Transcript
COLD OPEN
Lauren Glickman: Mowers were unreliable. They were expensive. They were diesel generated. So it wasn't an ideal fit for us. Then we were approached by a grazier who drove by one of our projects — it was, unfortunately, a little overgrown — and he reached out and asked if we had thought about grazing. So we looked into it, and it has been a perfect fit.
The sheep do a better job than a commercial mower can do. They're not throwing up rocks. They get to all the hard-to-reach places. They're just better.
INTRO
Jamie Nolan: Hi, I'm Jamie Nolan, a clean energy communications executive.
Lauren Glickman: And I am Lauren Glickman, also a clean energy communications professional and agricultural and solar enthusiast. Welcome to Energy Empire.
Jamie Nolan: I was really excited when I had the opportunity to pick some fun co-hosts because Jigar is away on vacation, and you came to mind because you are an expert in our topic of the day, which is agrivoltaics. So talk to us a little bit about today's guest and what you thought made her an ideal expert to talk to us about agrivoltaics.
Lauren Glickman: Rebekah Pierce, who we're going to be speaking with today, is a first-generation farmer who is grazing a flock of sheep across a portfolio of solar projects across upstate New York. She originally was a teacher and was interested in getting into farming, but the costs were very prohibitive — to expand, to find land, to find access, all of these things. And solar afforded an opportunity to grow her farm to the point that she is continuing to scale up this industry. She is an incredible storyteller for this concept of pairing agriculture and solar.
Jamie Nolan: Awesome. Let's get right to it. Here's Rebekah Pierce.
A HUNDRED THOUSAND SHEEP
Jamie Nolan: Rebekah Pierce, welcome to Energy Empire.
Rebekah Pierce: Thank you for having me.
Jamie Nolan: I have to say, I wanted to do this episode on agrivoltaics, and my friend Lauren Glickman and I have been friends for a very long time. So I immediately reached out to her and said, hey, there's this amazing farmer — the algorithm randomly fed me her content on Facebook — who does grazing beneath solar panels, and I was trying to figure out how to reach out to her. And Lauren said, oh, Rebekah Pierce, I know her. Let me shoot her an email right now. The universe delivered exactly the guest that I wanted. You were my first choice.
Rebekah Pierce: Oh, awesome. Yeah, Lauren and I go way back, so that worked out.
Jamie Nolan: You post absolutely beautiful content on your Facebook page from your very idyllic farm, with your sheep grazing under solar panels. I'm from a rural area in Maryland, so it reminds me of home, and I love the visual storytelling component of it. That's why we wanted to have you on the show.
And there are now more than 113,000 sheep grazing over 500 different American solar power sites across 30 states in this country — more than one in every 50 sheep in this country now works in the energy industry. And 10 years ago, this was just not a thing. So how did it all come together so fast?
Rebekah Pierce: Well, I think there's a combination of factors here. As solar has seen its renaissance in the US, the sheep industry has really grown up alongside it. Sheep fell out of favor in American agriculture for a number of reasons — you can trace it all the way back to World War Two, when our dietary preferences shifted and we started eating more beef instead of lamb. But at one point, there were more sheep in New York State than there were people. So to say that it's a totally new industry is not accurate. We've always been a state and a nation of sheep farmers, but it fell out of favor.
Solar provided this really nice in for farmers who are interested in raising sheep, because they work so well under and around solar panels. Sheep are also really nice if you're somebody like my husband and me — first-generation farmers, without a lot of startup capital or land capital. Sheep are a really nice entry point, because starting a 20-head flock of sheep is substantially less investment, both monetarily and time-wise, than doing the same thing with beef cows. So there's been a really nice interplay between the sheep industry and the solar industry.
Jamie Nolan: So tell us a little bit about your setup at your farm. How many megawatts are you working with? How many sheep do you have? Take us there and paint a picture for us.
Rebekah Pierce: That's actually a common question we get, and it's a point of confusion for a lot of folks, because they see our pictures and think that all of the solar we are grazing is directly on our farm. We actually don't host solar on our home farm yet — it's in the works. We only own about 25 acres, so we have a very small plot of land.
That's actually what drew us to the idea of agrivoltaics in the first place: the additional land access we would get by grazing solar sites. What we do is act essentially as a third-party service provider. Rather than hiring a mower or a landscaping company to come in and manage the vegetation so it doesn't shade the panels, a solar company like Encore would hire us to come in and graze instead. So we graze nine separate sites across upstate New York. It's about 200 acres, and we have roughly 300 head of sheep, along with five cattle that we are piloting on a couple of sites this year.
At the home farm this time of year, I think it tends to surprise people, because you drive by and there's not a ton going on.
Jamie Nolan: That's awesome. I didn't even know that was a possibility. So are you finding that that's a typical business model? Are you seeing more of that kind of third-party vendor model pop up in the sector?
Rebekah Pierce: Yeah — and I actually spent a lot of time digesting that and breaking it down in my book, because I did think it was important to clarify that there are differences there. The funding mechanisms are different, the business model is different. Those are different ways for a farmer to interact with solar.
We are seeing a huge additional industry springing up around this idea of third-party vegetation management. And it's really nice, because it allows us to have a relationship where we are working with the solar developer and the operations provider, but also with the landowner who originally decided to put their land into solar. More often than not, that's another farmer. Often we find ourselves working with older farmers who have decided to get out of farming — the land is their retirement plan — and they're really excited to see that the land is still going to be used for farming, and not solely for solar. It provides that nice cherry on top: they can look out and see there's an income-generating source for them, but the land is still being used.
Jamie Nolan: I love that. And Lauren, you're also a major expert in this field, so I want to talk to you about your knowledge base in agrivoltaics. What kind of operations are we talking about here? Are these mostly family-run farms? Bigger corporations? Is this occurring in just blue states, or red states as well? One anecdote that I saw was that one Texas company signed on to run 13,000 sheep across more than 12,000 acres of solar, which is an area three-quarters the size of Manhattan. I just cannot believe the scope of that.
Lauren Glickman: If someone had told me a decade ago that my passion for sheep would be as big as it is currently, I wouldn't have believed them. But here we are. It's an incredible aspect of the solar industry, and one of the amazing elements of it is that, just like Rebekah mentioned, there's not a one-size-fits-all. There's not a cap to where this can go.
For Encore, we graze one-to-five-megawatt projects up in the Northeast, where we're resource constrained — there's a finite amount of land, there are a lot of people, a lot of forest, a lot of mountains. Being able to remote graze is actually a popular practice in Vermont specifically, and pairing that with solar gives graziers — who otherwise are putting out hot wires in their friends' backyards to get access to forage — an actual secure site with good forage for their livestock. So it works at that scale in the Northeast, where community-scale solar projects are more common.
But then, I was on a briefing just a few weeks ago from Doral, where in Indiana they have the first phase of what's going to be one of the largest solar projects in North America — 400 megawatts is just phase one of the Mammoth solar project. They have thousands of acres that they're planning to graze within the fence line. And as you mentioned, in Texas they're doing this too.
And that's the other thing: it's not a blue state or a red state thing. It's a farmer-first approach to how we meet our energy needs while also providing opportunity for the farming industry. I would say the interesting thing on the blue-red side is that we're seeing more policy spring up in blue states than red states to support and incentivize these activities — but I think that's just because the industry is emerging. We're seeing activity and support on both sides of the aisle. It just makes so much sense. It's such a natural fit for both parties.
SHEEP VS. MOWERS
Jamie Nolan: I love it. And talk to me a little bit about your company's actual role here. What part do you play in making these projects happen?
Lauren Glickman: Interestingly enough, when Encore started as a company, we were a typical development platform — we sold our projects once they reached energization, so we were not actively part of the management process. But about four years ago, we transitioned to be an independent power producer, which meant we were responsible for the asset management over the life of the project.
In Vermont, a lot of our projects are in very rural locations. Our project in Constable, New York, that Rebekah grazes for us is also a pretty rural spot. It was a challenge to actually get the sites mowed or managed the way they needed to be. Mowers were unreliable. They were expensive. They were diesel generated. So it wasn't an ideal fit for us. Then we were approached by a grazier who drove by one of our projects — it was, unfortunately, a little overgrown — and he reached out and asked if we had thought about grazing. So we looked into it. It was an opportunity that presented itself to us, and it has been a perfect fit.
The sheep do a better job than a commercial mower can do. They're not throwing up rocks. They get to all the hard-to-reach places. They're just better. And I would say it's also cost comparable. I can't say across the board it's always going to be cheaper, because it really depends on the geography and how far the grazier needs to travel — there are a lot of factors that go into the price per acre. But it's comparable, if not cheaper, than commercial mowing, and they do a better job. So even when it comes out a little more expensive, you're getting a better product.
For us, we look at the value we can deliver beyond the megawatts we're deploying, and it fits really well into our ethos of what we should be doing as a solar developer. So we have committed to graze our entire portfolio as long as it makes sense. We do some brownfield remediation, and if we don't want to be growing food there, we also don't want to be feeding the grass and forage there to our sheep. Carports over asphalt are also not ideal for sheep. So we can't graze our entire portfolio, but everywhere it's viable, we're deploying grazing as our vegetation management strategy.
Jamie Nolan: I mean, sheep are also much cuter than diesel mowers. There's the cute factor.
Lauren Glickman: Though I did have to remind myself the first time — well, I did not remind myself. Our grazier, Lewis, reminded me when I went out the first time, when I expected these sheep would just flock to me, that these are not petting zoo sheep or 4-H sheep. They're working sheep. It took a little bit for me to become a sheep whisperer, and some snacks that were higher value than the grass, for me to befriend them. But they are much cuter.
Jamie Nolan: Yes. We can appreciate the cuteness from afar, too. We don't need to be besties for me to acknowledge that you're cuter than a lawnmower.
Lauren Glickman: But they have to not be hiding from you in order for you to appreciate it.
THE ACCIDENTAL SHEPHERD
Jamie Nolan: So Rebekah, let's talk about how this all came to be and how you became a part of this industry. You and your husband, Josh, were both teachers when you bought your acreage in New York, and at the time you didn't have plans to farm anything. So how did you even end up with sheep?
Rebekah Pierce: Oh, by accident — and because we're probably not that smart. We were both teachers. We bought our property just because we wanted some space. We wanted space for our dog to run around, we wanted a little vegetable garden, we wanted to raise some chickens. And that spiraled, as it always does with my husband and me. We now have this running joke that we never say never as far as things go in our operation, because we'll say, oh, we're never going to get pigs — and then we got pigs. We're never going to get sheep — and then we got sheep. So we just don't say that anymore.
We spent a few years just producing food for ourselves, doing the little homesteading thing, raising animals for our family and our friends. And then we realized we wanted to expand this into something a lot larger. I was at the point where I wanted to leave teaching and write full time. Josh wanted to leave teaching and farm full time, and I wanted to help him run the farm.
The problem was that land access was a huge challenge for us, as it is for most farmers — but especially farmers coming into the game as first generation. People who don't have that family background in farming don't have 300, 400, a thousand acres passed on to them from their father or grandfather. Not to say there aren't challenges implicit in that as well, but for us, not having that backing was challenging — especially because we had a certain philosophy for how we managed our farm, a more regenerative model that required a lot of land: moving animals often to fresh pasture, letting those pastures rest for 30 to 60 days to regenerate, both for the health of the pasture and the health of the animals.
And Lauren touched on this before — where we are in the Northeast, land tends to be more fragmented. Finding continuous acreage, even if you can afford it, is a challenge in and of itself. So we were spinning our wheels, experimenting with different business models that would let us expand enough that we didn't have to rely on second and, for a while, third jobs off farm.
Then we just so happened to have a conversation with two brothers who sell us hay for the sheep. They were putting a chunk of their acreage into solar. They are two absolutely delightful gentlemen, but they are also very stubborn, and they dig their heels in so they can get their way. They made a very strong case with that developer for us to be able to graze the property. That was back in 2022, when we got our first site. So we expanded the business so that we were both able to leave the teaching jobs and run the farm full time. It's been pretty incredible since then — obviously not without its challenges, but it's been very cool to see our farm grow up alongside this industry.
Lauren Glickman: So you alluded to this earlier, but before you picked up the solar business, the farm was losing money. You and your husband were having to work two, sometimes three jobs to keep afloat, and land in the North Country was just too expensive to scale an actual livestock business on the acreage you had. So what did solar grazing do to your bottom line? And do you have plans to grow — is that still on the radar?
Rebekah Pierce: As far as our bottom line goes, just for some context: for the amount of acreage we're currently grazing, which is right around 200 acres, some similar properties have gone up for sale in our area — and we're talking multi-million-dollar properties that we could never afford. That's even before having to put in fences or any other infrastructure. So that's been really revolutionary.
Having the additional payment as the vegetation management provider is also really helpful, because it provides that nice operational buffer so we don't necessarily have to lean on an operating loan to get through the year. We don't have to worry about our lambs fetching lower prices at the sale barn because the market's down. It's nice to have that as an insurance policy against the unpredictability that is farming.
When we first started doing this, we were putting a lot of time and a lot of money into the farm — which is not something we're against. We're both people who have no problem working 50, 60, 70 hours a week. The problem was, I always compare it to this: we were running what looked like a hobby farm on paper, when you looked at our finances. But if you looked at how much work we were putting in, it absolutely should not have looked that way. That was really when we had this mindset shift. We had just had our son. We wanted to be able to scale this in a more sustainable way, and with solar grazing, we really have done that.
We absolutely are planning on continuing to grow. We haven't found our carrying capacity yet for the sheep. We're also working on expanding the cattle side of the grazing business, because we see a huge demand for local beef. There's a huge demand for local lamb as well — we sell out every year — but somebody I spoke with not long ago said that beef is really America. That is the American identity. So being able to expand that side of our business would be awesome moving forward.
Jamie Nolan: I love it. And I think especially at this moment — every day there are new food recalls, and you're scared to trust the supply chain. I already supported farmers markets, but I'm spending more time and more money at farmers markets every week. One good outcome from these concerns about our food supply is pushing people back toward local farmers, sourcing their food from people whose hand they can shake every week at the farmers market.
SHEEPWASHING AND THE FARMLAND FIGHT
Jamie Nolan: Lauren, one comms question for you, my fellow strategic communicator. Of course, we can't talk about this without talking about some of the opposition. Some skeptics have called this "sheepwashing" — putting forward a few sheep for show, to make a power plant basically look like a farm. You're on these sites every week. So where do you think the line is between real agriculture and good marketing?
Lauren Glickman: I have yet to come across any of this sheepwashing or ag-washing where someone actually has their pet sheep out presenting as a lawnmower. I have not seen that in practice. I've heard there's a concern that it could happen, but I actually haven't seen it.
I actually think it's a failure in storytelling on our part, and a misunderstanding of what the American sheep industry is. Lamb is not the first-choice meat for Americans currently, though it does have a deep history in this country. Mutton — I can't remember the last time I consumed it. Some people look at sheep and think wool, and we have almost minimal domestic wool. So there's an education gap in terms of what the sheep industry provides in this country. I think we need our "beef, it's what's for dinner" moment for lamb — which was obviously funded by the beef industry, but something like that would be beneficial.
But then — I talked about policy a little before — what I do think happens, and what ends up in this ag-washing, sheepwashing category, is that our industry is very transactional. The entity that develops or permits or even builds a project might not be an independent power producer. They're not going to be the ones who own and operate it. And some of these commitments that are made during the permitting process to get a project across the line aren't built into the permit. They're not built into the lease option agreement. So you energize the project, and now it's a big tax equity firm or bank that owns and operates it, and they didn't make a promise to use solar grazing or plant crops or put pollinators in. There is a durability to some of these commitments that doesn't exist. It's bad, and we need to fix it, because we can't be making empty promises to communities and expect to continue to permit and develop projects at the scale and speed we need to deploy them.
I think there are some policy solutions that can force the issue. There are also really amazing groups, like the Renewable Energy Farmers of America, that are informing landowners so they can get some of these commitments into their land lease agreements, which are going to be more durable. But that's where the ag-washing comes in: you bring a farmer into a community meeting, then someone else owns and operates the project later, and that farmer isn't brought in. I think that's more common than the idea that someone's just going to throw a few sheep out and think they're parading as agriculture.
It's an element the industry needs to reconcile with, because these projects are assets — energy assets that are going to continue to transact and change hands. And I can tell you, prior to Encore owning some of our projects, we do have pollinator meadows that were mowed down by future owners. That's a real disservice to the communities in which we operate and to the industry at large.
Jamie Nolan: I'm glad you brought up some of these oppositional arguments, because in town halls across the country, the loudest argument against a new solar project is that it takes farmland out of food production. That's one of the reasons I'm very interested in this topic: where I'm from, on the Delmarva Peninsula in Maryland, this is a huge thing. I see my friends from high school and even family members posting in opposition to solar projects, because they're worried about what it means for the land use and character, and for the farms — they see that as the original use of that land.
And Rebekah, you wrote a piece literally titled "Dispelling the Prime Farmland Myth," which argued that prime farmland doesn't really do a whole lot if there's nobody around who can afford to farm it. So how do you convince fellow farmers who are worried that solar is going to crowd out food?
Rebekah Pierce: I think the most important piece of this conversation is really addressing the nuance — which, Lauren, you did very well when you were talking about the greenwashing component and how that perception comes up. The perception of solar taking up prime farmland and food-producing land is a valid one, in that if a project isn't managed with agrivoltaics, it could take up farmland.
But the piece that tends to get forgotten, agrivoltaics aside, which I addressed in that post, is that farmland isn't really useful if there's nobody who can afford to cultivate it. If you leave farmland untended, it just reverts to its natural state. It grows up into scrub, into raspberry bushes, into thorns and brambles. And not saying that kind of environment doesn't serve a purpose, but it's certainly no longer farmland.
We talk so often about preserving prime farmland without actually listening to the farmer and what the farmer wants. I would never go into a conversation with another farmer and say, you absolutely should put solar on your land because it is the best path forward for your farm — that's a very individual choice. Farmers know what's best for their land, the land they have been farming for their entire lives or for many generations. We need to start trusting the farmer to do what's right by their land, because they know it best. You can't drive by a farm field and know it's prime farmland just by looking at it. You need to do a soil test. You need to talk to the people who have dedicated their lives to cultivating it, and just listen to them a little more about what they need.
Farmers are struggling — that's a tale as old as time. I don't think any farmer in the history of farming ever got into it to get rich. But we do need to make sure they have avenues to help them stay in business. And for many, solar leases provide just that, because they can put the land into solar, continue to farm around it if they choose — but if they don't want to, the land is still theirs at the end of that lease period. If their children or grandchildren decide they want to come back into agriculture, they have the opportunity to do that, which they wouldn't have with really any other land use, whether that's the land being sold for a data center or housing or whatever it might be.
I keep talking to the American Farmland Trust about the little bumper stickers they have. Somebody brought up to me that they say "no farms, no food" — but it should also say "no farmer, no food," because we need that person there stewarding the land and helping get that food from the field to the plate.
Lauren Glickman: It's a great point. And I would just add: as developers, we're not the best messenger on this. When we are going into communities, it is really important to have a local farmer be a partner and share their story. In general, we need to talk about the food more, because it is at the moment hard to find the food that's produced in and around solar projects — there's not a lot of direct-to-consumer sales happening. But when you can feed someone, and it tastes better, and you know where that food came from — as you said, Jamie, the local food movement is only growing in this country. I think that's a huge opportunity. And the other thing is to make sure that when we are bringing farmers in to talk and advocate and champion our projects, we're also compensating them for their time.
Jamie Nolan: Oh, that's a great point. And I think the other element — it's not necessarily true about the projects we're discussing here, but it's not an all-or-nothing thing either. I know there are a lot of scenarios where farmers will pop solar up on their least productive acres, where they're losing money on particular acreage, and instead of continuing to do that, they can put up a solar array that reduces their energy bills and helps improve their bottom line. There are so many applications for solar on a farm. It doesn't have to be the conversion of all of the acreage to a solar farm.
All right. So last August, the US Department of Agriculture cut solar on farmland out of its main rural energy grant program, with the Secretary calling it "green new deal subsidized solar panels." And farmers who had already installed panels were left waiting on frozen grant money — money they had already spent and were expecting to be reimbursed by the federal government. Hypothetically, Rebekah: say even for a smaller solar array — say you just put solar on a barn, a $50,000 expenditure — and you're expecting a reimbursement from a federal agency for that money. What type of burden would that be on your balance sheet?
Rebekah Pierce: It's a huge one. I mentioned earlier that we're in the process of trying to get solar on our own property — really just enough to power our limited farm operations that require electricity, and our residence. To do that, it's over $50,000. The reason we haven't done it yet is that we're trying to save up enough funds so that we don't become reliant on grant programs. Because I think that's awful. It's a crippling amount of debt for a farm to take on when they're already shouldering, in most cases, significantly more debt. Farm energy use can be exorbitant — we're lucky ours isn't, because we're more pasture-based, but if you talk about a traditional dairy, they're going through a lot of energy. So an opportunity for them to offset some of those costs, even with some form of cost sharing, was huge. And the fact that the rug got ripped out from underneath them is terrible.
I don't know anybody personally in that situation, but I've certainly read about it, and I've been approached by people on social media who have found themselves in those situations. Many of them are pursuing legal recourse to try to recoup some of that. But again, that's additional expense and additional stress, all for an effort to reduce their energy costs. As Lauren mentioned, there have been a lot of positions taken by the administration that are really unfortunate. They do a disservice not just to the solar industry, but really to American farmers — to allowing American farmers to do what's best for their operations and for feeding folks. That's something that hopefully will change and take a bit of a turn in the next few years. But who knows?
Jamie Nolan: Sure. I mean, it's certainly not helping to keep food prices down. You could say this program was helping farmers keep their prices down so they don't have to pass those costs along to consumers. And also, I just think the federal government should keep its promises. If you have someone waiting on grant money that's been promised to them, and you're pulling the rug out from under them — particularly in an industry that's already, frankly, such a struggle — it's just sad. And I hate to see the federal government doing that, regardless of who's in the White House. I hope they're successful in getting those funds restored.
Thankfully, we see that the states are moving in the opposite direction. For example, Virginia just became one of the first states to define agrivoltaics in law, requiring that farming actually continues for the life of the solar project and that the land goes back to agriculture when the panels come down — as you suggested, Rebekah. Not possible if that land is sold off for housing developments or, God forbid, a data center. So what should states put in these laws so that they work for farmers, not just for developers?
Lauren Glickman: I would say it's really important to not limit what's possible. A lot of the agrivoltaics or agri-energy laws on the books — not just the definitional ones — tend to be pretty prescriptive. At the federal level, some of the policy discussions have row spacing and height requirements for racks. I would never go to a farmer and say, you must farm soybeans — and that's sort of what some of those prescriptions are tailored toward, certain crops. So we shouldn't limit what's possible.
And we also shouldn't set the bar for farmers higher than what it would be without solar. There are counties in Virginia where the threshold to be considered agricultural is $1,000 in revenue. No one is living off of $1,000 of revenue from their farm in a year. And I can guarantee you there's not a single lease payment that is less than $1,000 annually. So there are some of these equations where they try to say the farmer can't make more money from solar than they're making from farming, and that does a disservice. Why are we taking money away from farmers in this process, especially if it's going to keep their farm viable?
The possibilities are infinite. That Doral project I talked about — they're grazing inside the fence line, they're growing, I think, a thousand acres of crops in the buffer zone outside the fence line that has no solar restrictions at all, just leveraging what would be unused land. They have pollinators in other places. There's forest being conserved as an easement. That's incredible. If you put in restrictions like "the crops need to be inside the fence line," you've just wiped out a thousand acres of farming in Indiana.
To me, we need to incentivize the right activities, and they need to be durable. That durability — which might put extra reporting requirements on the solar asset owner — is just really important, because we can't have promises that only last for one year of an annual grazing contract. That doesn't work. It needs to be durable for the life of the asset.
Rebekah Pierce: It is really encouraging to see that so many states are now attempting to come up with a definition for agrivoltaics, because just a few years ago those conversations weren't happening at all — most people didn't even know what it was. But like Lauren said, not being too prescriptive is really the key here.
There have been a couple of ideas kicked around in New York State, for example, about how to make sure agrivoltaics practices are being followed on sites, and they generally sound good at face value — until you talk to a farmer and realize there are ways this is going to be very problematic. One of the earlier ideas was that it would only be considered agrivoltaics if sheep grazing had been used on that land prior. So the question is, okay, how long ago? Because pretty much everything in New York State was a sheep pasture at one point. Why does it matter? I think the concern was that you'd have people traveling in from many counties away with their sheep and displacing whatever the local agricultural economy was. So that was problematic.
More recently, another conversation that has come up is how to encourage developers to adopt agrivoltaics, and one of the ideas was to tie it to the agricultural assessment — the developer would get the incentive only if they were working with a farmer who was receiving that ag assessment, meaning $10,000 in gross sales for the year. Which sounds great, because it ensures you're working with a legitimate agricultural business. But the problem is, now you've completely excluded a new farmer who's trying to get in and doesn't have that $10,000 in sales yet. So it's really important to make sure farmers are brought to the table for these conversations, and that they're looked at in ways that aren't going to be so restrictive that they hamstring entire segments of the population trying to do this work.
TOMATOES BETWEEN THE ROWS
Jamie Nolan: So far, we've mostly talked about sheep, but people are also growing crops inside solar farms — tomatoes, berries, salad greens. Rebekah, how does that work? What does a farm like that look like, and what's different about it from a farm with no panels?
Rebekah Pierce: So, we don't grow — we are not a vegetable farm. My green thumb is very lacking. But I can speak to it a little from the conversations I've had with people who are doing this. One of the biggest benefits of farming on a solar site versus not, again, is the land access. Land is just as expensive if you're a vegetable farmer as it is if you're a grazier, and generally a smaller amount of acreage goes a longer way for a vegetable farm — a five-acre vegetable farm is very different from a five-acre sheep farm. So that's one benefit.
I do think there are considerations that need to come in, in terms of things like irrigation. The panels do provide a nice drip edge, but that may or may not always be enough, depending on what you're growing and where you're planting it.
One of the really interesting misconceptions I talk about a lot is this idea that vegetable crops — really anything besides your brassicas, your cool-season crops like broccoli and spinach and kale — don't perform well on solar because the plants get too much shade. What I've learned through my research, and through talking with people who are a lot smarter and better at growing vegetables than I am, is that that's actually not true. Most plants actually benefit from a small amount of shade. Even tomatoes — people think of those as a very full-sun crop, and they do like a lot of sun, but if you put them in too much direct sun, they get scalded, the fruits are damaged, and the plants are not healthy. The idea that plants need full sun 100% of the time just isn't true. When you look at how most sites are designed now, especially sites with tracker panels that move throughout the day, as long as you're thoughtful about how and where you place those individual plantings, pretty much anything could be possible.
The other piece is mechanization. A lot of vegetable farms still rely pretty heavily on human labor — hand harvesting and hand planting — and a lot do not, especially when you get talking about traditional row crops, your corn and your hay and your soybeans. There's a misconception that those cannot be grown on solar either, and I think the nuance is that they can't be grown on all solar. Not all sites are going to be conducive to growing those sorts of crops. But with a little forethought about your spacing, and making sure you have enough room for tractors to turn around, I really don't think it's as prohibitive as people think it is. It just requires a rethinking. And farmers are great people to have those conversations with, because they've always had to adapt and find solutions to tricky planting environments.
TELLING THE STORY
Lauren Glickman: I think you're doing the industry — well, you're doing the world a good service with your storytelling. And you've put us on our heels a little bit and let us know that we have a massive PR problem. Meanwhile, sheep lambing under solar panels, sheep grazing, lambs grazing under solar panels — there is not a more charismatic megafauna for our industry than that image. So is agri-energy a thing that can really get solar skeptics on board? Can this help turn us around? Is this our "got milk" moment?
Rebekah Pierce: I like to think so, and I think in many ways it has already done that. Just the conversations we've had with people in our community who were previously very anti-solar: we tell them what we're doing, and there's a shift. They may still not be totally supportive of what they would likely refer to as a climate agenda, but they are supportive of the work we're doing, and of the fact that we've been able to pivot to take advantage of it.
I do often say that I think the renewables industry has had a bit of a PR problem, because it has always been very heavily focused on the climate benefits. And obviously those matter — I'm not negating that at all. We know we're reducing emissions and our carbon footprint, and it's incredibly important. But the problem — and you know this working in communications, and I know it from my work in marketing — is that you really have to speak to who your audience is. Your audience doesn't always necessarily care about those things or view them as a priority. But they care about their wallet. They care about where their money is going. And they certainly care about where their food is coming from. So any opportunity to reassure them that these projects are not only helping their local economies but also keeping their local farmers in business — successfully in business — is a really important conversation that can help bridge that gap between the two camps.
Jamie Nolan: You're absolutely speaking my language, Rebekah. I don't know if you listen to Energy Empire, but we have discussed this many times: climate change is not a winning topic of entry with a lot of rural folks when you're talking about solar. But when you're talking about the property rights of farmers to decide what they're going to do with their land, and maintaining this bucolic — well, it's certainly not a data center. Like you said, you can hide a solar farm behind a tree line, and it's not going to make any noise, it's not going to disrupt you, and it's not going to put out any pollution. That's a lot better than a lot of options for that land.
So the midterms, of course, are just two months away, and electric bills are rising in rural districts — I know my dad will not stop talking about it. If a candidate running in farm country asked you how you would recommend they talk about energy this fall, what would you tell them? And I put the question to both of you.
Rebekah Pierce: I think it's got to come from an affordability standpoint. And I also think there's a larger conversation that needs to be had — I'm probably not the best person to have it, and I'm not really sure who is — but there needs to be more education about what actually goes into electricity pricing, how those rates are determined, and how they trickle down to the consumer, because there is just this huge fundamental misunderstanding. Solar panels are really easy to blame because they're really visible. You drive by them and you think, well, that's why my electric bill is so high — when in reality, it's a lot of factors. It's the fact that the transmission in New York State in some places is 100 years old. It's the fact that natural gas prices are through the roof. So there needs to be a broader education campaign that speaks to people where they're at and explains why this is the case — and here's how solar can help, and here's how solar paired with agriculture can help even more.
Lauren Glickman: I would echo that, and I think we have found ourselves in a unique moment to have that conversation. Harkening back to when Jamie and I worked together in 2008: I stood on a street corner in Northern Virginia and asked people about the state of energy in this country, and not a single person talked about electricity rates. They all talked about the price at the pump. This is the first time I think a kitchen-table conversation is actually happening around people's electricity bills every month. So there's a huge opportunity to educate people on what goes into that, because it's not clear. I don't think even a decade ago people were ready and willing — or interested, maybe I should say — in understanding the math that goes in there and how we can actually shape it.
Affordability is the buzzword, and energy is certainly on the list of things that are increasingly not affordable. So we have a unique moment, and anyone running for office should be seizing it. In rural communities, we care about being able to pay our electricity bills and keep the lights on — because that's the other thing, we're increasingly seeing power outages, not from not being able to pay your bills, but just from energy insecurity in our grid. And then people also love food. So the more we can talk about the food that's being produced, and how it's local to the district, I think that's going to be a winning message as well.
THE BOOK
Jamie Nolan: All right, Rebekah — before we get to the final question, tell us about your book. What is the name of your book, and where can people find it?
Rebekah Pierce: Thank you for the plug. It's Agri-Energy: Growing Power, Growing Food — oh, there you go. I didn't even have my coffee, and she's more prepared than I am. It was published by Island Press, which is now an imprint of Princeton University Press, so you can get it directly from Princeton University Press. It's also on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all the other places you can buy books. I had the opportunity to interview a lot of people who are way smarter than I am and have way cooler experiences than I've had — I just had the fortune of being able to tell their stories. So definitely pick it up. They can tell the story just as well as I can.
THE EIGHTY-YEAR VIEW
Jamie Nolan: Amazing. Okay, now final, final question. You've talked about an 80-year vision: communities that produce their own energy and their own food side by side. Your son is five, and he already helps on the farm. If he's still running sheep on solar sites decades from now, what do you hope that operation looks like?
Rebekah Pierce: Well, I can tell you what I hope it looks like and what he hopes it looks like. He is of the mindset right now that by the time he's my age, he wants to be running a bison herd on solar sites — which I love. I'm never going to say never. He's obsessed with bison, so that's his focus. I guess it's good he's not into tigers or something like that. So if he has his way, that's what he's going to be doing.
But really, what we're trying to build for him and for the community — I always talk about how, in many cases, certainly not all, we view agriculture as a very extractive business. You focus heavily on your yields and your inputs, and there's not really any interplay or returning things back. There's no circularity to it. That's what I think is really powerful about agrivoltaics: you are producing multiple crops — even if that's just whatever meat you're raising, or whatever crop you're growing, plus the solar energy — on the same piece of land. You're generating power that, in all the sites we graze, is going right back into the community hosting that site. The tax revenue is going right back into the community. It's creating jobs for local folks. It's creating jobs for us as vegetation managers. But then we're also turning around and spending way too much money on our winter hay from those local farmers I told you about. We're spending money at our feed store, at our vet's office, even just at our local gas station.
All of those pieces come together to build local economies that are self-sufficient, both in terms of where their money is coming from and where it's going, and also in terms of the energy and the food. We sell our lamb locally, to restaurants and little shops and direct to consumer. I think that's really powerful — to have systems that aren't "x equals y, this is your yield and this is your input, two separate buckets," but that are circular, helping to feed back into each other again and again. So 80 years from now, I hope that's what things look like, whether that's sheep or bison or whatever else. That's my fantasy.
Jamie Nolan: Well, that's a great vision, and I look forward to your son making his dreams come true. I'm definitely interested in buying some solar-powered bison one day in the frozen food section of my grocery store.
Rebekah Pierce: I'll let him know. He'll be on it.
Jamie Nolan: Let him know that we are pledging our support. Rebekah Pierce, thanks so much for joining us on Energy Empire. I really appreciate your time.
Rebekah Pierce: Thank you guys for having me.
Lauren Glickman: Thank you so much.
OUTRO
Jamie Nolan: Well, that was fun. And I learned a lot, because going into that conversation, I expected that Rebekah was a large landowner with sheep grazing on her property with the solar array. That is not what I learned. That's a brand new business model to me, and I'm excited about this innovation in the sector.
Lauren Glickman: I continue to believe this is an incredible opportunity for the industry at large. Lamb and sheep in the US is not something new, but this renaissance of pairing sheep with the solar industry is definitely new. I've spent over two decades in this space, and this is something I only learned about in the last three to five years. It's really expanding what's possible. It's creating a new opportunity. And the more I talk about it, the more conversations I have like the one we had today, the more I find people have never had this conversation before — even really long-time industry veterans. So it's a really important conversation. It's moving the industry forward, and it's supporting agricultural and rural communities across the country. The enthusiasm I had when you reached out did not disappoint.
Jamie Nolan: I love it. And Rebekah is such an important advocate. I mentioned this in the episode, but I first found her because the Facebook algorithm pushed her content to me. And first of all — rural communities are still very active on Facebook, y'all. You go to the Facebook pages for the businesses in my hometown; they don't have websites. Everybody's there, and that's where they're having conversations. And Rebekah is in the comment section on her farm's Facebook page defending solar and agrivoltaics day in, day out. She is sharing content, she is making it real for people, she is showing what it looks like in action, and she is a vocal advocate for this sector and for this business practice. I'm so glad to have met her and learned from her, and I'm grateful we have voices like hers to show how these emerging business models are driving value, both for rural communities and for solar companies.
Thank you so much for joining us this week for Energy Empire. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts — Spotify, Apple Podcasts — and we're also on YouTube. Please rate, review, subscribe, leave a comment, and check out our merch store. We'll look forward to you joining us next time.