Havre de Grace officials have decided to take the problem of overgrown weeds by the horns.
Instead of paying people to mow the vegetation, and risk contracting poison ivy, the city hired goats from a local farm to come in every day and eat the plants along a fence from the city's water treatment plant to the Salvation Army building.
The goats just got started on Monday but have been doing a great job so far, deputy public works director Donna Geiger said Tuesday.
"I saw a news segment probably a couple years ago," Geiger said about the origin of the concept. "I have been looking for goats ever since."
Geiger said it made more sense than the traditional route of lawn-mowing.
"We thought there could be a better way to do it, because the goats aren't susceptible to poison ivy," she said. "It's environmentally friendly. You don't have to use pesticides or anything."
The city is paying Dawn Yurkiewicz, of Stratford Farm, $275 per day to bring the goats in for eight hours, supervise them and take them back at the end of the day.
Yurkiewicz said it would take three to four weeks for the goats to take care of the whole fence area.
She started offering the goats as a free-range landscaping service about a year and a half ago, after using them on her own property, and said Havre de Grace is the first government to use her services.
"This has been a very good job for the goats. Actually, it's a rather ideal job. All the plants here are really good for them to eat," she explained.
"There's trees growing through here they like to eat, a little bit of poison ivy, a little bit of Virginia creeper, a little bit of blackberry," she said.