Did you know that, as many DMV residents are beginning to do, you can pay to have a flock of sheep do your yardwork for you?
As summer approaches, time off of school also means more time to get roped into dealing with yardwork. One up and coming Northern Virginia company offers an unconventional way for both students and their parents to sit back and relax while their yards get magically manicured: an army of hungry sheep.
Advertising itself as the “safest, quietest, and cutest weed-control service in the DMV,” Lamb Mowers replaces the traditional industrial lawn mower with a flock of fluffy Babydoll Southdown sheep—silent, squeal-worthy, and surprisingly effective.
Lamb Mowers operates by driving flocks of sheep that look more like four-legged teddy bears throughout the DC suburbs, taking them to yards and setting them free to munch the weeds away (within temporary fencing, of course). The company emerged in 2021, but it has risen in popularity and coverage more recently.
Cory Suter, the “Chief Shepherd,” is one of multiple Lamb Mowers human staff whom the company describe as “well-trained and certified… environmentalists at heart.”
Suter himself discovered the benefits of lamb mowing in 2016, when he “began using his flock of pet sheep to clear poison ivy, multifloral rose and other nuisance plants out of the yards and pastures around his Permaculture Farm between the City of Fairfax and Fairfax Station in Northern Virginia.” After realizing just how successful his sheep were at yard clean-up, he assembled his troop and made a business out of lamb mowing.
Lamb mowing provides a surprising amount of benefits for people, their yards, and the overall environment. The University of California, Davis adopted its own sheep mowing program in 2021 as a way to research how sheep benefit lawn landscapes, and one unexpected result of this study was that the use of lamb mowers improves people’s mental health.
Haven Kiers, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at UC Davis and the lead author of a study specifically focusing on lamb mowers’ effects on people’s mental health, surveyed people who interacted with the sheep on campus and people who did not. Kiers’ findings concluded that “There was a significantly lower likelihood of current feelings of being ‘very stressed’ or ‘stressed’ among the sheep mower group when compared to the group that did not experience sheep mowers.”
Moreover, farmers such as Nancy Corey, an owner of Correy Ippolito Winery in Blountville, Tennessee, recognize that sheep mowing “reduces fuel costs and saves time from regular mowing. Sheep add fertilizer to the ground [through pellets], which enriches the soil.”
Sheep also eliminate the harmful chemical byproducts of gas lawn mowers, thereby reducing carbon emissions. And if nothing else, sheep are certainly a far more heartwarming and entertaining alternative to mechanical mowers, making lamb mowing services an appealing option for getting landscaping done this summer.