup (usually fencing of some sort has to be put up), etc. as well as ongoing medical and shelter costs for when they aren’t working.