Marcus Gray called to his border collie, Trip, as the black-and-white dog raced around a herd of sheep grazing among rows of shiny solar panels.“Come by! Away! Down!” Gray shouted.Trip responded, alternately crouching and darting forward, urging the ewes off a grassy field and onto a dirt-and-gravel path running through the 620-acre Crystal Hill Solar facility in Halifax County.The solar panels creaked as they tilted slightly on their hinges, tracking the sun behind clouds on an overcast September morning.Gray and Trip continued moving the sheep toward another part of the property, where the more than 200 ewes would resume eating grass and weeds around the solar panels. The animals keep the plants in check, take shade breaks under the panels and are kept safe from predators by on-site “guardian dogs.”Gray and his wife, Jess, run a Chatham-based company called Gray’s Lambscaping. They oversee about 800 sheep that perform vegetation management on more than 1,000 acres of solar farms in Halifax County, Chesapeake and Suffolk and are planning to add sheep to another 1,000-acre solar farm currently under construction in Halifax County once it’s built.Now the Grays are looking at expanding the business model to fit a larger animal: cows. Marcus Gray, president of Gray’s Lambscaping, holds open a gate to allow a herd of sheep to pass through last month at Crystal Hill Solar in Halifax County. Photo by Matt Busse.‘Cattle agrivoltaics’ and its benefits, costsCo-locating animals or crops with electricity-generating solar panels is called “agrivoltaics.” It’s also called “solar grazing” when it involves pasture animals such as sheep, which are the most common animals found in agrivoltaics projects today.Expanding the practice of solar grazing to include cattle could have multiple benefits, the Grays say.Cattle agrivoltaics could open up an affordable source of land for young farmers or provide a new revenue stream for older farmers looking for less intensive work.It could improve the health of the solar farm’s land and perhaps the quality of the meat.It could also expand the agricultural possibilities for what can be done on land occupied by solar projects, which often meet opposition from people who fear they erode the availability of farmland. “If you can get cows out there, imagine the door that’s going to be open for all the other species out on these projects,” Jess Gray said.But having cattle on solar farms also could present challenges.Would the cows damage the panels or wires? Would solar developers need to use taller poles to raise the panels out of the cows’ reach, which would require more steel and cost more money?Would solar technicians working on the property be safe around the cows, which can easily weigh several times as much as sheep?How would the solar company’s corporate interest mesh with a farmer’s agricultural interest?“It’s not as easy as it is grazing your own pasture,” Gray said.While acknowledging the potential concerns, the Grays wonder whether cattle would actually damage panels or interfere with workers.They rent a Chatham farm where they raise 16 Dexter cattle, which are smaller than the more common Angus or Hereford breeds and, Marcus Gray says, more docile. With an opportunity to forage, the cattle care about little else.“If our cows have food, they’re eating,” Jess Gray said.The Grays rent a Chatham farm where they raise 16 Dexter cattle. Photo by Matt Busse.U.S. seeks new ideas for cattle, solarCattle agrivoltaics seems to be a relatively rare and untested practice. Some academic research into it has already begun.In 2019, researchers at the University of Minnesota installed a 30-kilowatt solar system in a pasture, with the panels eight to 10 feet off the ground to allow the cows to walk underneath. They studied how the cows’ access to shade affected their health and milk.In June, West Virginia University announced that it received a $1.6 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to study incorporating solar panels on small cattle farms.Last month, Rutgers University cut the ribbon on a $7.4 million research project in New Jersey to study how solar panels affect beef cattle grazing and hay production. The setup uses vertical panels instead of the more traditional kind that moves to track the sun.Today, the DOE keeps tabs on more than 200 solar farm grazing projects around the country comprising more than 7 gigawatts, which is just a few percent of solar generation capacity nationwide. Most of the projects involve sheep; none in Virginia use cattle. Dominion Energy is Virginia’s largest electric utility. It has more than 4.5 gigawatts of solar projects that are operational, approved by the state or awaiting approval. Some of its solar facilities have sheep or bees on site, but a utility spokesperson said he had not heard of cattle agrivoltaics.[Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]A representative of Urban Grid, which developed the 65-megawatt Crystal Hill Solar facility where the Grays have sheep, declined to comment, saying the company has had discussions about expanding its vegetation management beyond sheep, but “we haven’t got that expertise yet.”A media contact for the Solar Energy Industries Association, a national trade association for solar developers, did not return a message seeking comment.To spur more interest in cattle agrivoltaics, the DOE is offering more than $8 million to teams that develop the best projects where cattle and solar coexist. It’s called the “LASSO” — for “Large Animal and Solar Systems Operations” — Prize.Applications for the contest’s first phase are due by March 6, and the Grays hope to put together a team to enter. The contest comes with some requirements, including that projects must focus on ground-mounted solar arrays, not rooftop solar, and must have at least 250 kilowatts of generation capacity.Becca Jones-Albertus, director of the DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office, said on a webinar last month that she hopes the LASSO Prize will inspire new cattle agrivoltaics projects so people can better understand the costs and benefits.“In the U.S. today, we have about 5 million sheep and we have about 88 million cattle,” she said. “And so we’ve become very curious at DOE — you know, we know that agrivoltaics works really well with sheep — what about with cattle?”Jess Gray, CEO of Gray’s Lambscaping (left), and Blaise Whittle, a shepherd with Gray’s Lambscaping, attach a sign to a gate at Crystal Hill Solar in Halifax County, advising that sheep are on the other side. Photo by Matt Busse.Finding ways for agriculture and solar to coexistJones-Albertus said the DOE has seen a lot of interest in agrivoltaics but also a lot of concern from the public about losing agricultural land to energy generation.“When we talk about land use, it’s no longer an either/or. It’s not, ‘Are we going to use this land for agriculture or are we going to use it for solar?’ but actually when and where there are opportunities where we can use that land for both and not make it a choice,” Jones-Albertus said.Jess Gray voiced a similar sentiment: “Nothing has to be mutually exclusive.”That concern about using land for solar energy versus preserving agricultural character has come up time and again in discussions about developing new solar farms.It’s been particularly common in Southside Virginia, where solar projects have proliferated as developers have been drawn to the region’s relatively flat, inexpensive land.Some localities have implemented measures to limit or halt the construction of new large solar facilities. They have cited concerns about the loss of agricultural land and solar projects’ impacts on property values and the environment.On the other hand, some state lawmakers want to allow state regulators to approve such projects, bypassing local rules. They say Virginia must meet its legislatively mandated clean energy goals in the next few decades.The amount of solar that would be necessary to decarbonize the entire U.S. electric grid would only require about 1% of the land currently used for grazing, Jones-Albertus said.“Cattle agrivoltaics doesn’t need to work everywhere … if it turns out to be something that is effective in some parts of the country, it may be a great opportunity for some farmers and ranchers in some places,” she said.The post Coming to a solar farm near you: cows? appeared first on Cardinal News.