To help keep the city’s green spaces spick and span, officials in Winterthur have hired some brand new staff - but since they are only paid in grass, they really are a baahgain: the local council has employed a flock of sheep to help trim the lawn in public areas.
Speaking to SRF, city officials confirmed that they had employed a flock of 10 sheep to replace mechanical mowers in the city. The new workers will be grazing city parks for the coming few months, before moving to the grounds of a local school and a cemetery in the autumn.
Stadtgrün Winterthur Head of Ecology Michael Wiesner said that "if a positive effect is confirmed," they would expand the project to other areas. He explained that contrary to popular belief, sheep are the grassland food critics of the natural world. They are known to be “very picky” eaters, prioritising one area of grass over another - they have even been known to eat areas in stages as if they were courses in a meal.
However, sheep's “picky eating habits help biodiversity” and their slower approach is much kinder to nature compared to a standard lawnmower, Wiesner noted. He added that the sheep will help create new habitats for plants, animals and especially insects.
The sheep are effective in spreading seeds and fertilising the soil using their droppings. They also scare away mice instead of killing them, helping them become a reliable food source for kites and other birds of prey.
The idea of using sheep to mow lawns in Switzerland is not new: for years Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), the main public transport provider, has been using sheep to mow hard-to-access areas near rail lines. According to SRF, 100 sheep are currently in the employ of SBB.
However, history has suggested that it is a difficult trick to get right. Local officials in Zurich have tried to use sheep to mow lawns in the past, but the animals often eat too much, leaving a barren wasteland instead of freshly mown sod. At the Juckerhof adventure farm in Seegräben, the sheep got too fat from eating the grass.
Wiesener explained that Zurich failed because the “grazing was too intensive”, meaning too many animals were there for too long. He added that the Jucker farm’s mistake was that they used Shropshire sheep, which are too gluttonous to be good mowers.
He said that in Winterthur the animals will only mow one location for three weeks before being moved on. The sheep they will use are Skudde sheep, a native of Germany and the Baltic states that are picky enough eaters to be used to mow.