Chattanooga: Goats to return to ridge to eat more kudzu

For the third straight year, goats will munch away at kudzu and other hard-to-tackle plants on Missionary Ridge, and the city wants the vegetation-control initiative to grow to other sites.

“Quite honestly, the goats were a little bit more effective than we initially thought,” said Lee Norris, deputy administrator of the Department of Public Works. “They can get in and get a handle on the kudzu relatively fast, so we’re looking at maybe expanding this to some other kudzu-infested areas in the city.”

Jerry Jeansonne, self-proclaimed “goat dude” with the Department of Public Works, said the city will seek bid proposals from goat contractors later this summer, and he hopes to have the animals out working by the beginning of October, if not before.

“It’s done what we wanted it to do,” Mr. Jeansonne said of the city’s goat-browsing initiative, which has put the animals out on the west and east sides of Missionary Ridge above the McCallie tunnel and also on Bragg Reservation. “The only thing is … the kudzu keeps coming back.”

But he said that with successive years of goats eating the invasive plants, he hopes the pesky vegetation eventually can be killed on these sites once and for all.

Thus far, the initiative has been a hit, garnering attention from media outlets including The New York Times, Mr. Jeansonne said. The city now is talking to private individuals who want goats to nibble away on problematic plants at sites on Cummings Highway, in St. Elmo and on Signal Mountain, he said.

While city officials want to put goats on more public property, Mr. Jeansonne said they haven’t pinpointed any specific locations for that yet.

“All of them would require fencing and that kind of stuff,” he said.

Mr. Norris said the goat contracts were “considerably” lower than $10,000 for each of the past two years, but the city did not spend all of that money in either 2006 or 2007. He said he would like the contract to have a similar price tag this year.

He said the program has been tweaked and improved since 2006.

“(In) the third year, we should be able to have the successful bidder hit the ground running,” Mr. Norris said.