In some areas of the Midwest, the sheep is quietly becoming clean-energy friendly. Where the solar sites would have previously required tractors and laborers to trim the areas, it is now handled by flocks between rows of panels through grazing. It is commonly referred to as solar grazing: sheep keep the ground covered without the disturbance, fuel, and mowing up that huge arrays frequently demand. In the case of farmers, the agreement can reclaim previously fenced off land to be used as a working acreage.
Illinois farmer Brooke Watson has given an eyewitness account of the extent of that change. The flock of her family consists of 500 ewes in nine sites with solar facilities, which yield food and electricity respectively. The opportunity became a line that Watson has repeated as a rallying cry to those who are attempting to make the model pencil work: there is a tremendous, tremendous potential to these two industries to grow and develop together side by side.
It is a practical match, too. It has been observed by researchers and developers that sheep will generally be comfortable in solar arrays where larger animals are not; their size makes them easier to handle in areas with equipment and they will be able to maintain low growth without the same chances of bumping and hitting equipment. In the areas where corn and soybean are the main crops, the image of sheep under the panels remains something new. However, proponents hold that the tradeoff in land use is not as bleak as it may seem as much production of Midwestern commodities is diverted to fuel markets or exported to foreign markets instead of it being consumed locally.
However, the sheep-and-solar relationship is standstill when the animals get off the field: the American dinner table. Most customers hear about lamb as an annual rite of passage, or at the specialty markets, and the domestic producers are competing in an environment where a large portion of the lamb consumed in the country is imported. The grazing contracts would not alone provide a sustainable livelihood to shepherds attempting to increase because of less stable demand.
This is why the pressure to normalize lamb is often accompanied by a second concept the use of more animals. The proponents of nose-to-tail consumption believe that familiarity with more cuts and preparation decreases waste and consolidates small economies of meat production, particularly where few cuts are considered “prime,” and only these can be sold consistently. The philosophy also re-links contemporary kitchens with the earlier food cultures that viewed broth bones, organ meats and slow cooking cuts as staple commodities and not novelties.
At that, lamb is an abnormally pertinent linkage between tradition-oriented cooking and the modern sustainability discussions. One sheep may be included in a land-management strategy which will subsidy clean power, and which will also provide protein, and a wider market to diverse cuts will allow farmers to escape the rut of raising animals which can be profitable only when consumers purchase a single familiar chop. To communities around new solar installations, the slogan is not so much as a slogan but more a supply chain: locally farmed vegetation, local meat, and, as long as the cultural appetite expands, local and even more local meat.
Organizations such as American Solar Grazing Association and American Farmland Trust have been trying to train farmers and standardize the practice of grazing under panels, so that grazing under panels is not as experimental but more replicable. Depending on the region, the details vary, yet the gaming principle remains unchanged: should Americans know how to use the lamb not merely as a holiday buy, solar fields may become not only power plants, but pasture.
