David Wall
NOTE: This article written for vegetable gardens, not pasture-land.
Several years ago, a local land owned was showing his 200 acres of pasture land and mentioned he wanted to invest in a goat herd because of all the goat weed on the property. He wasn’t happy to learn that goats detest goat weed. Usually, the only way they’ll eat it is if the field is brush hogged and later baled. Even then, they’re not happy to have it as a choice meal!
Untreated goat weed in your vegetable garden can rapidly become a serious problem. Fortunately, however, vegetable gardens are seldom larger than 6-7K square feet, but even up to a full acre, an easy treatment is to pull every plant by hand. Then, put the pulled weeds in a pile, burn them, or bag and take them to the local trash dump. You’ll miss a few plants and/or seeds, of course, but in subsequent years, new goat weeds will be less than before.
For whatever reason, but once goat weed gets to 12” tall, most chemical sprays for it just can’t get the job done. At that height, it’s probably best to brush hog the area, and as soon as new growth is detected, spray, or wait until spring to spray.
Goat weed is almost the perfect weed, because most eradication methods used to treat it are usually too early, too late, or otherwise ineffective for whatever reason. Waiting until the plant is too tall for sprays to be effective is a common failure. On top of this, spraying will not kill the seeds. So, even if the sprays should work, the seeds will rapidly make a comeback.
Fires in our area are dangerous but will kill the current plant as well as the seed above the ground.