Sheep grazing under solar panels help U.S. farmers to survive crop-price slump
CHICAGO –
For the first time in four generations, the Raines family didn't plant a single cotton seed last year. Chad Raines parked his tractor and rented out most of his Texas farmland to a neighbor.
Instead of plowing fields, Raines spent the year ferrying his flock of sheep to solar farms, to munch on the grass that grows around the gleaming panels. The deals he struck for this natural lawn-mowing service with five solar companies were more lucrative than growing cotton, he said.
"Cotton prices have been terrible for so long, I had to do something different," said Raines, 52.
As U.S. farmers grapple with soaring debt and slumping incomes, some crop producers are trading their tractors for flocks of sheep, and starting up solar grazing businesses to help make ends meet. Sheep-herding for solar is one of the ways farmers are scrambling to diversify their income, as a multi-year slump in the U.S. agricultural economy has hit crop producers particularly hard, economists said.
If Raines had raised cotton last year, his farm would have seen a $200,000 loss, he said. Making money farming sheep only for meat would be tough too. Instead, Raines cleared a profit of about $300,000, thanks to the solar sheep grazing payments and starting to sell lamb meat to a restaurant supplier, he said.
"Every expense I have, from the labor to the $2,000-a-month I spend a month on dog food for the guard dogs, is covered by solar," said Raines, whose son came back to the farm to help. But such opportunities may slow. U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order that, among other things, ends clean energy-related appropriated funds, which could impact a swath of clean energy incentives through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the future.
IRA funding has been frozen, as part of the Trump administration's sweeping push to review all government grants and loans. A recent court order led to some IRA funds being unfrozen, but many groups have reported still being unable to access them. "Farmers and ranchers should not have to rely on far-left climate programs for grazing land or 'economic lifelines,'" a USDA spokesperson said in an email statement, adding the agency is focused on rural prosperity and is "putting a stop to spending that has nothing to do with agriculture."
Crop farm blues
U.S. cotton future prices have slumped nearly 40% over the past two years, as hefty global stocks have overwhelmed global demand. U.S. exports have dropped sharply, losing out to cheaper Brazilian supplies and falling Chinese demand, U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows.
"The last three years have been brutal for Texas cotton growers," said Louis Barbera, a managing partner at cotton broker VLM Commodities.
While U.S. farm income overall is expected to improve this year, the upturn is being driven by high livestock prices and a massive boom in anticipated government aid from the American Relief Act of 2025, a USDA forecast in early February showed.
Farmer Chad Raines checks on his sheep and guard dogs in Haskell, Texas, in December. Raines, a former agriculture banker and cotton farmer, switched to sheep grazing after learning more about solar energy.
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REUTERS
But when adjusted for inflation, corn and soybean farm businesses will see incomes at the lowest levels since 2010 — even if producers receive that aid, said Jennifer Ifft, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University.
Farmers who rely heavily on debt to operate were slower to pay back their loans in 2024, and a growing number are selling assets to stay afloat, according to data from Federal Reserve Banks of Kansas City and Minneapolis.
"Income diversification in ag downturns can mean saving the farm," Tait Berg, senior examiner and agricultural risk specialist at the Minneapolis Fed, said in an interview.
For farmers faced with pricey seed bills and expensive equipment parts for repairing their machinery, these solar land-management contracts can be an economic lifeline, according to interviews with more than a dozen farmers.
It can mean they run their farm at a profit, rather than try to get a supplementary job in town to pay down their bills or find some other gig, they said.
Sheep grazed on more than 129,000 acres of U.S. solar panel sites last October, compared to 15,000 acres in 2021, according to the non-profit American Solar Grazing Association. The number of solar-site sheep jumped from 80,000 to more than 113,000 between January and October last year, the group said. While that represents a tiny fraction of the nation's total 5.05 million sheep and lamb herd, the new business opportunity has helped herd numbers tick higher for the first time since 2016, said Peter Orwick, executive director of the trade group American Sheep Industry Association.
New opportunities
The U.S. solar industry grew under President Donald Trump's first term, and development surged after a 2022 law passed under former President Joe Biden provided subsidies for new clean-energy projects, said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association.
The sector expects to continue to grow under Trump's second term, she said.
Sheep move across the solar farm in Haskell, Texas. Chad Raines, the farmer and shepherd, rotates the sheep across the six different solar panel zones on the land.
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REUTERS
White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly in a statement: "Ultimately, President Trump will cut programs that do not serve the interests of the American people and keep programs that put America First." In Indiana and Illinois, the solar boom has attracted twenty- and thirty-somethings eager to jump into farming, without taking on millions of dollars in debt to rent land and machinery, industry analysts said.
In Virginia, Marcus and Jess Gray put their planting dreams on hold after securing lucrative contracts with Dominion Energy and Urban Grid. Now, they graze their 900-head flocks across 4,000 acres where solar is being built.
"It's steady income, where we get to set and negotiate the price, rather than taking our grain from our bin to the local elevator and they tell us what it's worth," said Jess Gray, 39.
Fleece on the rise
Using sheep for clearing local flora can mean substantial savings once a site is up and running.
The initial capital expenditures can be higher, depending on the project site, said Reagan Farr, chief executive officer of Tennessee-based solar firm Silicon Ranch. Some locations require wells to be drilled for water supplies or more complex gating systems for corrals, he said.
Still, the company saves about 20% in operating expenses once a site is running by using managed grazing, Farr said.
"The economics work, when you're not trucking a flock of sheep across the country or hauling in trucks of water," Farr said. "It's much easier and less costly to pay our shepherds a living wage, than it is to hire someone to sit on a lawnmower for 10 hours a day, day in and day out."
Demand for solar grazing animals prompted Silicon Ranch, in which Shell owns a stake, to launch its own sheep breeding program in Georgia to bolster local farmer supplies. For Raines and his family, the decision was simple economics.
"If I had kept row crop farming, our family farm would be out of business," Raines said.
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For example, he recently doubled his steel and aluminum tariffs to 50%, likely increasing costs for U.S. manufacturers and construction companies that rely on the metals as raw materials. Likewise, he threatened a 50% tariff on the European Union under the belief that it would jumpstart talks with the bloc, only to back down as his self-imposed 90-day negotiating period is set to expire around July 9. But his approach to China has been especially bewildering. After imposing a 20% tariff on Chinese imports, the American president quickly upped the ante, raising the levy to 54% to offset what he said were China's unfair trade practices. Then, enraged when China retaliated with tariffs of its own, he increased those levies to a staggering 145%. Beijing counterpunched with 125% tariffs on U.S. imports. Those triple-digit tariffs threatened to effectively end trade between the United States and China, causing a hair-raising selloff in financial markets. 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The report by the Netherlands-based Global Rights Compliance says companies including Avon, Walmart, Nescafe, Coca-Cola and Sherwin-Williams may be linked to titanium sourced from Xinjiang, where rights groups allege the Chinese government runs coercive labor practices targeting predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities. Many analysts complained that all the drama hadn't accomplished much. Dan Kritenbrink, who was assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Biden administration, said the London meeting produced "a fragile truce." "Both sides have now demonstrated that they know where the other's weak points are," said Kritenbrink, now a partner at the Asia Group. "They demonstrated that they both have leverage and tools they can use to inflict damage on the other.'' The Chinese know that when it comes to rare earths they "can turn that spigot on and off at will... They really have incredible leverage over the United States in the global economy with rare earths, and they're not afraid to use it.'' Still, he welcomed the London ceasefire because "the alternative is no truce at all, and a supply chain war that threatens not just U.S. and Chinese economies but the global economy as well." Danny Russel, vice president for international security and diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said Trump's latest pressure campaign on China appeared to "be ending with a whimper, not a bang." "The U.S. found it needed to back off the restrictions it had thought would generate leverage,'' he said, "and in exchange, they get merely a promise by the Chinese to dole out critical minerals a bit more quickly." Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, dismissed the London truce as "a handshake deal ... It can change at any time.''