Solar power is one of the key technologies scientists say we’ll need to combat climate change.
That technology has made its way to the North Country in recent years, where companies have built dozens of new solar arrays. That’s sometimes bitterly divided communities, with critics saying those solar farms have gobbled up once-productive farmland.
But there’s a small but growing segment of farmers who see an opportunity in the vegetation that grows around and under those solar arrays. They practice what’s called “solar grazing,” using ruminants like sheep to mow down grasses and forage around and under solar panels.
A farming couple in Clinton County has built a successful business around it: Josh and Rebekah Pierce of J&R Pierce Family Farm, in West Chazy.
Rebekah Pierce has even written a book on solar grazing and the wider world of agro-voltaics that was released in 2025. It’s called Agri-Energy: Growing Power, Growing Food.
Rebekah Pierce grew up in Northern New York, in Essex County. But neither she nor her husband Josh come from an agricultural background.
So when they bought twenty-two acres of property in West Chazy back in 2015, she said they were just looking for a place to build a house and give their dog space to roam. But then they got chickens, what Pierce calls the “gateway drug.”
“Because once you get chickens, then it leads to more chickens, and then it leads to pigs, and then it leads to, for us, sheep and then cattle,” laughed Pierce.
Fast forward a couple of years, and the couple realized they wanted to turn their hobby farm into a livelihood. But to do that, they needed to figure out how to access more land.
That opportunity came in 2021, when the Pierces were approached by some nearby farmers, who sold them hay for their sheep. They had decided to lease their land for a solar farm.
“They’re in their 70s, and they knew that they needed a way to be able to retire, and putting some of their land into solar would allow them to do that,” said Pierce. “But at the same time, they didn’t want to see this wonderful farmland they have just sitting fallow. They said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you guys could graze your sheep here?’ And that’s really when the wheels started turning.”
Pierce said they had an “a-ha moment.” This was a way to access more farmland and grow their business at a time when land prices were steeply rising, and solar companies would potentially pay them for the service.
More land was also critical to practice the type of regenerative farming the Pierces were committed to.
“We’re not just stocking animals in a barn year-round. Our model is very much land dependent,” said Pierce. “We practice rotational grazing, which means you are moving animals very frequently to new pasture. So the land access through solar grazing for us was huge.”
Pierce said it took a lot of work to get their first solar grazing contract, which actually did end up being on their hay farmers’ land. To get the contract, they had to approach the company managing the new solar farm and pitch themselves as a service.
“When we are hired, we are essentially the alternative to mowing that site or spraying herbicides,” explained Pierce. “Not only is it cost-effective, our prices are generally comparable, sometimes even less than what would be charged by a traditional landscaping company, but it’s also safer, and it’s also going to be better for the environment overall.”
Pierce also pitches sheep as having a great work ethic and being more thorough than a mechanical mower.
“They will eat everything in the rows between the panels, but then they’ll also duck underneath the panels, and they’ll either eat that forage, or they will lay on it and trample it,” said Pierce. “They work all day long, and they love it.”
Pierce said another benefit for solar companies is that “solar grazers” are on a site a lot more often than a landscaping company would be if they mowed once or twice in a season.
“So if we notice something, like a wire has come loose or there’s a bee’s nest forming under one of the solar panels, we’re able to communicate that to the asset owner and let them know. We’re kind of like their eyes and ears on the ground.”
In 2025, the Pierces grazed their flock of roughly 200 hair sheep on seven different solar farm sites across St. Lawrence, Essex, Franklin, and Clinton counties.
That looks like a lot of driving, said Pierce.
They truck their sheep from solar farm to solar farm from early April through the end of November.
Each site is different. She described one with really well-established vegetation that “comes in very aggressively, especially first thing in the spring. And so we have to put all of our animals on that site in May to make sure we’re staying ahead of that vegetation, or we’ll have a jungle.”
By law, all solar sites in New York have to have a perimeter fence, so the Pierces rotationally graze the sheep by setting up movable electric fences within that larger fence.
Pierce said it’s an incredibly management-intensive process and requires changing plans all the time, depending on the weather, the sites, and the sheep themselves.
They also have to truck water for the sheep to each site, which is no small task, considering their furthest solar farm contract is over two hours away in St. Lawrence County.
But that hasn’t been as onerous as Pierce originally feared it might be, “because the sheep consume so much less water when they’re on a solar site. A lot of that is because being shaded, the vegetation holds a lot more moisture.”
She said that was especially evident this past summer, when the whole region experienced prolonged drought.
“The alleyways, the grass was completely burned. It was singed on the tops from the heat and the drought. But then underneath the panels, it was still lush and beautiful, and the sheep were having the time of their lives, just eating all day. And so they consume far less water, but then they reach much heavier weights on solar.”
The solar grazing business model has been working for the Pierces.
Pierce said their solar contracts account for more than 80% of the farm’s revenue now, which has allowed her husband, Josh, to farm full-time, with no side jobs.
While they started solar grazing for the land access and financial benefits, she’s come to really value the intersection of renewable energy and agriculture, Pierce said.
That intersection is the focus of a book Pierce wrote, released in November 2025, called Agri-Energy: Growing Power, Growing Food.
Pierce said her book is less of a how-to-solar-graze manual and more of a big look at the intersection of renewable energy and agriculture.
In it, she explores the different ways that people around the United States, and the world, are practicing agriculture under solar and wind farms, whether that’s by grazing cows or installing panels over a cranberry bog.
“It might mean a tenant farmer like us grazing sheep on a solar site, or it might mean a tenant vegetable farmer growing vegetable crops. It might mean the farmer who is actually leasing the land to the solar company to be developed is the same person who is also continuing to farm it. So kind of doubling up on those two opportunities. I kind of tried to piece together all of these different ways that renewable energy and agriculture come together,” she said.
Pierce said there’s an assumption that agriculture and solar projects are fundamentally at odds with each other.
“There tends to be a lot of opposition when these projects come in. Sometimes that opposition is well-founded. I think people have concerns about their communities being changed fundamentally in some way,” said Pierce. But she asserts there are lots of instances where agriculture and renewable energy farms are working together.
She highlighted a section of the book about Hawaii, a place that has rich agricultural land, yet currently imports most of its food, because land prices are so high. She said solar farms have actually brought land back into agriculture.
“Agrivoltaics has been really instrumental there, because you’re not only opening up that land for farming again, but [also] the shading [of the panels] is really beneficial. They’re growing things like broccoli on the Hawaiian Islands, which is virtually unheard of,” said Pierce. “So there’s a lot of opportunity for communities to really branch out and just see what’s possible and help build up more of that local food and energy independence.”
She said a large part of why she wrote her book was to show that there are opportunities to pair agriculture and renewable projects.
“I think there’s a huge opportunity here to expand our farming communities here in the North Country, which, as we know, have not had it easy for the last few decades. And so this is a great avenue for them to do that,” she said.
A recent census by the American Grazing Association found that the number of solar grazers in the US has more than doubled since 2020.
The Pierces are part of that growth, and they expect to graze about 300 sheep on ten sites in 2026.
