Covington Cemetery’s unique lawn care system

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – A couple of furry friends are doing their part in keeping a historic cemetery clean.

“Covington Cemetery is named after one of our initial founders of the city of Bowling Green. The Covington family was here with the Moore brothers when Bowling Green was first founded,” Brent Belcher, Director of Bowling Green Parks & Recreation says.

The cemetery has been in town since the 1800s, but it wasn’t until much later that neighbors raised concerns.

“There’s a lot of unknown graves, unmarked graves, a lot of the tombstones that toppled over its terrain because of that is very unpredictable. It turned out to be that we’re just… we knew that coming in, that this is not a flat surface by any stretch. So that makes traditional mowing pretty much impossible,” Belcher says.

One neighbor says the cemetery is so bad, he had poison ivy growing on his backyard fence. Belcher saw the same.

“I can tell you when we first started this was so much of a jungle, you couldn’t even see the fence. You couldn’t even tell what was behind it as you can right now. It was when you drive by, you wouldn’t have known that there was really anything here besides just a lot,” he says.

That’s why he thought it was such a unique idea.

“Livestock grazing is not new to civilization, but it’s new to urban areas. For us, it was the first time we’ve ever gotten to do it as Parks & Rec goes. If we had other properties, we had four sides of the fence and would do we’ll use more goats because they’re just really effective. There’s plenty of occasions that they would indeed earn Employee of the Week awards,” he says.