Garlic mustard as a valuable resource?

The cows have munched down all the good stuff in the pasture, and now wait at the fence for me whenever I happen to bend down to pull a weed where they can see me.  I was cutting long grass with scissors to give them some green stuff (yes, always the die-hard animal lover!).  Then, when we had cut all the long grass in the Barnevelder enclosure, I noticed the garlic mustard growing there.  It's looking kind of dry, but the seed heads hadn't burst open yet.  So I thought:  Why not feed an armload to the cows every day?  They wait for me to feed it to them over the fence as if it tastes as good or better than the grass.  They went through a phase (after the flower stage) where they wouldn't touch the stuff, but now the garlic mustard is suddenly a favorite again! What a great idea!  I was so worried when the whole yard seemed to be covered with the stuff.  Every web-site warned to eradicate it, and to do it NOW.  I was disheartened that there was no way I could actually pull all of that garlic mustard, and no way that the cows could eat that much without bloating and needing vet assistance.  I even felt like a failure in the "save the environment" category, because I had not been able to keep my little slice of nature free from the invasive weed and would fight the same battle every year.  A few months' back, the garlic mustard was rapidly growing almost 3 feet high, a thick ground cover that choked out just about everything else.  And underneath that thick cover was the lush new growth (a SOLID mat of it!) that would become next year's invasive weeds.  No way would I have been able to keep up with it and feel good about the effort. But now---a totally different point of view has entered the picture.  --At first, I pulled as much as possible when it was flowering, and fed it to the cows.  I thought that the battle to keep this year's seed explosion to a minimum was lost because I didn't seem to make even a dent in the surplus of weedy growth. --Then when this year's plants were done flowering, I pulled the lush new growth that was springing up and the cows loved that even more.    Did I mention that I've been eyeing the tall grass that grows by the edge of the road, wondering how much of it I could cut to feed the cows (that is a mild way to put it.  I've been COVETING the tall green stuff that the cows would love to eat because we didn't have enough grass here for them to eat!)  I had no idea that a wonderful resource was maturing in our own yard.  --NOW the sight of garlic mustard growing under every tree and in every garden is not quite so frustrating.  As I pull a huge armload of the stuff every morning for the cows, the understories of the more wild areas in the 2 acres are opening up and looking presentable again.  I'm seeing the lush new plants which will put up seedheads next year, and thinking, "That will be for the cows next spring."  No more "I've failed!  We'll have an even worse weed problem next year!"  This is something much more promising. It's got me thinking on something that my cousin's husband Greg suggested:  run an electric fence around the areas that need to be grazed down, even if it's a garden of flowers or hostas, and let the cows eat as much as they want, but only when I choose to let them to graze that area.  I've already had to accept that I will not be able to get all gardens back into the state they were in 15 years ago.  Why not give the cows, chickens, geese, turkeys, and ducks access to the worst areas by securely fencing them in and letting them graze small sections of the yard at a time?  Plans for next year!  Woo-hoo!  "Promising", "nutritious" and "resourceful" (when talking about weeds) are much better words than "frustrating" or "impossible" or "insurmountable"! Laura