Latest / Clean Power Hour / Solar Grazing Saves Failing Farms: The Agri-Energy Revolution

Transcript

Solar Grazing Saves Failing Farms: The Agri-Energy Revolution · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Rebekah Pierce: When we are thinking about how to farm on solar, I think it's really important that we don't become overly prescriptive and say, you know, all solar projects developed in New York State have to have sheep on them, or all projects have to have, you know, broccoli or whatever it is, because when you do that, you are ignoring the nuances of the land. You're ignoring the fact that certain plots of land might work better for one crop or for one farmer, as you mentioned, the issue with tenant farmers is a reality we need to to work with as well. And so it's really important that if there's any regulations that start coming down, which this has occurred in several states already, where you know, there are stipulations about what can be grown, what should be done, how the land should be used. We need to be really, really careful about not over regulating things to the point where it creates additional barriers for farmers and for developers who are wanting to implement these models on their sites. Are
• 1:47
  intro: you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host, Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization.
• 1:57
  intro: We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together. We can speed the energy transition
• 2:10
  Tim Montague: today on the Clean Power Hour, what we have come to know as dual use solar, but we have a new word for it, Agra energy. My guest today is Rebekah Pierce. She is the author of a forthcoming book called Agra energy, growing power, growing food. She is a journalist. She is a sheep farmer in New York State.
• 2:31
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the
• 2:33
  Rebekah Pierce: show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. It was great
• 2:37
  Tim Montague: meeting you at solar farm Summit. Shout out to Dan French for creating such a wonderful coming together of so many interested parties in dual use solar or agrivoltaics, is the term I use most commonly, and I'm good with agri energy, though. So Rebekah, give us a little bit of your backstory.
• 2:58
  Tim Montague: How did you get into being a farmer, and how did you get interested in renewable
• 3:02
  Rebekah Pierce: energy? Yeah, that's a great question, and I will try not to be too long winded in my answer. And I'll start by saying that the reason I use the term agri energy when I'm talking about these solutions. And in my book, is because I, when I started writing this, I was really looking for a broader term that kind of encompassed everything.
• 3:19
  Rebekah Pierce: So agrivoltaics, I think, is a great way to describe farming under solar. So is dual use solar. But in my book, I also get a little bit into the weeds about farming under wind and things like that also. And so I was looking for more of a blanket term that kind of described what I was trying to do there. But to go back to your question. So my husband and I purchased our property in 2015 so about 10 years ago to build our house on. When we bought our property, kind of our primary goal in purchasing, I think we bought, you know, just a little under 25 acres. And the reason why we wanted that amount of land had nothing to do with farming. We just wanted a lot of space for our dog and, you know, privacy and all those good things once we moved in, we, you know, we started the way most, I think, people who don't have any background in farming do, which is by raising backyard chickens.
• 4:06
  Rebekah Pierce: And from there, we expanded into pigs and then into sheep, into grass fed cattle, and leading up to about 2020, which is when we kind of had the first inkling that we wanted to do this on a larger scale, we were pretty much just raising food for ourselves and for a small group of friends and family. Once the pandemic hit, we saw this massive interest in our farm, and specifically the way we were raising animals. So we kind of pride ourselves on having a regenerative approach to agriculture, so finding ways that we can farm the land that not only produce some sort of end product, so your meat or your vegetables or whatever, but also add value back into the land. So keeping the soil healthy, improving soil quality.
• 4:52
  Rebekah Pierce: When we first bought our property, the soil quality was horrendous, and we've improved it over the period, you know, the last 10 years or so. As we grew, though, and as our market grew, we realized that the amount of acreage we had just wasn't really enough to do what we wanted to do, to raise animals, you know, rotationally grazing them to raise them in a way that we felt respected the animal and respected the land.
• 5:16
  Rebekah Pierce: And so we started looking for more land. But as probably every single listener of this podcast will understand, it's prohibitively expensive, and as first generation farmers, we just didn't have access to the wealth of resources, you know, in terms of land, in terms of, you know, the knowledge base that you might have if you had grown up in farming. And so we kind of tabled the idea for a while, and were mostly content just to run the farm, you know, as a hobby farm at that point, until we were approached by a couple farming friends. Of ours is actually the the farmers who sell us our hay for the sheep in the winter, and they said, Hey, we're putting in a solar farm on our property. We'd really like for the land to remain in agriculture somehow. We don't want to farm it, you know, we want to get out of farming.
• 6:06
  Rebekah Pierce: We're ready to retire, but we would love to see you guys make use of it somehow. Right around that time, I had also written an article for acres USA magazine about solar grazing, which in 2019 2020, was really just on the cusp, I think, of what it's become now. And so I already had this interest that had been piqued in the concept of grazing sheep on solar and so when they presented us with that opportunity, we were like, yeah, absolutely. Let's, let's start the conversations. So in 2022 it took a few years of back and forth, but in 2022 we got our first solar contract, and we're now grazing half a dozen or so projects across three counties in upstate New York.
• 6:48
  Tim Montague: If you're listening to this, please check
• 6:48
  Rebekah Pierce: yeah, absolutely. And I'll be out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Tell a friend about the show. That's the best thing you can do. And tell a friend about this book, agri energy, because this is very important content for farming communities, for solar developers, wind developers, battery energy storage developers. It is a great overview of some of the pros, cons and challenges that we all face in our day to day work to clean the grid and create a more sustainable future. So I love your backstory, Rebekah, you seem like you're coming from a very good place, and most people, honestly, whether they're business people, farmers or technologists, right? Most people are coming from a good place. We just want a better future for ourselves. But there are many misunderstandings, okay, and naivetes about renewable energy and about how we are currently using our amazing farmland. And I want to get into that land use is front and center here. And I'm going to read a short passage from your book, because this is amazing data for everybody in our industry, okay? And here goes. This is in chapter two. On the other hand, the US could supply all its electricity with solar alone on just point 4% 10 million acres of the country's land area, that's without even taking advantage of rooftop solar. And by the way, we've converted 6% of the land area to built environment, roads, cities, suburbs, etc. If the country were to transition 40 million acres of ethanol fuel to solar, ideally dual use solar.
• 8:39
  Rebekah Pierce: She's referring to corn to ethanol there. Okay, it could meet 100% of its electricity needs, while at the same time also powering a nationwide fleet of electric vehicles. I could go on. But so you make this point that a we're using a huge amount of our land for corn to ethanol, which is hugely inefficient. You point out it's 200 times less efficient than land to electricity. And you point out that that we only need less than 1% of our land to completely green the grid, which is a double edge in some regards, which I want to get into. But when you learned this, what was that like for you? Because this is a major aha for a lot of people, I think, completely honest here and say I have not always been probably the best champion for renewable energy. When we first started grazing on solar, my perception of it was really, you know, this is a financial means to an end.
• 9:39
  Rebekah Pierce: This is going to give us new space to graze. It's going to give us an additional income in, you know, from the payment that we were receiving from the solar company for vegetation management. But I viewed it kind of as a necessary evil. I didn't love the idea of solar taking up farmland, but as I have gotten you know more into the weeds on this and learned more about how this works, and more about how our current agricultural landscapes are being utilized in the US, I've realized that my earlier opinion was kind of ill founded. So so one of the conversations that comes up a lot in the, you know, the discussion about turning what is, you know, so called, prime farmland into solar, is, once you turn prime farmland into solar, it's gone, and we don't have that space to to grow food anymore, right? And for me, there's, there's a couple problems with that statement.
• 10:28
  Rebekah Pierce: The first one, and this might be the most obvious, from from an economic standpoint, is prime farmland is great, but it doesn't really do a whole lot if there's nobody around who can afford to farm it. And given that the average age of the American farmer, I believe, is 58 and it's only rising, you know, our farmers are aging out.
• 10:45
  Rebekah Pierce: We don't have new young people getting into farming. It is a profession. My opinion, that has a notoriously high glass ceiling. There's a lot of barriers to getting started.
• 10:54
  Rebekah Pierce: Cost being probably chief among them. You know, we're reaching this breaking point where prime farmland is not going to remain prime farmland, and solar really doesn't have anything to do with it. You know, if you can't afford to farm the land that you own, you're going to turn it into something else, whether that's solar, whether that's another dollar general, whether that's real estate, something else is going to happen to that.
• 11:15
  Rebekah Pierce: It's not just going to sit there, and if it does sit there, it's probably going to turn back into scrub brush, you know, and still not be useful for agriculture in that regard. So that's kind of the first moot point there. And the second
• 12:19
  Tim Montague: point, can I stop you there? Because I think we should also put a pin in urban sprawl, because that is a much bigger enemy, writ large, to farmland in America than renewable energy. Is you give a statistic, and this is somewhat related, that 100,000 farms were lost between 2011 and 2018 and so there's a frailty to farming, because it's a hard way to make a living. But there is also this greater phenomenon in America of urbanization. Chicago is a great case in point, right? When you look at the physical footprint of Chicago in the last 50 years, it has tripled in size, and that machine, okay, that suburban sprawl munching machine is massive?
• 13:08
  Rebekah Pierce: Yeah, absolutely. And there's we're definitely reaching this kind of nexus in our country right now where we need to figure out how to make more, how to make better use of the land we have, because the land that's available is shrinking, and it's not necessarily due to just one cause, as you mentioned. You know, our cities are growing larger. People want bigger houses. We need room for all these data centers for AI, you know, we and none of those are inherently bad things. I think those are just things that we need to think about when we're discussing how to use land. So then. So my other point, just, just going back to the, you know, the prime farmland argument is that if you are, you know, just the average Joe, you know, if I'm driving by a farm field, unless I am that farmer who manages that field, or I am some sort of soil scientist who has done work on that field, there's not really a great way of knowing, just by looking at it, if a field is prime farmland, or if it's just a vacant field. Now, obviously there's a lot of nuance in that statement, right? And I understand that, but my point here is that our farmland in the United States is not what it was 100 or 200 years ago, on average. So going back to the corn conversation, so on average, we lose about a pound of topsoil for every bushel of corn that's produced, that's that's not good. We're losing topsoil at a rapid rate. You know, there's a lot of factors that go into this, fertilizer use, erosion. You know, this idea that we've been growing the same exact things in the same exact spots for decades. You know, our emphasis on monocultures is really coming back to bite us. And so we need to think not only about what we are doing on these lands to make them economically viable for the farmer and for our domestic economy, for the people who are buying these products, but also what are we doing so that we can continue to farm these spaces, you know, 100 years from now?
• 15:01
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's like there's some innate assumption, I think, by rural communities, that farming is good for the land. Okay? It's good for the community under some constraints, like here in the Midwest, right? We have massive subsidies for corn and bean farming, and as a result, we have lots of corn and bean farming, more corn and beans than you can shake a stick at and converting corn to ethanol is highly energetic, pollution causing and inefficient. We could do much better by converting that land to dual use solar, where it's good for the land, you actually would have organic farm ground after 40 years of agri solar. If you treat the land well, and you can graze it. You can crop it and do better by the land. Instead of dumping all these chemicals and pesticides on the land and killing the soil and sucking the carbon out of the soil and causing massive erosion, right, we have a huge dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico, right, because of all the chemicals that we're dumping on the on the land here in the Midwest. So there's so many things that come back to, well, agri solar is good for farmers. They can triple their income, right, by renting their land to a solar developer, which gives them life on the land, which is not easy, right? A lot of young people don't want to stay on the land when they look at the economics. So this is a lifeline for rural communities.
• 16:30
  Tim Montague: And the tax incentives, which we've covered here on the show, are massive for local community, local rural communities. It really is a lifeline, okay? And it's good for the land. Like, that's, that's my bottom line.
• 16:42
  Tim Montague: Is we need to create a more sustainable land use for future generations. We can't keep mining the soil, which is what we've been doing.
• 16:52
  Rebekah Pierce: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's really helpful to kind of shift our perspective, you know, for at least the last 50 or so years, you know, especially since, you know, the the Earl butts, you know, get bigger, get out. Dictate that farmers needed to get larger and consolidate into just a couple of crops. I think we've really had this very extractive idea of agriculture in the US. So what can we get out of this land, rather than, how can we look at things from a systems based approach? And I know this is, you know, kind of a side note to the to the solar piece, but when we think about especially the tariffs that have been top of news lately. So corn and soy are our top two agricultural commodities, not just in the Midwest, but in the United States at large. Just soybeans alone, about half of our soybeans traditionally are sold to China. As of this month, China has yet to purchase any American soybeans from the fall harvest. So we need to find ways where we can keep those agricultural economies more local and benefiting local communities. And I think dual use is a great way to do it.
• 17:59
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I have to say the government has really stepped in some big doo, doo on the soy bean thing. There is now a financial crisis looming for soy farmers, and that's that's impacting a huge swath of the Midwest. For sure, I don't know what's going to happen to that crop if China doesn't buy it, so I hope there's a peaceful resolution and but this is, this is a good data point too. Like, it doesn't make good economic sense if you're dependent on a Chinese market for your product.
• 18:36
  Tim Montague: Like, why put ourselves in that position when we could be growing electricity, right?
• 18:40
  Tim Montague: Which is, we're going to triple the grid, not only because the data centers. You know, two years ago, we weren't talking about data centers. We were talking about electrification of transportation and electrification of HVAC and industrial processes. And that's still happening, albeit more slowly now, thanks to the federal government putting, you know, quashing that. But we we need to be energy independent, and part of this is land use independent, right? We don't want to be dependent on foreign markets. We want to grow stuff that makes sense. We need food for sure, and I don't want food prices to go up. It's interesting. We're not growing broccoli and cauliflower and pickles on these on our prime farm ground, because it is lucrative, quote, unquote, to grow corn and soy, because those crops are so highly subsidized.
• 19:36
  Tim Montague: If you take away the subsidies, things change dramatically, and so we need to level the playing field also right for other crops, which I think farmers actually would enjoy.
• 19:52
  Rebekah Pierce: Yeah, and I've written, you know, quite a lot about crop subsidies, and my opinions on them, and they certainly, you know, they have their place, and there are benefits. But the problem is, like, what you're mentioning, when we're incentivizing American farmers to just grow one thing, or in some cases, incentivizing them not to plant anything at all, then that's where we have a problem, because so much of what we're currently growing in this country is not staying domestic. And it could right, like we have some of the most fertile farm ground in the world, even with, you know, the problems I had mentioned earlier, yet we are producing just a small, small percentage of what we could be. You know, I always come back to this idea of we need diversity in our energy diets, and we need diversity in our food diets, and we aren't producing that diversity domestically, even though we could. There is a study, and I included it in my book. And I'm probably going to botch the numbers now because I'm trying to recall them off the top of my head, but I believe it was about 90% of our food supply could be produced within 100 miles of where we live. And that's true regardless of where you live in the United States, we need to get more creative about the crops we are growing, as you mentioned, and think about better ways to incentivize farmers to do that. And I think dual use does present that opportunity, because it removes a lot of that financial insecurity, and it removes a lot of that risk, so farmers are more comfortable trying new crops and experimenting with different growing techniques so that they can continue to keep as many of their products local as possible.
• 21:27
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one, three phase string inverter with over 10 gigawatts shipped in the US.
• 21:38
  Tim Montague: The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 to. Aw to 350 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS. 350 KW is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand, and is America's number one choice for solar plants now offering solutions for commercial utility, ESS and balance of system requirements go to Chintpowersystems.com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more, I want to continue this conversation about land use, and then we will pivot to how developers see things and how to work with developers, but, but let's focus on farming in rural communities. You yourself are a sheep farmer, and there are a lot of nuances to that. Figuring it out and making it work is not easy. But what are, what are some of the misconceptions, okay, for landowners and rural communities about renewable energy writ large?
• 22:51
  Rebekah Pierce: Oh, gosh, how much time do you have, right?
• 22:54
  Rebekah Pierce: There's, there's a lot. I think that the prime farmland complaint is probably issue number one. I think there's also a lot of fear that these projects are being developed by people from outside the community, which, you know, that's a fair assumption. Most projects are being developed by companies that don't, you know, that aren't centrally located within those small towns, sure.
• 23:16
  Rebekah Pierce: But then, as kind of, you know, ancillary to that point, one of the complaints or concerns that I've heard recently is there is this fear that solar companies will kind of advertise their interest in using sheep to graze a site or doing some form of agrivoltaics in the early stages of a project. So in the planning or the siting, or, you know, whenever it is, they have to come in and get that community support, and then either it doesn't happen, you know, it's kind of sheep washing, for lack of a better term, you know, instead of green washing, or there's a concern that a farmer from outside that community is going to come in, take over that farmland and start using it, which that's that's really not what happens. You know, I've had people mention that to me before, and it's it's not practical. You know, the projects we're grazing are all within two hours of our home farm here, so it's not really a valid concern. And I think there's also some worry that we're going to be all sheep and nothing else. And it's true that I think sheep are really the kind of the plug and play option for solar right now. I think it's very easy to get sheep on a site that's already been designed and built and been functioning for a few years. But as you know, and I've heard you mentioned before, there are plenty of other opportunities to do other things on solar as well. Whether that's cattle or pasture pigs or clipped wing poultry or vegetables or you name it, you can do it. So. So again, I think that fear is a little bit overblown as well.
• 24:44
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and, you know, I get it that rural communities don't like change, but they have to remember that only a small percentage of the landscape is going to be impacted. First of all, sometimes it seems like there's an onslaught, because our infrastructure is is concentrated, the power lines, the substations, the access to the grid is not everywhere uniformly. And so projects do get cited in proximity to the grid. And this can mean that there's a concentration of projects in certain places, and then sometimes there's other projects, like pipelines, also on top of that. And so a community kind of gives, oh, we've had enough, and I get that the so there is, you know, a potential downside. And the other downside that I think that we also need to be cognizant of as energy professionals is that if, if the land is being farmed by tenant farmers. These are farmers that don't own the land and it gets converted to solar they may get kicked off the land, and this may harm their livelihood. And we need to be cognizant of this and work with them as well and and win them over any and make sure that they're included. And of course, if you're going to do dual use, you can keep that same farmer on the land, albeit under modified conditions, because, let's face it, you know, 40% of the ground is now covered by solar if you're doing trackers, for example. And so it's going to be different, and it may require different crops. And this is definitely a emerging field of how to crop with solar and what works and what technology to use. I know that there's numerous companies coming out with elevated trackers, for example, so that you can perhaps grow more sun requiring crops or bigger animals like cattle. So it's an emerging. Field, but if you're committed, okay, as a landowner or as a developer, you can figure it out. And there are, you know, to their credit, some developers, like blue wave out of Massachusetts, that's doing nothing but agrivoltaics Now, and that's super cool.
• 26:56
  Tim Montague: Yeah, so shout out to them, and then a quick shout out to ASCA.
• 27:00
  Tim Montague: So if you're a landowner and you need resources and information, the American Solar grazing Association is a great one.
• 27:07
  Tim Montague: There's also RIFA renewable energy Farmers Association, which is a newer organization. I don't know. Have you had any contact with RIFA?
• 27:17
  Rebekah Pierce: Yeah, I have.
• 27:17
  Rebekah Pierce: They're, they're incredible. I'm excited to get involved with with everything they've got going on. They're great.
• 27:23
  Tim Montague: Oh, very cool. So there there are resources. Okay, so if you're listening to this and you're a landowner, reach out to asga and RIFA. Tons and tons of resources. And obviously, Rebekah can be a connector for you. There anything else about the land use and rural communities before we switch to how developers need to perhaps change their game too, because it's a both. And it's not just, we're not just expecting rural communities to change their ways and go all of a sudden, oh, yeah, come on in solar developers, it's a two way street.
• 27:57
  Rebekah Pierce: Yeah, 100% and I think the only thing I would add here, and this might be kind of a nice bridge into your next topic of discussion here is that when we are thinking about how to farm on solar, I think it's really important that we don't become overly prescriptive and say, you know, all solar projects developed in New York State have to have sheep on them, or all projects have to have, you know, broccoli or whatever it is. Because when you do that, you are ignoring the nuances of the land. You're ignoring the fact that certain plots of land might work better for one crop or for one farmer.
• 28:29
  Rebekah Pierce: As you mentioned, the issue with tenant farmers is a reality. We need to to work with as well.
• 28:32
  Rebekah Pierce: And so it's really important that if there's any regulations that start coming down, which this has occurred in several states already, where you know, there are stipulations about what can be grown, what should be done, how the land should be used, we need to be really, really careful about not over regulating things to the point where it creates additional barriers for farmers and for developers who are wanting to implement these models on their sites.
• 29:01
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and you know, every jurisdiction has different rules. I can appreciate you know, in New Jersey, for example, or in Massachusetts, these are smaller states where farm ground is at a much bigger premium than in some larger states. In New Jersey, you can't do Greenfield ground mount solar anymore. You have to do agrivoltaics or dual use if you're going to do ground mount.
• 29:23
  Tim Montague: And this incentivizes more rooftop solar for like, community solar. And I think that's great because there are tons and tons and tons of warehouses and big rooftops in New Jersey that should be solarized first before we use the spare or sparse remaining farm ground. So that's, you know, special case, and I absolutely support that, but I hear you also about not being too prescriptive. So if you're a legislator, an elected official, please, you know, reach out to the community of dual use experts and get their advice, because there are certain things that you might do that'll really be counterproductive and will scare developers away in droves.
• 30:11
  Tim Montague: It's very easy to scare developers away by making things too restrictive, or scare farmers away for that matter.
• 30:18
  Tim Montague: Yeah, 100% All right, so let's talk about the energy developers out there. You know, energy development happens primarily because it is economic and and so again, it's happening in places where there are good regulations in place incentives for community solar, for example, or counties that aren't too prescriptive about where you can put solar farms, you know, setback requirements and things like that. So but, but from a developer perspective, how good are developers at working with the concept of dual use, would you say on, you know, on a one to 10? Where are we in that, in that journey?
• 31:09
  Rebekah Pierce: I think it's, it's a journey that is rapidly evolving, I can tell you. So we've only been doing this for, you know, on the ground about three years, but we've been in conversations for about the last five and within those, just those last five years, the conversations have really transitioned from us trying to sell the fact that solar grazing would likely be cheaper than mowing, and that was kind of our sole selling point for developers to now we are at the point where folks are approaching us and saying, we want to do this, because we really do think it's better for the land, and even if it is a little. Bit more expensive than mowing. We're still okay with it. So there's been this shift, and I think a lot of it has to do, you know, in all fairness, I think a lot of it has to do with optics. I think it's a lot easier, in general, to get a project pushed through if, if there is going to be agriculture, agriculture happening. But I also think, just from, you know, recognizing human nature, we all know that we need to be able to eat. We all know that we need our rural economies to be healthy. And so I think that there has been as as solar grazing and as agri energy as a whole becomes more commonplace. And I think as there is this recognition that it's not as risky and we don't need to be as afraid of it. You know, sheep are not really going to damage anything, I think there's been a larger scale acceptance across the board, and those conversations really have changed within the last few years to more of a systems based approach, rather than just, what are the dollars and cents of this all?
• 32:36
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I think solar grazing has been the tip of the spear when it comes to agri solar. Really, there's, now gigawatts of solar projects, especially in the Southwest in Texas, some very, very big projects that are being grazed.
• 32:54
  Tim Montague: And I think it is relatively simpler to integrate sheep into a more traditional solar construction style of construction, you know, at face value, traditionally, what energy developers would do is they would lease parcels that are contiguous. They want to put together a a piece of ground that they can then build a solar or wind farm on. And you know, traditionally, they're not thinking about agri solar.
• 33:24
  Tim Montague: They're just thinking, Okay, we're going to take this corn and beans and we're going to convert it to a solar or wind farm. I mean, in the case of wind, it's not so much, right?
• 33:33
  Tim Montague: Because you're you're only impacting maybe 10% of the real estate, and then it's just business as usual with the farming around the wind turbines. But for solar, much of it would get taken out of rotation. And so this was a change, and this is something that irritates rural communities. And so I do think that dual use solar is a carrot to rural communities for developers, nimbyism is a real thing. A developer told me a year and a half ago, Tim my projects are taking twice as long and costing me twice as much to develop because of the pushback from rural communities.
• 34:08
  Tim Montague: And what that tells me is a yeah, we're growing a lot of solar now. You know, we've become a major industry. 80% of new energy on the grid is wind, solar, batteries. But two, we haven't done a great job of the ground game and working with local communities, educating them, and, you know, being part of the community and helping them understand, but then also leaning into agri solar, which they're going to embrace, I think, much more than just solar farm on a cornfield. And, yeah, okay, maybe it's pollinator friendly. We have good pollinator friendly regulations in some states, you know, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, but it is a select few. And if it's, you know, you're just putting in turf grass and then mowing it, you know, it's, it's kind of a math for, I think rural communities, whereas, if you're growing crops or growing sheep or cattle or pigs or chickens, I think rural communities go, Oh, cool. This is still farming, and we get it.
• 35:15
  Tim Montague: We need electricity. It mean, electricity gives us the modern world that we all love, honestly, and so now we can grow that electricity on the land right around our communities, and it's a both.
• 35:30
  Rebekah Pierce: And, yeah, and I think, you know, one of the things that I've been saying a lot lately, and this might offend some folks, and for that, I apologize, but it's my opinion that the renewables industry has kind of a massive PR problem in that there are so many amazing benefits of these systems, especially agri energy systems, but renewables as a whole. And the problem is that when we get into these rural communities, we're not, you know, getting in there and tailoring our messaging to what that individual community needs and wants. So a lot of my I have a full time freelance writing business outside of the farm and the work that I'm doing with this book. And so, you know, I do a lot of work in advertising and marketing, and one of the core tenants there is, you really need to understand your audience. And so I think if you are, you know, for anybody who's in the who's a developer, anywhere in the industry that's listening to this, I think one of the most important things you can do is to get to know the people where you are wanting to put in these projects, and don't make assumptions on what they want or what they need, but actually talk to them and then tailor your proposal you know for whatever you want to do based on that. So if you are putting in a project, you know, in a. Cattle farming community, maybe you need to start thinking about cattle voltaics, you know, if you're putting in a project, you know, that's in the Corn Belt, you need to think about what your project is going to do to the corn industry there, and really tailor that messaging to address those concerns specifically, because they may not care quite as much you know about other pieces, like, you know, pollinators, or things like that. So it's definitely really important to to address that accordingly. I think,
• 37:08
  Tim Montague: you know, one example I like to bring to the fore is Apex clean energy. They are one of the developers, and I'm putting this on screen. If you're not watching the video, check it out on YouTube. But they have an amazing website where they actually document their projects under development and post development, and it's a both hand. And so what you see here is a map of other projects across the country, and this includes wind and solar, and you can drill down in a specific jurisdiction, and you see there's a little guide here.
• 37:39
  Tim Montague: They've got utility scale solar, utility scale wind. And so I'll just click on a project. There's 100 megawatt project here in Indiana, homes powered 20,000 learn more. And you can actually subscribe to notifications about this project, whether it's built or under development. And this is really good, because a lot of developers, I find tend to want to be very secretive about their work. And guess what?
• 38:06
  Tim Montague: Communities don't like it when they get caught off guard, and all of a sudden there's a hearing that they learn about on, you know, a Tuesday and next Thursday, there's a hearing about a solar farm down the road, and they're going, WTF, bro, I didn't know about this.
• 38:24
  Tim Montague: They don't like that. Gotcha moment, right? And so I think developers need to learn to be more proactive, more boots on the ground, more embedded in the community. And I get it, they can't have a constant presence in every community you saw on that map. They're working over a huge swath of the United States, in the case like apex, I mean, they're, they're a well known utility developer of wind and solar, but I do think that developers need to up their game on a variety of things. It's both working with local communities and becoming more mission driven about creating sustainable land uses, right?
• 39:05
  Tim Montague: Mowing turf grass is not necessarily a sustainable land use, in my opinion, and what is the economic good for the local community there, mowing is polluting, right? And it's expensive. And as you pointed out, this is one of the reasons why solar grazing has taken off in the US, is because the developer can actually save money on their own M costs by embracing grazing. The sheep need food. The food is growing on the solar farm. So you put those two together and you have a win, win. Now, there are some nuances, and we should talk about those, which it helps if you plan for this from the get go. Because sheep are animals, they need water. Okay? You got to have water on site. They're not getting all their water from the grass they're eating. That doesn't happen. They need water, and they need to be kept safe, right? They need to be free from hazards, whether that's wires that are hanging low to the ground or other things that they can get caught on. They have, you know, wool and tails, and you know, they can, they can be injured. And we want to be cognizant of the animals that might be on the, on the on the on the farm. So what else should developers be thinking about?
• 40:13
  Tim Montague: And kind of, I think you kind of lay out a a system, for lack of a better expression in your book about this
• 40:23
  Rebekah Pierce: I do and so again, this is where I think nuance and really having conversations with the farmer in that area is important. So I'll start with water, because I know you brought up water. So what's really interesting is, when we first started our solar grazing business and started, you know, picking up these projects that were several hours away from our home farm, they were existing projects that we weren't involved in the planning on, and so they did not have water on site. And so our concern was, how are we going to graze our sheep on, you know, 30 or 40 Acres, and how are we going to get water to them if we're having to truck it two hours twice a week? Something really interesting that we found so this year, so I'm in upstate New York, and so we have had a record breaking drought this year. You know, it's causing a lot of problems for a lot of the other farmers around here who aren't grazing solar one of the things that fascinated us was that even in the midst of this drought, when when the vegetation shouldn't be holding that much much moisture, it was still growing really well beneath the panels, because it was shaded, and our sheep were consuming very, very little water, I think, because they also had shade and protection from the heat. So this is not scientific at all. We didn't take official measurements or anything like that, but our water needs were were dramatically lower than we thought they would be. Now, obviously we are still trucking.
• 41:42
  Rebekah Pierce: Them water, because we're not going to not put out water, but, but water considerations are still important, especially, you know, once you move into the Midwest and once you're on, you know, especially these larger utility scale sites we only graze, you know, very small community solar sites that are less than 30 or so acres. So trucking enough water for animals that are on those properties isn't a huge deal, because we don't have a large number of animal animals on site at any given time anyway, but if you're grazing a site that's several 100 acres, then it's good to have those conversations early on with the developer about provisions for water and also for things like interior paddocks, so that the farmer isn't having to run out, you know, strands of temporary electric to subdivide the area into paddocks. Because one of the things people don't realize is when you put sheep on a solar site, you're not just kind of dumping them out and letting them have the whole thing.
• 42:30
  Rebekah Pierce: Typically, you are dividing it into separate individual areas for grazing. And the reason for that is so that the animals can a because they if you give them the whole space, they're like little kids. They're just going to go eat all the candy first and eat all the stuff they like, and not like and not touch their broccoli. And we want them to eat the broccoli. They need to eat everything. And then there's also, you know, part of our approach is regenerative farmers. Is rotational grazing and making sure they're on different strips at a time, to make sure that land is bouncing back the way we want it to. And we're doing the best we can buy that land. So interior paddocks are helpful the biggest thing, and this is kind of the piece that we always emphasize with developers, if we are able to have conversations early on, because I think it's probably one of the hardest to fix, kind of retroactively, is fencing.
• 43:14
  Rebekah Pierce: And so my understanding is that all solar farms need to have that exterior fence, you know, to meet safety codes, the problem comes in when we see, one of the things we've seen a lot in our local communities is communities pushing for a gap between that lower edge of the fence and the ground. And they'll say, Well, it's only, you know, 12 inches or so, so wildlife can pass through, and that's great for the turtles, and you know, the, you know, you know, the small animals that they want migrating through there. But it also means things like coyotes and domestic dogs can get in with the sheep, and that's that's a big problem for us. So we do try to have those conversations early on and find ways to mitigate it. If communities are concerned about wildlife, finding other ways we can, we can make that work, because we really want to make sure that that fence is secure for the sheep.
• 44:09
  Tim Montague: Hey, guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial but wanting to scale into large CNI solar? I'm Tim Montague. I've developed over 150 megawatts of commercial solar, and I've solved the problem that you're having. You don't know what tools and technologies you need in order to successfully close 100 KW to megawatt scale projects. I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you just go to cleanpowerhour.com click on strategy and book a call today. It's totally free with no obligation. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate you listening to the pod, and I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Go to clean power hour and click strategy today. Thanks so much.
• 44:56
  Tim Montague: I could talk to you all day, Rebekah, but I think we're going to wrap it up there. I want to encourage my audience to check out your book, agri energy. It's out in November of 2025 This interview is dropping just a few weeks before the book is released. It is it is available anywhere you buy books, right?
• 45:20
  Tim Montague: Do you want to say any more about that?
• 45:25
  Rebekah Pierce: Yeah, just check out the book. It's, you know, it's several years in the making. And I, you know, I don't talk just about sheep in it, you know, I'm looking at all of the different ways that agriculture and renewables can come together. One of the cool things when I was writing the book is I really thought it was going to be very focused on sheep and solar. And as I researched this and started having conversations, I realized that it is much, much bigger than that. So definitely check it out. It's available Amazon directly through Island Press.
• 45:50
  Rebekah Pierce: Pretty much as Tim said, anywhere you find books, you can find it and reach out. You know, I'm always willing to to answer questions, to have conversations with people. I understand there's a lot of confusing information out of there, and misinformation and disinformation. So I think as long as we keep these conversations going, we'll all be in a much better place at the end of it, check
• 46:11
  Tim Montague: out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com.
• 46:14
  Tim Montague: Please give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify. Tell a friend about the show. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners, and with that, Rebekah, do you have a website, or what is the best way people can reach you?
• 46:27
  Rebekah Pierce: I do have a website. It's just Jrpiercefamilyfarm.com, and then I'm also on LinkedIn. I think that's probably the best way to get in touch. So just Rebekah Pierce on LinkedIn.
• 46:37
  Tim Montague: I'm Tim Montague, let's grow agri solar, take care, everybody.