Talk about whacky weed whacker..Calgary-based Enbridge is taking its recruitment drive to new levels after it deployed a herd of goats to control invasive plant species along its pipeline route in northeastern British Columbia..About 30 of the billy buckers have been deployed to the Pine Pass, about 240 km north of Prince George, to forage on hard-to-reach weeds on its natural gas system..According to company officials, the critters are more effective than weed whackers or herbicides. Goats happen to be the world’s best ’browsers’ — as opposed to ‘grazers’ — because they literally eat anything and everything to the ground..“The best-case scenario is the goats eat everything. They eat the leaves, they eat the little branches and they graze it right down to the ground,” said Dan Tisseur, the company’s senior environment advisor for operations and maintenance..The burry bleaters are even outfitted with company colours and logo-bearing bandanas with their names, and are considered to be employees..Enbridge said the Goat Grazing Project is part of its integrated vegetation management program, which uses both traditional and biological methods to control invasive plants in an environmentally friendly way..The company plans to research and document the results to gauge its efficiency over time with an eye to expanding it..“This is going to be a multi-year project to assess the efficacy over time. So we’re actually going to bring these goats back to the same location to repeat these treatments to see if over time we’re witnessing a reduction in the shrub biomass and invasive plants on site,” Tisseur said.
