THE BELMONT GOATS

🥳 🐐 Over TEN YEARS as Portland's nonprofit resident herd. 🥳 🐐 The Belmont Goats provides urban public access to domestic goats within Portland, Oregon, and/or its surroundings. This service also may be provided to specific communities deemed to benefit from such access. The Belmont Goats is “Portland's resident herd", offering an oasis of rural community amidst the built urban environment.Originally residing at what was known colloquially as Goat Field (or, to the local development community, “the goat blocks"), two city blocks bounded by SE Belmont and Taylor Streets and SE 11th and 10th Avenues, The Belmont Goats were preceded by three summers of unrelated herds rented from Goat Rental NW and Sauvie Island Goat Rental to clear brush, part of an argicultural and social experiment pitched to developer Killian Pacific by landscape architect Brett Milligan.After those first three years, Creative Woodworking NW—whose shop stands directly across the street from the property, and who'd helped care for those rented herds—arranged to have their own goats beginning in October of 2012. That's the herd which the Buckman neighborhood and the greater Portland community came to know and love over the course of the Spring and Summer of 2013, becoming, in the words of one supporter, the “nexus of an unexpected and spontaneous community".In late October of 2013, after a year of uninterrupted residency, an approaching deadline to move the goats to make way for a long-anticipated development project raised the possibility of the herd being split up. Instead, a handful of its volunteer caretakers stepped up to purchase the herd in order to ensure that it remained intact, for the good of both the herd and the community—with the goal of finding a new publicly-accessible home.While the herd no longer resides on SE Belmont Street, its new owners officially named them The Belmont Goats in recognition of the pioneering history of urban goats at Goat Field.Early in October of 2014, at the invitation of the neighborhood and after a successful crowdfunding campaign, The Belmont Goats relocated to Lents Town Center (initially in partnership with Green Lents), onto land provided by the Portland Development Commission. Current plans call for the herd to reside in Lents at least through mid-2016, but information on how to attract The Belmont Goats to your neighborhood will be made available soon.