From the Pastures: Solar lamb-scaping

Lambing is going well. I’m about half done, with about 40 ewes left to lamb. I’ve been getting rains and the forage is really growing. The rotation moves are about every two days.

The American Lamb Board solar grazing workshop was June 11-13 at Kankakee Community College. There were 33 attendees and four speakers. We had people from four states and the rest were from Illinois. On my right was a guy from Maine, about 35 years old. His dad owned an apple orchard and they were in the process of putting in a solar farm.

The demand for the type of apples they produced was very poor, so they were going to pull out the trees. The solar company said they would pay to have the trees pulled out, so the farmer said, “Sure, we will pull out the trees and get paid for it!” This sounds pretty good, but there are always rules and regulations, also. This young guy has never been around livestock, so the learning curve will be real steep to go from no livestock to grazing several hundred head of sheep inside of a solar farm.

The guy on my left was from Oregon, 22 years old, has 250 head of sheep and has been grazing six solar sites for two years. In his area the solar farms are regulated to not be bigger than 15 acres, so he had a more manageable situation. Another guy was from the state of New York and was grazing a solar site of 250 acres with 600 ewes. The size of the solar farms varies greatly along with the number of sheep to graze the site. The paperwork and constant communications will keep one person busy almost full time.

You have to understand you’re working for the company managing the solar site, not yourself. If you have a dead animal, they want it removed within 24 hours. If the forage gets above a predetermined height, you have to mow it. This is not smooth ground; it has been trenched, driven over with a variety of construction vehicles and left for you to deal with. One attendee said he had just mowed 4-foot-tall forage with a Toro zero-turn mower that averaged half an acre per hour and he had figured on mowing two acres per hour.

The money might be high, but you have a lot of your time involved in the operation, especially if you have to drive two hours in one direction. One guy had to drive to four different sites and they were all two hours from home. Then you have the large investment in mowing equipment needed to maintain the site to keep it looking pretty.

You have to do your own homework, physically visit the site, know what you’re signing and determine your cost to do the work. As a wise-old rancher told me last year, “I can lead you to knowledge, but I can’t make you think.”