The Chew Crew hosts an arrival party to welcome goats to campus

And if you haven’t RSVPed to their Facebook event, what are you even doing?

A herd of goats is coming to UGA. Don’t worry, they won’t be running rampant throughout campus, but they will be eating the overgrown vegetation in Driftmier Woods.

The Chew Crew is composed of interns from UGA’s Office of Sustainability and a herd of goats. The goats are living lawnmowers for places on campus with overgrown plant life.

Photo credit: Camden Stovall

The Office of Sustainability at UGA has been running this program since 2012. There is already a herd of goats working to restore the urban forest and stream at Tanyard Creek, but the Chew Crew is expanding their horizons to Driftmier Woods.

The Office of Sustainability even threw a goat arrival party today to welcome the goats to campus. Until 6pm, there is food and music and everyone in attendance will get to play with the goats.

Photo credit: Stephanie Bryan

Eric MacDonald is the Faculty Advisor for the project. He has been developing the project since it began in 2012 after a student proposed the idea.

“[Chew Crew is] creative, innovative and an interesting experiment in ecological restoration and community engagement,” he said.

Photo credit: Stephanie Bryan

The goats will be at the Driftmier Woods location until April 18th. Students can interact with the goats and watch them graze. The students behind the Chew Crew also host volunteer workdays once a week when volunteers can assist in fixing exclosures, sampling vegetation and removing hard-to-eat vegetation from the goats’ environment.

Photo credit: Stephanie Bryan

Madison Garrett is the Public Relations Intern for the Office of Sustainability. She hopes this event will spread awareness about the goats coming to campus, but also let people know the goats are a great alternative to reforesting methods such as mowing.

Madison said: “It’s important to emphasize sustainable practices and that’s why we use goats. Even thought they are very cute, they don’t use any energy, they don’t use any fossil fuels – this is just what they do naturally.”

Photo credit: Camden Stovall

Dave Hasslinger is in charge of building the solar-powered electric fence, a temporary shelter and an enclosure for this project. As a student at UGA, Hasslinger got involved with this project because he wanted something that would change the environment at UGA for a long time to come.

“This project has been going on for four years and it just keeps getting stronger and stronger.” He said that even though he is graduating, he wants to come back in 10 years to see all of Driftmier Woods being grazed by the goats.

Photo credit: Stephanie Bryan

There’s still a little time to welcome the goats to their new location on campus and learn more about the effort UGA is making to become more ecologically sustainable.

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