Solar farm developers in Wyoming are banking on a menagerie of barnyard animals to graze under hundreds of thousands of panels planned for construction from one end of the Cowboy State to the other.
Sheep, cattle and Kunekune pigs top the list of possibilities for sharing vast solar farms.
“My experience has been with cows,” said Brad Heins, a professor of animal science with the University of Minnesota who is working with one unidentified Wyoming business in the Jackson area considering adding dairy and beef cattle.
Cattle is a new field of study in the last two years for farm animals being considered for grazing possibilities under solar panels, Heins told Cowboy State Daily.
“People were grazing sheep underneath solar panels in Minnesota, but there’s isn’t a very big sheep industry here,” Heins said. “We have lots of dairy and beef cows, so we asked, ‘Why not put cows there?’ We started a small research project in 2019 to see if it worked.”
Heins, who is the leading expert in the emerging field of grazing cattle under solar panels, said he received an initial grant to study their behavior under panels at his Morris, Minnesota-based research campus almost five years ago.
“It did work by putting them (the cattle) underneath the panels. It’s good for soil and grass and reduces heat stress on the cows,” he said.
Today, his campus has cattle grazing under panels built about 8 feet off the ground to keep the bovines from bumping into the panels and catching on the wiring of a tiny plot of 5-10 acres of land, he said.
Sheep only need 5 feet of clearance and have already taken hold with solar farms.
In its April census, the American Solar Grazing Association found 80,000 sheep grazing on 100,000 acres of solar panels in the U.S., said Kevin Richardson, a spokesman for the group in Massachusetts of which Higgins is a founding member.
The trade group plans to hold a virtual meeting June 4 to discuss cattle grazing under solar panels. Discussion will focus on how to make solar arrays cattle-proof and what that looks like, Richardson told Cowboy State Daily.
At least two proposed solar projects in Wyoming are considering sheep grazing underneath solar panels.
Sheep, Cows And Pigs
One project is located near Yoder in Goshen County while the other is in Glenrock in Converse County.
When Florida-based BrightNight LLC decided to develop its 500-megawatt solar farm near Glenrock in a way to also graze sheep on the same land, it wanted to stay true to the local landowner’s sheep herding practices. The pivotable solar panels proposed by BrightNight would be built 5 feet above the ground for the sheep to graze underneath.
BrightNight asked Oregon State University Associate Professor Chad Higgins, the world’s foremost authority on using land for both agriculture and solar power, to provide some advice on herding practices.
In October, Higgins flew to Casper to take a look at Casey Tillard’s sheep enterprise, Mart Madsen Sheep Co., which is leasing 4,738 acres of his ranch to BrightNight to build its solar farm bordering the North Platte River.
In addition to sheep, New Zealand Kunekune pigs may be coming to the proposed Yoder solar farm in Goshen County.
The Kunekune, which has a docile, friendly nature, is a small breed of pig from New Zealand. Kunekunes are hairy, especially the ears, with a rotund build and have fleshy wattles hanging from their lower jaws.
Their color ranges from black and white to ginger, cream, black and brown.
“We want to make sure we have the right grasses,” said Paul Stroud, a director of Cowboy Energy LLC, which is based in Las Vegas but run by Stroud out of Sheridan, and his partner Hezy Ram, a geothermal and alternative energy expert.
Cowboy Energy has teamed up with Portugal-based Greenvolt Power to build the solar farm in Goshen County, which is still awaiting approval by the county’s board of commissioners, Stroud said.
Cowboy Energy plans to build nearly 326,000 solar panels spread over 1,200 acres, situated about 15 miles southwest of Yoder, about an hour’s drive northeast of the state’s capital city, Cheyenne.
Rancher David Otto wants to bring in several hundred head of sheep to the land where Stroud has proposed his solar farm.
The beef cattle and other crops that Otto currently maintains are struggling with a long-term drought in the region. But the solar panels help retain more water on the land for grazing sheep because the solar panels provide shade.
Otto previously told Cowboy State Daily that he may end up selling off some of his beef cattle herd if things work out with the sheep.
“There’s no reason why all of the animals can’t co-exist,” said Richardson, adding that he’s even heard of one solar farm operator elsewhere in the U.S. looking at adding runner ducks to the mix.
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
