6,000 sheep will soon be grazing on 10,000 acres of Texas solar fields

JR Howard of Texas Solar Sheep can’t buy sheep fast enough. He supplies them to solar farms, where their grazing keeps grass short for less than the cost of mowing it. Demand for his animals has skyrocketed over the past few years as more and more large solar installations are being built. Now Howard is scrambling to fulfill his biggest order yet: for 6,000 sheep, which will be put to work grazing eight Texas solar fields run by Enel North America.

Howard’s booming business is a form of agrivoltaics, which combines solar panels with agriculture or other land uses that benefit farmers and ecosystems.

Along with renting sheep out to solar fields, Howard raises them to sell for meat — but only the males. He needs as many females as he can get to shore up his herds. When he first started his business three years ago, he had just 400 sheep on one solar site. Since then, he’s deployed over 10,000. The increasing demand for sheep grazing on solar farms is ​“the greatest opportunity for the sheep industry in my lifetime,” Howard told Canary Media.

The solar grazing project with Enel isn’t the first of its kind, but it will be the largest in the country. Altogether, Enel’s eight solar installations occupy a stretch of land nearly the size of Manhattan and currently produce 2.6 gigawatts of power (a few of the fields are still in the final stages of construction).

Using sheep as a vegetation maintenance crew is a win-win.

“Ultimately, we’re a business,” said Jesse Puckett, director of sustainability projects and community affairs at Enel. ​“This is one way that we can enhance the bottom line and build sustainability into our project.”

The animals are more efficient than lawn mowers, since they can get into the nooks and crannies under panel arrays, Puckett said, though some additional mowing is sometimes necessary, which Howard’s company provides along with the sheep. Mowing is also more likely to kick up rocks or other debris, damaging panels that then must be repaired, adding to costs.

Agrivoltaics projects involving sheep have been shown to improve the quality of the soil, since their manure is a natural fertilizer. At a solar installation in Minnesota, where Enel first started grazing sheep in 2017, the company saw a 200 percent improvement in organic matter. Using sheep instead of mowers also cuts down on fossil fuel use, while allowing native plants to mature and bloom. Solar projects that prioritize native plant growth have been found to increase the biodiversity of plants and insects, like native bees, and to reduce soil erosion.

The sheep benefit, too. Shade from solar panels helps them stay cool, and Howard has found they don’t need as much water as when they’re grazing on open fields. 

Meeting the United States’ ambitious clean energy goals will require rapid installation of solar over the coming decades. The clean energy source is set to lead the growth of U.S. power generation for the next two years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

While much of that solar will be built on rooftops and on contaminated land that can’t be used for anything else, like former nuclear sites, some of it will inevitably take up viable farmland.

“It’s not possible to meet solar demand without using some farmland,” said Jordan Macknick, lead energy, water, and land analyst for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. But the overall amount will probably be relatively small, he argues. If every new solar project were built on agricultural land, 10 million acres at most would be needed to achieve a completely decarbonized electric grid by 2050 — that would still be less than 1 percent of all the country’s farmland.

Nevertheless, agrivoltaics projects could help reduce that percentage, not necessarily replacing farmland so much as transforming the way it’s used.

“I think we recognize the fact that, as an industry, we have this amazing opportunity to do things a little bit different,” Puckett said. In addition to grazing sheep, several of Enel’s sites will incorporate beekeeping, native plant habitat, and hay production. Across the U.S., 500 agrivoltaics projects already cover around 62,000 acres of land.

For farmers like Howard, the scaling up of solar and sheep go hand in hand.

Over the next few weeks, Howard will be securing animals from nearby ranches and farms — around 3,000 or 4,000 more. He hopes that someday soon he’ll be able to sell off some of his herd to help other farmers start their own sheep-for-solar businesses. ​“That’s really the goal,” Howard said. But for now, he said, ​“We need those sheep.”