On a recent morning in rural Hopkins County, Texas, beneath a bright blue sky, a herd of sheep grazed in their favorite spot on a hot day: under the shade of solar panels.
The site, a 2,700-acre solar farm, got its first few hundred sheep two weeks ago. It will soon have as many as 1,800. It’s one of eight solar farms owned by Enel North America that are now deploying the animals to help manage vegetation that would otherwise be cut with lawnmowers and weed trimmers. In total, the program will have 6,000 sheep on more than 10,000 acres of solar land, which may be the largest project of its kind in the country.
Texas Solar Sheep, the ranchers partnering on the work, started specializing on utility-scale solar projects a few years ago. At the time, the family-owned business only had around 400 sheep on its own traditional ranch. “We had a friend in South Texas tell us, ‘Y’all ought to look into solar grazing,’ says JR Howard, co-owner of the business. “Of course, we didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.”
At that point, some other solar farms were already using sheep to help maintain vegetation, including an Enel project in Minnesota. But most of the work was happening at a small scale. Now it’s quickly growing.
The approach has multiple benefits. External studies of Enel’s Minnesota project found that grazing sheep helped store more carbon in the soil and improve soil health. It’s also possible to add native plants to the pasture and simultaneously help bees and other pollinators. Sheep can help spread wildflower seeds that get stuck in their wool and planted as their hooves dig into the ground, similar to the way that bison herds once helped spread plants.
For the energy company, which needs to keep plants short to avoid fire risk, mowing has some disadvantages. It’s noisy, causing friction with neighbors. It can also sometimes damage solar equipment. Using sheep can ultimately be cheaper. “This saves us money,” says Jesse Puckett, who manages sustainability projects at Enel North America. “It’s an efficient way to do this. It’s great for the environment, but it also helps our bottom line. And so it’s a win-win for us.”
For sheep, shade from the solar panels can help improve the animals’ health—especially in hot Texas weather. The shade also helps grass or other plants grow in the summer heat. “It’ll be brown down the middle [of the rows] and green under the panels,” says Howard.
At Enel’s Texas solar plants, the herds of sheep are beginning to graze in rotation, meaning they munch on grass and other vegetation in one area and then get moved to another part of the solar farm a couple weeks later. Some of the sheep are sold for meat. The work is nearly the same as what would have happened on Howard’s original ranch. “We really operate just like a regular ranch,” he says. “The only difference is that we have solar panels.”
There are a couple of minor changes, including extra safety rules. When we spoke, Howard was wearing a flame-resistant shirt and had a hard hat ready to replace his cowboy hat if he needed to get close to the solar equipment. The border collies that he uses to round up his sheep are also sometimes hard to see in the rows of the solar panels, Howard says, so he’s started to also use drones to help herd the sheep to new pastures.
Demand from large solar projects is growing so much that Texas Solar Sheep now has to turn down work. The ranching company is currently on 19 different solar sites, with around 12,000 sheep. “We’re kind of in a bind now for really finding enough sheep to put on these sites,” he says. He’s also helping train other ranching families to do the same work, and worked with American Solar Grazing Association on a recent class for ranchers on solar grazing.
It’s one way to help bring more jobs to rural communities—in some cases, he says, the work with sheep might actually create more jobs than the ongoing work that’s needed on the solar panels themselves. At each solar farm, Texas Solar Sheep hires local workers to help manage the farm’s flock. The Enel sites each started as solar farms first, though in some cases solar grazing can help existing farmers keep using their fields for livestock when solar panels are installed. Sheep are ideal for the work since they won’t chew on wires, unlike goats. (If solar panels are built high enough, cattle could also graze underneath, though the extra height adds cost.)
“What I tell most folks is it’s kind of the biggest opportunity in my lifetime for the sheep industry,” Howard says. “Four years ago, I was getting laughed at when I said that, but now those same guys that were laughing about it are sure calling me.”