We might call them solar farms, but there’s often no farming going on under solar panels. That’s a real shame. But as Rachel Williamson reports, with some hard work and planning, a solar harvest doesn’t need to impact agricultural output.
Gayle Lee’s voice ripples with the special kind of incredulity rural people reserve for certain city folk as she recalls an anecdote about electricians and sheep.
Early in her family’s experiment keeping sheep and solar panels in the same paddocks at their western Victoria farm, she fielded queries from worried electricians in Sydney, contracted to maintain the new power plant.
Who, they’d demanded, would put the sheep to bed at night?
“All the operations people on solar farms are electricians. They’re not farmers. They’ve got no idea,” Lee says.
“We just rolled around laughing. The other one was ‘if you put the sheep in there and we need to work, who’s going to take the sheep out’? And we said, ‘no, the sheep won’t come near you’.
“It’s that sort of [lack of knowledge] that [farmers in the solar industry] need to counter. But I do think they’re getting better at it.”
Gayle and Tom Lee’s property hosts part of the 149-megawatt (MW) Glenrowan West solar farm. Unintentionally, it became a model for how to successfully farm under solar in Australia.
But their tale is also a perfect microcosm of a much bigger story: one that marries years of overseas research with the urgent need for Australia’s vast horizons to produce both food and electricity.
That research has shown that it’s possible to farm and produce electricity at the same time. And with hard work and planning, it’s possible while maintaining Australians’ ideal of what the bush should be. Luckily, we don’t have to go into this situation blind. In Europe and Japan, limited land forced new ways of thinking about power and farming many years ago. And in the USA, business-savvy farmers developed a new multi-billion-dollar industry out of ‘solar grazing’. Australia has a lot to gain from the idea that farming and solar can happily coexist.
Fight the fear
Australia’s countryside is bearing the brunt – or the cornucopia, depending on who you talk to – of the country’s energy transition.
In some districts, such as those around Engie’s The Plains Energy Park near the New South Wales (NSW) town of Hay, people are being won over by the financial and community benefits provided by big renewable energy developments.
In central Victoria’s spa district, a tiny town called Newstead decided as a community to play an active role in the transition. It switched on a 3MW solar farm and 5-megawatt-hour (MWh) battery in 2024. But just kilometres away, a badly handled community engagement process has left both the community of Colbinabbin and the local council actively opposing a proposed 500MW solar farm and battery project.
Generally, Australians are very supportive of renewable energy, citing the reason as their awareness of the urgency to cut fossil-fuel emissions, according to regular surveys by organisations such as CSIRO and the Climate Council.
But the fears about solar in the bush are not unfounded. Visually, the swathes of panels transform the landscape, and extra power lines can stretch for kilometres. Some people are concerned that contractors could inadvertently spread weeds or cause other forms of environmental degradation. And some solar farms make productive land unusable – a loss that hurts the entire community.
The benefits also feel unfairly weighted to the cities. There is a sense that farmers and rural residents are being asked to bear radical changes to their views and the local environment, so that eco-conscious urbanites can buy renewable energy to charge their electric vehicles.
Ben Wynn encapsulates the conflicted position of many people who love the land, but understand the pressing need for reduced fossil fuel use.
He pioneered an Australian option for cattle-plus-solar in his company Wynergy, and is deeply knowledgeable about how to make farming-plus-solar work. But he’s recently moved out of the sector in despair at the lack of care and action by developers.
“Why are we going to all of this effort to put some of these large-scale solar farms on such beautiful productive farmland [and] high-class soils, yet we don’t have any moratorium or wind down on the coal we export or the gas we export? I feel like we’re shooting ourselves in the foot a little,” he says.
“You need to establish a design that provides the capacity to host [animals]. It’s really difficult and challenging too. [For] some solar farms, it can’t even happen. You get to the point where you can’t actually do it because the panels didn’t line up, or you didn’t use the right tracking infrastructure.”
People like researcher Eric Nordberg at the University of New England, and farmer-consultant Karin Stark, are hoping the datasets they’re building can change the narrative of rural loss.
“We often don’t think about the social licence and getting the community’s approval for having these big sites,” says Nordberg, a wildlife ecologist.
“To the farmers that say, ‘I don’t want to lose my grazing landscape to a big solar company’, we’re trying to say, ‘you don’t necessarily have to lose that’.”
The benefits don’t just go to farmers, either. The solar companies that operate the panels get plenty from the deal too.
“Obviously [sheep under solar is] good for the solar companies,” continues Nordberg. “They essentially get free vegetation management. If you’ve got sheep under there, you can also make the farmers happy, because they don’t necessarily lose that area to the energy company.”
Unfortunately, the message hasn’t quite got through to most developers. These companies build solar farms and then sell them on to another company to manage.
There are a growing number of guidelines on how to set up solar farms right – NSW’s state renewables rollout vehicle EnergyCo is funding one now. But surprisingly little local, on-the-ground data is available about the positives or negatives. This is where international research comes in.
Learning from experience
The concept of solar-plus-farming has a long history. It was founded in a German research centre where learned boffins gave it the clunky, clumsy term ‘agrivoltaics’.
In 1981, German scientists Armin Zastrow and Adolf Goetzberger, a pioneer of solar power, outlined how to configure solar panels to grow potatoes underneath.
Today in Japan, agrivoltaics takes the form of 3m-high, tree-like solar canopies over potato, aubergine, Japanese yam and ginger crops. By 2021, almost 2,000 farms had embraced what’s known there as shared solar.
In the Netherlands, berry farmer Piet Albers went all-in with European renewables giant BayWa r.e. and solar installer GroenLeven to grow outdoor raspberries. According to BayWa r.e., the pilot showed better air circulation under the panels than by using traditional systems, and protected the fragile crop from the weather.
In the USA, sheep rentals or solar grazing – as it’s branded there – was worth US$3.6 billion (A$5.8 billion) in 2021 and could more than triple that by 2031, according to market research company Allied Analytics last year.
Practically, sheep cut costs by keeping the grass and weeds down, thus reducing the number of times grass needs to be mowed.
The extra shading from panels also lets sheep stay out of the hot sun. The outer layers of their wool can be 7-8°C cooler, according to a 2023 study in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, and they produce higher-quality fleeces because the thin fibres aren’t exposed to as much sun or rain.
“Although solar pastures decrease herbage 38% lower than conventional unshaded open pastures due to full shading … this was offset by higher forage quality, resulting in similar spring lamb production to open pastures,” said a 2024 study in Applied Energy on the financial impact of putting sheep under solar. “Other studies have seen increases in pasture yield, that means even more revenue per acre … photovoltaic (PV) systems benefit the animals by offering shading that they prefer.”
Increased soil moisture from shading meant that during 2018’s very hot German summer – a climatic feature Australian farmers are well attuned too – the harvest at the solar-wheat field at Goetzberger’s own Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE rose by 3% even with the solar equipment blocking 30% of the sunlight.
It’s not just good news for harvests, either. Solar panels are most efficient at 25°C, so they also benefit from the partnership.
A 2023 study in Applied Energy led by Cornell University doctoral student Henry Williams found soybeans planted under 4m-high solar panels could reduce module temperatures by 10°C compared to a solar panel mounted 0.5m above bare ground.
“These results indicate that ground conditions and panel height play important roles in solar farm cooling, and that agrivoltaic systems can potentially help to resolve the global food-energy crisis by improving solar PV conversion efficiency while enabling agricultural production on the same land,” the study concludes.
Working with a vibe
Australian research comparing the actual effects of grazing sheep underneath solar to sheep grazing offsite is thin on the ground, but it is emerging.
“There’s not really empirical data to show we’ve compared the quality or the production underneath panels to something else,” says Nordberg. “I think it’s one of those things that sounds like a no-brainer and it would make sense that that is the case, but we don’t really have any data.”
A trial at the 66MW Parkes solar farm in NSW, which started in 2018, found higher wool yields from merino wethers that had been keeping the dry grass down.
A more recent comparison trial at the 174MW Wellington solar farm in NSW suggested the 1,700 solar merinos were producing wool that was not worse compared with a neighbouring mob of non-solar brethren. The data released by solar farm owner Lightsource bp in October 2024 showed that the mean number of thicker fibres was slightly smaller at 0.61% compared with 0.74%, meaning more of the solar fleece can be sold for a higher price. The comfort factor or softness against the skin was slightly higher, but spinning fineness was not quite as good.
Nordberg is leading the early stages of a grazing study at the massive 720MW New England solar farm and its 400MWh battery, under development by Acen Australia. The farmers originally thought the solar farm would reduce grazing capacity, along with grass yields and quality.
“We are trying to measure a whole bunch of food vegetation plots and quality to see if the grass cover and the nutrient values underneath panels is better or worse,” explains Nordberg. “So obviously the panels themselves provide shade and holding moisture and all that kind of stuff. We actually think that [the growing conditions] might be quite good underneath those panels.”
“We also have people that are interested in looking at the animal production side of things. Do you get better fleece quality from the sheep that are grazing under panels? Do they have more or less parasite load? What’s their reproductive status? Can they put on more weight, more quickly?”
Making it work
Although as Nordberg puts it, the preliminary data indicating that running sheep under solar panels is a “no-brainer”, the experts say there’s plenty of reasons why it doesn’t – or can’t – happen.
Developers need to plan from the very start for fencing and water sources. And they need to make re-sowing pastures possible by ensuring the rows of panels are wide enough to fit a tractor down, according to agricultural consultant Karin Stark.
“[The issues could include] things like lack of land management and preparation prior to construction causing issues later on, having lack of access to adjacent pasture so animals can be taken off for health reasons and for chemical spraying,” says Stark.
“It’s really important for landholders and developers to have meaningful conversations early on … Do they want to continue grazing? There will be some cost in putting in infrastructure, but that’s much cheaper than doing it later.”
Even the design of how the panels will move to follow the sun is important. On the Lee’s property, the panels track the sun as a row. But the 4 new projects near their house connect each row of panels with a bar across the alley, so they move en masse. This means that vehicles that enter must back out, and worse, woolly sheep can sometimes get caught up on the bar.
Still, once the basics are in place, we’ve only begun to explore all the benefits.
Gayle Lee doesn’t own the sheep running around the solar panels near her house – another farm does that work – but she is still deeply interested in the outcomes. She has a sense the sheep can graze for longer under panels than on a similar patch of land without panels, but would love to secure a PhD student to prove her hunch.
And the Lees are also trying out a new fertiliser method – a worm juice spray – instead of the granulated, acidic superphosphate that corrodes delicate solar panels. She’s expecting the results in 4 years. No one ever said farming, or big builds, or winning community trust, were quick.
Rachel Williamson is a business and science journalist based in Melbourne.