Blue skies, green grass and fluffy white animals - New Zealand on a postcard.

But trade the sheep for goats, and your grass gets even greener.

New Zealand’s given goats a bad rap, but they can provide value for money as a fibre source and weed control - Temora Downs out at Mayfield is proof of that.

Partners John and Jane Harrison got Cashmere goats on the property a half year ago, and have been pleasantly surprised by their appetite for pest plants.

“Green grass is growing under them, meanwhile they’re eating the thistles from the top down,” John Harrison said.

“It’s amazing.”

He opened his property to demystifying goats, and show what it takes to farm them, as part of a field day for New Zealand Cashmere.

“There’re a lot of misconceptions about goats out there,” NZ Cashmere business development manager Olivia Sanders said.

“Once [farmers] actually see the animal, and hear farmers talk about the animal, that’s when they realise it’s a little bit different from what they thought.”

A “boom and bust” of goat farms in the 80s is where most of the misconceptions have come from, she said.

“Back then, farmers tried to farm goats like sheep.

“They’re not like sheep whatsoever; they’re white and fluffy, but that’s about where it ends.”

Where sheep will graze from “low to high” - eating closer to the ground before tackling tall grass - goats graze high to low.

That means there’s a lower risk of them consuming third-stage infective larvae, which live on the pasture, than with sheep.

And while they’ll eat grass and clover at a push, they prefer the prickly “waste” plants that cause farmers problems.

Gorse, thistles, cutty grass and blackberry are all on their menu and, like us, goats enjoy variety.

“For us, it’s about changing those perceptions.

“They’re more like dogs than sheep, they’ve got a real brain, so utilize it.

“It means they’re easy to train, they’re inquisitive, they’re easy to work with in the yards.”

Harrison said the 150 goats were his wife’s idea.

“She’d been driving around the paddock and it was full of thistles, she just said ‘we need some goats’.

“It wasn’t until about a year ago that we saw this opportunity.”

The herd is a joint experiment by the Harrisons, NZ Cashmere, AgFirst, and Graham Butcher of Rural Solutions to see how the animals benefit a multi-faceted farm, where goats replace the spraying of weeds as pest control.

“Half of the feed [goats] eat is stuff most don’t consider as feed or put into your equations around available feed on farm,” Butcher said.

“John’s also found he’s surprised how easy they have been to handle.”

By Anisha Satya