ANDOVER — An overgrown meadow on High Plain Road will soon receive much-needed landscaping from local goats.
Under a pilot program approved this week, Andover farmer Lucy McKain can bring her six dairy goats to the town-owned Virginia Hammond Reservation to graze.
Members of the Andover Conservation Commission hope the goats will help restore the 3.5 acre meadow now threatened by years of overgrowth and pressure from invasive species.
With little town money available for conservation land maintenance, the meadow hasn't been mowed in years.
"Environmentally, it's beneficial to have areas of meadow," said Andover Conservation Director Bob Douglas. "To have it done for free, where we don't have to pay for a mower or use herbicides, is certainly a pretty nice option."
The grazing program will come at no cost to the town. McKain will pay for insurance and a temporary wire fence at the meadow. The goats will not be kept there overnight.
McKain, who lives on High Plain Road, declined to be interviewed for this story.
"The woman who's going to do this is taking full responsibility," said conservation commissioner Howard Kassler. "We're going to see how it goes this fall."
Across the road from the town's leaf compost site, the meadow is now home to thick shrubs, tall grass and bittersweet and buckthorn — both invasive plants that choke out other species.
"The invasives are a real problem," said Douglas. "The bittersweet and buckthorn are plants that just colonize areas and take over."
Douglas said restoration of meadow grass will increase biodiversity and attract nesting birds.
Conservation Commissioner Al French said goats are efficient grazers, well-suited to help prevent the meadow's slow transformation from a grassy field back to a thickly inhabited forest.
"I think we're increasingly, as a community, looking for ways to manage the land, and one of the expenses is mowing the fields," said French. "A variety of terrain is an important thing to have."
Kassler said the Conservation Commission will keep in touch with McKain throughout the coming months to monitor the progress of the grazing program.
If successful, French said the program could be brought to other overgrown conservation land.
"That's the intention," French said. "It could spread."
