Photos by Jordan Secher
Tom Brown’s sheep have an enviable summer job on a solar farm near LaSalle: Eat like they’re at a Vegas buffet.
The wooly vegans were released on May 8, and their only job until mid-October is to graze on the wild grass and other vegetation that grows around the solar panels owned by Pivot Energy.
Solar energy is, of course, an environmental business, so growing a bunch of water-hogging Kentucky bluegrass and hiring landscaping companies to cut it down every week didn’t make much sense to Pivot.
This is Brown’s first year on this particular solar farm, which is expected to go online in July or so, after the last details are finished. He will graze 1,100 sheep on a dozen of the 30 sites owned by Pivot around Colorado. The company has 30 more under development in the state.
More than 75 sheep were released on the LaSalle solar farm, about the number that will work the other sites as well. Brown’s Greeley-based business, Brown Land and Livestock, owns more than 2,000 sheep he raises for meat and wool.
The LaSalle solar farm is a large piece of property—about 29 acres—but Brown doesn’t need to tell the sheep where to go. They go where the grass grows.
“We will use an electric fence at times if we want some intensive grazing,” he says, “but generally the sheep do it on their own.”
Pivot calls the grazing program “a business imperative” and follows it on 98 percent of their 1,000-plus sites across the country. The grazing keeps the grass from growing over the panels or shading them from the sun, but Pivot prefers to think of the program as another way to use the land besides harnessing energy. They call the method “agrivoltaics.”
“This way, we can manage the vegetation and be true stewards of the land,” says Angie Burke, director of operations and maintenance at Pivot.
The solar farm and its nearly 12,000 panels will eventually put out enough energy to power 600 homes, which can be purchased through Xcel Energy. It will also be home to the 75 sheep, and Brown will likely use cattle to graze the land at times as well. He may even bring a few chickens, but it’s mostly up to the sheep. They will be kept behind locked gates, so they will be protected from predators, but Brown may also use a couple dogs and llamas as guard animals.
Brown will visit the site frequently to protect the sheep from any poisonous plants that may grow on the land. He’s lost a few sheep to bad plants in the past, but that’s rare and one of the few downsides to grazing. In fact, grazing is a rare privilege, and he says he’d probably have to pay for it. But in this case, Pivot pays him to have his animals graze the land, and the grass helps get some animals to market faster than if they were eating grain.
Brown also likes to visit to refill the sheep’s water tanks and give Kona, his sheep dog in training, a few rounds with the herd.
When the sheep first spilled out of Brown’s trailer, most of them dove into the greens right away. But a few of the younger ones jumped around and seemed to enjoy a chance to soak in the sun and frolic in their food.
