ZANESVILLE, Ohio -- The installation of solar panels across the rural landscape means the vegetation around these panels needs to be kept in check. Solar grazing is now the new thing which brings sheep and other livestock into the area to graze the site. With solar grazing, sheep do what a team with lawn mowers and weed eaters would do.

 “Putting sheep to work at keeping the panels clear of overgrown vegetation is a perfect fit and way to bring agriculture and solar together,” said Lexie Hain, one of the founders of the American Solar Grazing Association (ASGA). “We founded ASGA in 2018. We’ve learned since that time that financially this assistance with the solar industry could help agriculture, which sometimes is a sliding economy. Solar grazing is more effective than mowing or using herbicides.”

Solar grazing has been proven successful on solar panels in New York, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida and eastern Ohio.

 “Solar grazing is kind of targeted grazing,” Hain said. “Sheep simply keep their heads down and eat grass and are no threat to the panels or the wiring.”

Hain has farmed in New York since 2005. She sold her specialty plant nursery in 2015 and transitioned to solar grazing with sheep. By 2020 her grazing business included five solar companies as clients.  

Sheep are most often used for this work as they are best suited for solar installations due to their size and grazing behavior. Solar companies contract with local sheep farmers to move the sheep onto the site in the spring, care for them through the grazing season, and move them off the site for the winter. The shepherds provide water and minerals, monitor the health of the sheep and manage them to ensure vegetation doesn’t become overgrown and shade the solar panels.

Hain says sheep enjoy eating many types of weeds and invasive species and are good at grazing underneath the panels where it is more labor-intensive to mechanically mow. The well-designed perimeter fence around a site contains the sheep and protects them from predators. The solar panels provide the sheep shelter from rain, wind and direct sun on hot days. Unlike goats, sheep are also unlikely to chew on the cables. 

Hain says the price per acre varies widely because the industry is still young. An economic model put together by the ASGA calculated a shepherd could fetch $450 per acre for a vegetation management contract. She adds that for a 10-acre parcel, one might put 300 sheep on it for three or four days. The goal is to put out as many sheep as possible for the shortest duration of time to force the sheep to eat all the vegetation.

“While it seems like a good deal to let sheep graze on a solar farm for free, shepherds need to treat it like a business, because it is one,” said Tom Karas, of Minnesota Native Landscapes, a commercial landscaping company near Minneapolis. “Solar grazing has been offered up time after time as the solution for keeping farmland in use, even as it is covered with solar panels.

The solar industry in Ohio is still in its infancy, especially the large utility scale solar facilities covering hundreds of acres at a time. Hardin, the first utility scale solar farm in Ohio, became operational this past winter and covers about 1,115 acres of ground.

Both say that dozens of varieties of sheep are being used for the work. The most common sheep breeds used for solar grazing are Katahdins and Dorpers, which as standard sized sheep.

“These solar projects need to be managed for 25 or 30 years, whether it’s through mechanical means or sheep,” Karas said. “We’re at the start of it. There’s room in this industry.”