LEWISTON — Under a hot sun at Riverside Cemetery, a big Nubian goat named Tito senses a visitor and wanders over to poke his nose at the stranger.

“Don’t pet him,” says Craig Charron, handler of the goat team. “His head is full of poison ivy.”

Yep. This big lug of a playful goat has been chomping on poison ivy all day, along with poison oak, sumac, weeds, dead leaves — anything, really, that causes blight in an otherwise pristine landscape.

Munching away ugly scrub is the job of this team of goats presently stomping up and down the hillsides at the Lewiston cemetery along the Androscoggin River.

The beasts are from Al’s Goats of Maine, operated by Charron’s son, and they’re who you call if you need to clean up unsightly or dangerous fauna and can’t or don’t want to bring in heavy machinery.

“They do this for a living,” says Charron. “This is their job. They’re the natural way to get rid of invasive plants that are very hard to get rid of. These guys will eat all that right down to the ground, thorns and all.”

The business employs — for lack of a better word — 31 goats. The chomp squad are called all over the state for this very type of cleanup gig.

“They’ll work on steep hillsides and wet areas,” Charron says. “They’ll work along waterways and in any place where you cannot bring machines.”

The goats from Al’s have been called in to clean up along solar panel arrays around the state. More recently, they were tasked with cleaning up around a hospice house in Scarborough, where the goats — Nubians and smaller Nigerians, mainly — became the hit among the hospice staff.

Because that’s the thing about goats. Charron had a team of roughly a dozen working at Riverside Cemetery this week and to look at them, you’d think the animals were at play rather than at work.

Surrounded by a portable electric fence Charron uses to keep the animals from running off, the goats eat constantly. But in between chomps of this weed or that one, they are headbutting one another. Occasionally, they will jump up on the stones and just kind of pose there, as if fancying themselves Greek gods of the goat world.

“Oh, they’re hilarious,” says Charron. “They do get up to their antics.”

They’re playful and productive, those goats, yet somehow they manage to not intrude on the pastoral serenity of one of Lewiston’s finest cemeteries.

There is no high buzz of saws or growls of excavators and backhoes. Hardly anything looks out of place. The animals somehow appear perfectly natural roaming the bushy hills of the cemetery.

“Goatscaping,” they call it. It’s a practice that’s been in use for centuries, although popularity soared in the early 2000s when it was realized that goats could be used for eco-friendly wildfire mitigation.

“Goats are a natural solution,” according to the Al’s Goats website. “No chemicals or herbicides, just powerful teeth, a huge appetite and potent digestive abilities. They even grind up the seeds that most animals excrete or spit out. This helps diminish the seed bank.”

The goats fertilize the soil with their manure, and their urine helps to degrade the seeds lying dormant in the ground.

“This decreases their ability to germinate while giving the native plants a nutrient boost,” according to the website.

GOATS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN

Early Tuesday afternoon, when the sun was high and the air hot, there were few mourners at Riverside Cemetery. One lady who came driving out of the cemetery, though, paused a moment to watch the goats at work.

The woman, who had presumably been tending the grave of a deceased love one, beheld the animals for half a minute or so, smiled and then went on her way.

It’s an idea that is not lost on the company that employs the animals. There is just something about a goat.

“Al’s Goats are inquisitive, playful, sweet, and can lift your spirits,” according to the website. “It is really hard to be in a bad mood around all this love. Especially when they are chomping away to make your life easier.”

Al Charron, Craig’s son who runs the business from Springvale, says working with goats is a distinct life improvement.

“It’s wonderful,” he says. “It’s perfectly relaxing. After 27 years of truck driving, I gotta tell you: The most relaxing part of my day is actually spending time with them.”

Al Charron started the business in 2018. In the beginning, they had just three goats that were used mainly for cleaning up their own properties.

“It’s like getting a tattoo,” he says. “Oh, I’m just going to get one. Then three. Then three more and three more and then it just snowballs out of control.”

So now the company has nearly three dozen of the animals, including a quasi-famous Nubian goat named Mr. Peanut, who is out of work on disability — Mr. Peanut has mobility issues in his old age and so the Charrons are devising a 3D-printed type of wheelchair for him.

Since starting in 2018, the Charrons have found the notion of “goatscaping” only gaining in popularity. They like doing it, the goats like doing it, and it’s a much cleaner means of cleaning up landscapes than more traditional methods.

“We’re doing what we can for the environment,” Al Charron says, “that’s for sure.”

Craig Charron, a lithe and graceful man, spends whole afternoons walking among his goats at Riverside Cemetery. He surveys the landscape around them to make sure there’s nothing the animals shouldn’t get into.

On this day, it’s a good thing Charron didn’t shirk in his scrutiny. He has found a patch of Lily of the Valley and marked the spot with a rod.

“They cannot eat that,” Charron says gravely. “No animal can eat that, it’s highly poisonous.”

While the goats meander and munch within their generous pen, Charron moves along the perimeter, ripping out unwanted plants from higher ground and throwing it to the animals.

Munch, munch, munch. That nuisance plant is gone in seconds.

The idea, according to the science of it all, is for the goats to defoliate the pest plants, robbing them of their ability to draw energy from the sun. This weakens them and causes them to draw more energy from their root stores.

Over time, the process will decrease the amount of regrowth that occurs in that area. The goats will clean up that unsightly patch of land and for the most part, it will stay cleaned up.

“They do a pretty good job of it,” says Charron, pausing a moment in his labors to watch the goats.

With Al’s Goats becoming more and more mainstream, word-of-mouth is often the only advertising they need. When the Riverside Cemetery Association decided some cleanup was necessary, they somehow found their way to Al’s Goats.

“It’s a great, low-impact way to keep invasive vegetation at bay on steep terrain that heavy equipment would struggle to tackle,” said Reggie Poussard, a member of the Riverside Association board. “Plus, it’s fun project for everyone, including the goats, and it supports small business.  

“Win, win for everyone,” Poussard said.