Luis Reyes
Oct 3, at 6:30am ET
People love to argue; that’s not really up for debate. (Huh? Huh?) And one of the latest dumb arguments I’ve seen is drivers in New South Wales, Australia claiming that solar farms take up so much farmland that there isn’t even room for sheep.
The man who grazes that land had a pretty great comeback. He rounded up 4,200 sheep, out of a flock of 6,000, between the rows and hit record.
The farmer is Tony Inder, a sixth-generation wool grower from Wellington, in the state’s central west. His clips went up on Facebook, then to RE-Alliance, an Australian renewables advocacy group, which ran them in its March 2026 newsletter. By May, the viral videos had been picked up by CleanTechnica as well.
“It’s because you just can’t see under the panels,” Inder said of the doubters. The sheep are in there full-time. You only notice them when most of the flock lands in the same camera frame.
You wouldn’t think something like this would need explanation but…
The farm in the video is Wellington North, and its numbers are frankly a bit silly: more than 755,000 solar panels on single-axis trackers, spread across 847 hectares (2,093 acres), all of it rated at 425 megawatts (the combined rating of the panels themselves). GRS, the Spanish contractor that built the plant for Lightsource bp, handed it over for provisional acceptance in December 2024.
That’s a lot of panels.
Now picture the view from a car. A merino stands somewhere around knee height, and the panels tilt through the day to track the sun, so the rows stack up into what reads like one unbroken sheet of glass and steel from the road.
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Everything below that line is shade. The animals spend their days in one part of the property that a passing driver physically can’t see into (the shade). When driving by at 60 mph, a few thousand sheep simply aren’t part of the picture.
Inder didn’t wander in with a camera one day. He’s the grass control. He doesn’t own the ground under the panels, and per an AFP interview from February, the landowners let him graze it for free. In exchange, the operator mows far less, and that matters twice over in rural Australia: cutting 2,000-plus acres of grass costs real money, and keeping it short is part of complying with bushfire prevention rules.
RenewEconomy reported back in 2025 that once his sheep took over the job, mowing dropped to a single pass a year. The University of Sydney put the solar-grazing flock at 1,700 merinos in early 2024. By the time AFP visited this February, Inder was running 6,000 sheep across two blocks of land covering close to 10,000 acres.
Why does a wool guy bother? Shade, basically, and what that steady shade does to grass. “It’s constant shade and it’s constant green,” Inder told AFP, and consistent feed grows consistent wool. That’s his read as the man selling the fleeces, not a lab result.
Sheep as solar groundskeepers keep turning up on this site, by the way. Volkswagen keeps a flock and a donkey under panels, and a Calgary solar farm runs sheep, pigs and chickens.
Alright, we can’t act like the solar panels are completely magical.
There’s a study, but you gotta really pay attention to the wording. Lightsource bp, which owned the farms at the time, commissioned EMM Consulting, working with Elders Rural Services, to compare two groups of merinos. One group grazed regular pasture, and the other grazed the original Wellington solar farm next door to the big one in the video.
Published in October 2024, the second round of results found that running sheep among panels didn’t hurt wool production. A few parameters even pointed toward improvement. However, the company admitted it needed to do longer-term testing to fully understand the benefits. And that’s coming from the company’s own commissioned study.
So no, I can’t tell you solar panels grow better wool. Neither can the people who ran the numbers, yet. Nothing in the testing says the panels make the wool worse, though, and Inder clearly likes what he’s shearing.
Wellington North didn’t show up alone. It sits next to the original Wellington solar farm, a 200-megawatt project on the same road, and together they operate as a 625-megawatt hub.
Lightsource bp’s own math puts the new farm’s output at the equivalent of 152,500 homes, or 244,000 cars taken off the road. I’ll let you decide how much an “equivalent cars” number is really worth, but on this site it felt rude not to mention it.
Ownership changed hands this year. Aula Energy bought both Wellington farms in February 2026 as part of a package of five operating solar farms totaling 1 gigawatt, with options for up to 800 megawatts of batteries on top, and said the daily routine at the farms wouldn’t change.
For 6,000 sheep, that’s the best outcome an ownership change can deliver.
Agree or laugh out loud?
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