I have two ponds. The big one isn't fenced in yet. The small pond is 3/4 of an acre. Before getting goats, I had blackberries taking over the shoreline. I could mow pretty close to the edge of the water, but not enough to control the blackberries. Every year they took over more shoreline and I got farther behind in the battle to control them.
We started out with 3 Dwarf Nigerian Goats and five horses. At first, I couldn't tell if anything was happening with the blackberries. I wasn't expecting them to eat them, we just got the goats because we wanted them as pets. Then one day I noticed that they blackberries where gone. It seemed like it happened overnight. I was shocked!!!! As we got more goats, we expanded the size of their pasture. The grass turned into carpet. Eaten right down to an inch of the ground. We don't know if the horses did most of that or the goats. They both eat grass non stop.
The horses were rescues and the oldest two have passed away in their mid to late 20's. We have three horses left that are around ten years old. We're at 60 goats right now with zero boys. They maintain about 27 acres, and eventually when I finish fencing the rest of the land, they will have 65 acres. The big pond is in the area that isn't fenced yet. I'm really hoping they clear the shoreline there too!!!!
My favorite thing about the goats is how they clear the undergrowth in the wooded areas. It's become like a park. You can see through the trees up as far as the goats can reach. They get on their back legs to get the leaves, and it makes the area look really nice!!!
I'm using 2x4 horse fencing. It's expensive, heavy and a pain to install, but it's very effective. Eventually I'm going to replace that with 8 foot tall deer fencing, which is stupid expensive, heavy and very very difficult to install. But that's another story. For now, the horse fencing is working great. In the pictures, you can see the white vinyl three rail fence that I installed when I first bought my land. That was a huge waste of money. I love the look, but it's worthless. I had to run electric wire on it to keep the goats in, and now it has 2x4 horse fence tied to it. I'm slowly removing all of it since it's so worthless with animals.
Goats don't eat everything, but they do eat a lot of different things. I expected them to not eat grass, but they seem to love it. They love fresh leaves too, but I see them out in the middle of the pasture eating grass a lot more then I see them in the woods eating leaves. They just love blackberries, but also just about every type of tree sapling that grows on my place is gone. Trees are weeds here and difficult to control. If you leave a pasture alone for a year, it will be full of saplings!!!!! Not with goats, there are no trees taking over any of my pastures.
