Posted on 06/04/2007 10:51:35 PM PDT by neverdem
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Summer is settling onto Missionary Ridge overlooking this southeast Tennessee city. Swallows glide on the warm breeze rustling the hackberry trees, kudzu vines sprout along the hillside and the goats are back at work.
Chattanooga’s goats have become unofficial city mascots since the Public Works Department decided last year to let them roam a city-owned section of the ridge to nibble the kudzu, the fast-growing vine that throttles the Southern landscape.
The Missionary Ridge goats and the project’s tragicomic turns have created headlines, inspired a folk ballad and invoked more than their share of goat-themed chuckles.
“Usually, in dealing with this, you’ve got to get people past the laugh factor,” said Jerry Jeansonne, a city forestry inspector and the program’s self-described “goat dude.”
Despite the humorous overtones to the city’s methods, the program represents an environmentally friendly effort to grapple with a real problem in Chattanooga and the South.
Kudzu, which is native to Asia, was introduced in the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, according to the United States Forest Service. It arrived in the South several years later, becoming a popular ornamental vine, then a forage and erosion-control crop. In the Great Depression, the federal government paid farmers to plant it.
First called “the miracle vine,” kudzu eventually came to be known as “the vine that ate the South.” It grows at an astonishing rate of a foot a day, smothering flora, swallowing houses and blanketing the landscape.
Now embedded in the South, as well as in parts of Oklahoma, Texas and some Northern states, kudzu can be found on at least a million acres of federal forest land, and probably millions more acres of private land, said James H. Miller, a research ecologist for the Forest Service.
While not the worst...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Turn it into an alternative fuel.
Paul Harvey reported on Goats loving Kudzu...I don’t know...a decade ago? This one goes to the old news file.
Anytime goats and tennessee is mentioned I think of the drunk goat at some bar in memphis.
The drunk goat of Silky O’Sullivan’s. He lives in a castle, you know. ;)
See, this makes no sense. Carbon is carbon. It would be much more efficient to plant vast tracts of kudzu and simply plow it under, sequestering the carbon that the plant has extracted from the atmosphere in compensation for the carbon being released from the combustion of the long-sequestered petroleum and coal deposits.
Tell the junkies it gets you high and they’ll smoke it all.
You should instead think about our fainting goats. If they hear a loud noise they drop over on their sides in a dead out faint.
Goats, by the way, will give you a great field of grass by eating everything *except* the grass.
Cattle will eat it too.
“See, this makes no sense. Carbon is carbon. It would be much more efficient to plant vast tracts of kudzu and simply plow it under, sequestering the carbon that the plant has extracted from the atmosphere in compensation for the carbon being released from the combustion of the long-sequestered petroleum and coal deposits.”
Ah - but when the plants decay, the carbon is released!
Eeek! You have “fainting goats”? *I* have “fainting goats”!!
I just got mine this spring... talk about “easy keepers”! The neighbors are absolutely fascinated by the fact that they aren’t “escape artists” or “fence jumpers”, plus they eat my mesquite and cedar!
I see a business opportunity. Many of our Latin “guests” are accustomed to a diet of goat. Also, goat’s milk is rich and healthy. We have endless goat feed in the Kudzu patches throughout the south. This would be a win/win situation. Let the goats take the jobs that americans won’t do.
Cattle will eat it too.
There was a piece on Discovery Channel about the farmers in Ga. using Kudzu for cattle feed. A farmer was shown bailing the stuff and, describing how much more nutrients it contained over grass feeds.
Kudzu.
People can it it also, the bloom is delicious in a salad.
True, some does get converted to CO2, but not all by a long shot.
As soon as someone starts smoking it, the federal government will find unlimited funds to eradicate it. Hemp used to be a weed, you know.
Oh cool. Yeah I have never seen him, but my college roommate who is from Memphis was telling me all about him.
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