Canadian registered nurse Janna Greir always loved the idea of living in the country and operating a small farm, but her hopes to become a first-generation farmer seemed dim until she discovered a new collaboration between raising animals and solar farms.
Today, Janna and husband Ryan oversee a flock of 1,000 sheep who graze on the vegetation on a huge solar farm, enabling both industries to prosper. This mutually beneficial arrangement, known as agrivoltaics, is in its infancy in Canada, but holds great potential for expansion.
‘Solar Grazing’
“My husband and I are both from Vancouver Island,” says Janna. “We didn't grow up on farms … but we knew that we had an interest in agriculture.”
Previously, they both worked in a city while dabbling in farming. “We started with a small acreage and a few animals and quickly grew a passion for it and a passion in particular for sheep.”
After Ryan found work in Alberta, Canada, they bought Whispering Cedars Ranch, just outside of the town of Strathmore. Then Janna discovered “solar grazing” from some friends who were doing it in Ontario. By coincidence, electric power producer Capital Power was building a solar farm just a short distance from their Strathmore ranch.
Janna and Ryan did their homework on solar grazing, and although agrivoltaics was fairly new at the time in Alberta, Janna approached Capital Power in 2021 with a plan, and “they were just as excited about it as we were.”
“It's created this unique partnership where it's allowed us to grow,” says Janna. “At one time, we only had one sheep and then 10 sheep, then 60 and 100 sheep. And now we have 600 breeding animals,” says Janna, whose flock now numbers 1,000 sheep.
This partnership works because of two intersecting interests: Capital Power needs to control vegetation on their solar farm, and the Greirs need range and forage to graze their sheep.
Since taking an interest in solar grazing, Janna has developed significant expertise in vegetation management, improving soil quality, and planting the right species to improve the land and growth of her sheep. She now owns Solar Sheep Inc. and is doing consulting for the solar industry, procuring custom seed mixes, all while expanding her own ranch operations to other solar farms.
The Strathmore Solar project has a capacity of 41 megawatts on a total of 320 acres, with 240 acres inside the fence and another 80 acres outside the fence.
In the first year, Janna ran 400 sheep in the solar farm; just a few years later, she supports 1,000 sheep on the solar farm, and there’s room for more.
Janna has a contract to manage the vegetation, inside and outside the fence, of the solar farm. In the first year, Janna ran 400 sheep in the solar farm; just a few years later, she supports 1,000 sheep on the solar farm, and there’s room for more.
“The sky's the limit with this site in particular because of the vegetation, and the way that it's managed allows it to rebound so quickly.”
Asked about their own adoption of solar energy,” Janna replies, “It's funny you should ask that.”
“We have a 28.8-kilowatt solar install [on our ranch] very similar to this. We put it in last year, and essentially, that brings our farm to net zero,” she says.
It also looks like the sheep at the ranch like the solar arrays. Sheep are lambing beneath the solar modules, which provide protection from sun, heat, wind, rain, and snow.
Pigs and Solar
The success with sheep has inspired Janna to branch out into other species. As she walks behind a row of solar panels, small pigs can be seen grazing beneath them.
“These are a specific type of grazing pigs. They're called Kunekune, and they come from New Zealand.” These pigs have upward-turned snouts, she says, and “they are not like traditional pigs where they root up the ground and they dig for all kinds of things.” Instead, the pigs eat like lawnmowers and also eat things left behind by the sheep, including parasites and worms, which interrupts the life cycle of the parasites.
“The idea is not only to adapt and to allow for multi-species grazing, but the cool thing is when you're running more than one species of livestock, they eat different plants,” says Janna.
Expanding Agrivoltaics
Janna jumped at the chance to join the board of the new Agrivoltaics Canada organization set up to create awareness, provide education, influence policy, and “take agrivoltaics to a whole new level,” she says.
“Canada is just in its infancy with regard to agrivoltaics. We've only just got our foot in the door,” she says. “There're tons of room for food production under solar. That could mean anything from grazing to crop production—they're even looking into berry production under solar, and specific types of gardens.”
In the United States, the Inspire Project, supported by the US Department of Energy, has mapped 589 agrivoltaic projects. Inspire tracks projects with crop production, habitat improvements, grazing, and greenhouse operations.
The state of Minnesota is a hot spot where sheep grazing is the most common application, although garden operations are increasingly emerging on solar farms.
Inspire has also created the Agrivoltaics Calculator to help evaluate low-impact solar development strategies.
Back in Janna’s home province of Alberta, Claude Mindorf, founder of Agrivoltaics Canada and a former farmer, now works with solar companies. He’s jazzed about the potential of agrivoltaics, is keen to educate farmers on the potential, and is working on various models of farming integration.
He’s working with Shawn Morton, a fourth-generation farmer from Joffre, Alberta, who runs a cow-calf operation and partners with various farming operations as well.
Keeping the Farm in the Family
When Morton was first approached with the idea of solar on his land, he did what farmers usually do: “You always say no,” he says.
But the solar guys were patient, and eventually, he met Mindorf and now has a 48-megawatt solar farm on his land. And part of his deal with the solar developer is to continue farming and grazing on the lands.
“If we can continue to use it in agriculture, I think the benefits are tremendous,” Morton says, standing between two rows of solar modules on his farm. Initially, he intends to hay the site and eventually run a herd of sheep on it.
“As you can see up and down these rows, we're in the middle of May and already the grass has grown probably four inches,” says Morton, adding there was no impact on the quality of the land.
More significantly, these new revenues from the solar lease have transformed his thinking about farm succession and his young daughter.
“I hope that my daughter will farm, or if she doesn't choose a career in agriculture, she'll have the benefit of being able to stay in agriculture with the revenue from the solar park.”
“There's a financial benefit [in the long run]. I think it'll keep a lot of farmers on the land,” he says, adding “I'm able to farm full time with the financial benefit of the [solar] park.”
“I hope that my daughter will farm, or if she doesn't choose a career in agriculture, she'll have the benefit of being able to stay in agriculture with the revenue from the solar park.”
This is music to the ears of Mindorf, who explains there are essentially three kinds of agrivoltaics.
Three Kinds of Agrivoltaics
One kind is “field agrivoltaics, where you have cereal grains. There are designs for vertical panels where you can grow tall crops like corn, grain, and canola in between,” he says.
“Then there is what we call the market garden approach,” where the solar canopies almost touch at the top or they are V-shaped and almost touch on the sides. “They provide shade and shelter for tender fruits like strawberries, bench strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, or haskaps (honeyberries).”
Mindorf says one can also grow leafy vegetables. “Any of the nightshades, potatoes, beets, tomatoes, or peppers grow incredibly well under solar,” he notes, adding that there is now ongoing research in Oregon, Arizona, and other places.
The third kind of agrivoltaics “is what you see here [at Joffre], where you have single ground mount panels or single axis tracking where grazing is the primary activity underneath. You rotate crops in every few years to reduce the site becoming root-bound.”
“[I]t would take less than 1% of the agricultural lands, under utility-scale developments such as [in] Joffre” to “provide Canada’s electricity,”
Mindorf notes that critics worry that solar farms will take up valuable land. However, Dr. Joshua Pierce of Western University in Ontario has found it would take “less than 1% of the agricultural lands, under utility-scale developments such as [in] Joffre” to “provide Canada’s electricity,” says Mindorf.
Solar rarely, if ever, goes on prime farmland because farmers already know the best use for that land.
Agrivoltaics’ Potential to Improve Productivity
In many cases, the quality of the farmland and productivity is increased in agrivoltaics. As ranchers such as Janna Greir bring their expertise to vegetation management, soil quality improves, and so can biodiversity. And with growing expertise, innovation is coming fast.
For instance, Janna has some ideas for solar farms to use solar trackers with slightly different spacing and the placement of some of these mechanisms and cables out of the way or underground, so that solar farms could drastically improve the potential of the land.
“For instance, we could come early in the season, and we could hay it. And we'd have extra forage for our animals throughout the winter,” says Janna. In the northern climate of Alberta, her sheep can stay on the solar farm from May until the end of November, but in the winter, they must be fed back at their ranch.
“We've got forage for animals for six, seven months of the year on the solar farm,” she says. “But feeding them for those additional six months is extremely expensive.”
“Being able to produce forage and/or crops underneath solar that you could continue to use it for your operations at home throughout the winter. ... That would be a game changer, for sure,” she adds.
*David Dodge is an environmental journalist, photojournalist, and the host and producer of GreenEnergyFutures.ca, a series of micro-documentaries on clean energy, transportation, and buildings. He’s worked for newspapers and published magazines and produced more than 350 award-winning EcoFile radio programs on sustainability for CKUA Radio.
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