Putting sheep to work under solar panels stopped being a novelty a while ago. Mowing a field packed with electrical gear is slow and expensive, spraying herbicide next to all that wiring makes operators twitchy, and a flock of sheep will crop the grass cheaply while the panels earn their keep up top.<\/p>\n
Solar grazing is common enough now that the world’s largest solar farm grew so much grass on a Tibetan plateau that its operator had to bring in 20,000 sheep<\/a> just to keep the modules clear.<\/p>\n But sheep are picky. They hoover up the soft grass and walk straight past the tougher weeds, and a fenced field grazed by a single animal only gets you so far.<\/p>\n At a solar farm about 25 miles east of Calgary, the fix was to stop leaning on one species and start hiring a whole crew.<\/p>\n The site is Strathmore Solar, run by Capital Power<\/a>, and it has turned into something close to a working farm bolted onto a power plant. Sheep handle the bulk of the grazing. A team of Kunekune pigs cleans up what the sheep miss. Around a hundred chickens follow behind in a coop that drives itself, and a climate-controlled hut on the edge of the property holds up to 20 beehives.<\/p>\n All of it sits under, or between, 109,174 solar panels.<\/p>\n Strathmore is Capital Power’s first Canadian solar project. It came online in March 2022, covers 320 acres of leased land just outside the town of Strathmore, Alberta, and is rated at 41 megawatts, enough to power thousands of homes on a sunny day. The grazing is run by Solar Sheep<\/a>, a consulting outfit founded by first-generation farmers Janna and Ryan Greir, whose own ranch sits a short drive down the road.<\/p>\n Sheep are the reason any of this works, and they are still the primary crew. Capital Power leans on them as its main vegetation-control method, swapping a job that used to mean diesel mowers and herbicide for a flock that eats the problem and fertilizes the ground on the way through.<\/p>\n Keeping the grass down isn’t about tidiness. Tall, dry vegetation under a solar array is a fire risk, and at Strathmore there’s a second reason to care. The panels are bifacial, meaning they pull power from light bouncing up off the ground as well as light coming straight down, so letting weeds grow tall underneath them quietly eats into output.<\/p>\n Mowing solves the height problem and creates new ones. A mower deck near rows of panels kicks up stones, and stones crack glass. Sheep don’t. “We use the sheep as our primary vegetation control method,” Brad Cochrane, Capital Power’s renewables operations and maintenance manager, told Business Renewables Canada, noting that grazing comes in cheaper than mowing and holds up better over the life of the site.<\/p>\n Greir started here with a few hundred ewes and has scaled her broader operation toward a thousand head across the solar sites she now manages. The case for it is blunt: a life-cycle analysis she likes to cite found that running sheep and solar on the same ground is about twice as land-efficient as doing the two jobs on separate land. That, in one sentence, is the whole pitch for agrivoltaics, the practice of farming and generating power off the same patch of dirt.<\/p>\n Sheep have a weakness, though. They graze selectively, cropping the grass they like and leaving the coarser weeds standing, which is the exact gap the pigs were brought in to close.<\/p>\n The breed is the part most coverage gets wrong. These are Kunekune pigs, a small, mellow breed originally from New Zealand, and they were chosen precisely because they don’t behave like the pigs you’re picturing. Commercial hogs root, tearing up the ground to dig for food, which is the last thing you want around tracking hardware and buried cables. Kunekune have upturned snouts and graze along the surface, closer to a lawnmower than a rototiller.<\/p>\n That distinction is the reason they’re allowed loose on the site at all. Greir has been clear that these animals are grazers, not diggers, and that’s what makes turning them out between the rows safe.<\/p>\n What they add is range. Pigs eat a different spread of plants than sheep do, so between the two species far more of the weed mix actually gets eaten. They also clean up after the flock in a useful way, eating parasites and worms left behind in sheep droppings, which interrupts the parasite life cycle and keeps the sheep healthier.<\/p>\n The pig crew started small. CBC News<\/a> reported Greir testing eight female Kunekune at the site in 2024, and the herd has grown season to season since. Capital Power now lists a team of Kunekune pigs among the site’s permanent fixtures rather than an experiment.<\/p>\n Then it gets stranger. Following the sheep and pigs around the property is a flock of about a hundred chickens, and they live in a coop that moves on its own.<\/p>\n The mobile coop is built by UKKO Robotics, a Manitoba startup, and it crawls slowly between the rows so the birds get fresh ground without anyone hauling a barn around. The chickens lay eggs and scratch through the manure the larger animals leave behind, spreading it out and adding their own. Free fertilizer, applied right where it’s needed.<\/p>\n Off to one side sits the newest addition, which Capital Power calls a Bee Cube. It’s a predator-proof, climate-controlled building about the size of a garden shed, and it houses up to 20 hives for pollination and honey. The same panels everyone assumed would sterilize the land now sit over bees that have multiplied dramatically under solar arrays elsewhere<\/a>, sheep lambing in the shade, and chickens laying eggs.<\/p>\n For a power company, none of this is about novelty. The reason Capital Power is bothering is that solar’s biggest headache in farm country isn’t carbon. It’s land.<\/p>\n Out in rural Alberta, the loudest objection to a big solar farm is that it swallows good cropland and locks it away for the life of the project. Solar is expanding fast there, landowners are wary, and that argument carries real weight.<\/p>\n Strathmore is Capital Power’s attempt to answer it with data instead of a brochure. The company has kicked off a 10-year soil-testing program to measure how the grazing, the rotation, and the manure actually change the ground underneath over time. Wade Heuscher, the site’s solar manager, has framed the whole setup as a model other operators should be copying rather than a one-off curiosity.<\/p>\n The wider picture backs the bet. Agrivoltaics is still young in Canada, and one Western University analysis ranked Alberta second in the country for its potential, behind only Saskatchewan. The appeal is partly that it keeps land in agriculture instead of fencing it off and writing it down. “Our vision is essentially farming under every panel,” Janna Greir, co-founder of Solar Sheep, told CBC.<\/p>\n It fits a pattern that keeps showing up at these sites, where the same solar farms accused of sterilizing the land quietly do the opposite once somebody manages the ground on purpose. An endangered California fox moved into two solar plants and survived as well inside the fence as the foxes living outside it<\/a>. Strathmore is the agricultural version of the same surprise.<\/p>\n From the road, Strathmore Solar looks less like a power station every year and more like a slightly eccentric hobby farm (sheep in the grass, pigs working the weeds, chickens in a self-driving coop, bees in a shed) that happens to push 41 megawatts onto the grid while nobody’s looking.<\/p>\n Whether the rest of the industry follows comes down to the soil numbers, and those won’t be in for years. But the basic trick is already doing what it was hired to do. The weeds are down, the fire risk is down, the diesel mower is parked, and the land underneath is still, in every sense that matters to a farmer, a farm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Putting sheep to work under solar panels stopped being a novelty a while ago. Mowing a field packed with electrical … <\/p>\nThe sheep do the heavy lifting<\/h2>\n
Where the pigs come in<\/h2>\n
Chickens, bees, and a coop that drives itself<\/h2>\n
The point isn’t the petting zoo, it’s the dirt<\/h2>\n