*Source: American Clean Power
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We love living off-grid, reliant on solar and wind power. It’s gratifying to live off of clean energy and to know our day-to-day activities are not contributing to fossil fuel extraction. We graze our sheep, cattle, poultry, and horses around our solar array and it’s integrated into the pastures. It doesn’t interfere with the grazing management, and we can still operate and rotationally graze as usual.
There are two things our world is going to continually need: food and power. Being a third-generation farmer and rancher, I have an appreciation for the land and its capabilities to provide as well as an understanding of a farmer/rancher’s obligation to produce quality crops/products for our communities near and far. On other hand, I have been fortunate enough to work within the Renewable industry for the past 10 years. Through those years I have recognized both the importance and demand there is for energy now and in the future. Unique circumstances have brought two of my passions together to create efficiency of the land through Agrivoltaics/Agri-PV. Knowing the world needs more protein and power with limited land availability, we believe making dual use of solar farmland is pivoting. We have demos and utility scalable projects in store to develop an understanding of grazing cattle and producing hay within solar farms. This can provide economic viability on two fronts: agriculture and energy! Our experience and research, combined with studies by others, would suggest that we may be able to increase our agriculture production by creating microclimates for our grass species and provide shade to get better health and production from cattle! We are confident that solar and farming/ranching can successfully coexist.
We had been interested in grazing our sheep in a solar array for a while when United Agrivoltaics contacted us about a project 3 miles down the road from our farm. We get paid to graze and don’t have to worry about any of the maintenance work or costs. We are really impressed with the operation, we are not grazing any differently than we would be on our own property. When you can combine solar and grazing it just makes sense. It’s good for the environment and energy production and it can create an additional income for the farmer.