Wind and solar power could bring huge profits to shrinking Texas farms and ranches

GAINESVILLE, Texas — Over a Spartan field near the Oklahoma border, thin clouds drift across the North Texas sky.

Hundreds of solar panels slowly track the path of the morning sun to strike directly from an energy source 94 million miles away. But not the sheep. They follow J.R. Howard’s gray Ford F-250—weaving between rows of solar panels as he honks his horn. It’s feeding time on this April morning.

Howard, owner of Texas Solar Sheep, is part of a growing industry combining Texans’ affinity for sheep farming with the growing popularity of solar energy, a rapidly expanding source of electricity.

The sheep here – the white Dorpers – are not known for their wool. They are here for their appetite, munching on vegetation growing along the panels. If some are sold for slaughter, so much the better.

The combination of solar and sheep farming is one of several ways renewable energy is being integrated into the Texas landscape—providing a second, reliable source of income that can help farmers and ranchers maintain a threatened way of life. The trick is finding ways to limit the impact of energy production on farmland.

Wind turbines are in many ways a more natural solution because they have relatively little impact on farms and ranches.

Solar energy, with its exponentially greater reach, has difficulty coexisting peacefully with agriculture. So far, sheep have proven to be the most natural roommates for photovoltaic cells.

This allowed Howard to continue doing what he loved: ranching and raising cattle.

“This is the biggest opportunity of my life,” he said.

Goats are not allowed to be kept

James McCall, who lives near Denver, Colorado, has been working for nine years to solve the problem of building solar power plants on agricultural land.

McCall, an analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, has been researching ways to integrate solar power with community-supported gardens and beehives.

Research has not yet produced a viable solution for combining large-scale solar energy with agriculture, McCall said.

In Europe, where energy prices are higher and land availability is limited, solar energy companies are required to conduct agricultural operations on site.

In the U.S., McCall said, some solar operators are planting small gardens between solar panels to grow peppers, tomatoes, kale and other vegetables. Some have experimented with growing pollinator flowers and bee hives alongside the solar cells.

So far, sheep are the most widely accepted agricultural use next to solar panels in Texas. Cows are too tall. Goats will jump on the panels. “And they’ll chew on the wires,” McCall said.

Sheep are smaller, agile and can maneuver around solar panels without incident. They graze with their heads down, which keeps them away from wires when cleaning areas under solar panels, according to the American Solar Grazing Association.

In the Permian Basin, where solar and wind power have proliferated in recent years along with oil and gas drilling, water is at a premium. That makes growing crops with solar power a challenge.

“We can’t do things that require water,” McCall said. “Water is really a holistic thing that’s needed in West Texas. We hear that very loud and clear.”

In Texas’ more fertile regions, water availability has presented an unexpected problem for solar developers: vegetation. Unchecked growth can block access to the arrays and block sunlight from reaching the panels.

Raina Tillman Hornaday, co-founder of Caprock Renewables, an Austin-based renewable energy company, said mowing 1,000 or more acres can cost more than $1 million a year.

“That’s where sheep come in,” she said. “Sheep can be really effective at grazing, trampling and managing the land under solar panels instead of mowing.”

Howard, owner of Texas Solar Sheep, has sheep grazing on 11 solar farms from the Oklahoma border to Temple, including an 81-megawatt solar system operated by Adapture Renewables about 10 miles south of the Oklahoma border near Interstate 35.

“Three years ago, there were a lot of skeptics,” said Elora Arana, project development manager at Adapture. “Now, every major solar company in Texas is looking at it.”

Howard, 44, said farmers were his biggest skeptics when he started combining sheep and solar panels. As he reintroduced sheep to the community, curiosity grew.

“These sheep haven’t been in this area for 100 years,” Howard said.

According to the American Solar Grazing Association, sheep now live next to solar farms across the U.S., and in Texas they graze alongside about 100 solar panels.

Solar Challenges

State Senator Lois Kolkhorst remains suspicious of the spread of solar power.

Beyond the inherent reliability of a weather-dependent electricity source, the industry lacks the oversight it needs, Brenham Republican said. In 2023, she proposed legislation that would create a state permitting process and environmental reviews for all renewable projects.

Kolkhorst’s proposal has faced opposition from renewable energy developers across the state, and in some cases it has pitted environmentalists who want to move Texas away from fossil fuels against conservationists who see wind turbines and solar panels as a threat to Texas’ natural beauty.

Kolkhorst said she filed the bill in part because of the recent surge in solar energy development, coupled with reports of large swaths of land being taken out of use and replaced with solar panels.

“There’s something to taking this out of production,” she said. “When you look at some of these contracts, it’s the removal of farmland for half a century.”

Wind turbines on agricultural land

Texas lost nearly 18,000 farms and ranches and more than 1.5 million acres of farmland between 2017 and 2022, according to the 2022 U.S. Census of Agriculture.

Texas Farm Bureau spokesman Gary Joiner said the combination of consolidation and subdivision is driving many Texans away from farming and ranching. Because land is passed down from generation to generation, vast swaths of fertile land can be divided into smaller parcels that may not make economic sense to farm. In turn, those smaller parcels can be bought by large companies, further reducing the number of Texans in the business.

The average farmer is also getting older. As young people turn away from the profession, the median age of a farmer in Texas is just under 60.

Another obstacle is rising costs.

“They’re paying more for energy,” Joiner said. “They’re paying more for seed. They’re paying more for labor, for equipment, for parts — even the interest rates they pay on the operating loan.”

“That profit margin – that unpredictability of whether there will be a profit at all – when you add in the weather and factors that are completely beyond the control of the farmer and the rancher, that is the pressure and current economic reality for many in modern agriculture,” Joiner added.

Herff Cornelius, a Matagorda County farmer and cattle rancher whose family began raising cattle in southeast Texas in 1917, began investing in wind turbines to cope with financial uncertainty, creating a second source of income on the family land.

“It’s hard to earn a living every year, but this is an easy way to earn extra income while still continuing to farm and keep your family happy,” he said.

Cornelius and his family grow rice and raise cattle and crayfish on about 5,000 acres. The crayfish and rice ponds posed a challenge for the company that built 21 wind turbines on the farm, but Germany-based RWE is adding five more turbines in the second phase of the Peyton Creek Wind Farm, which spans multiple properties.

Cornelius said neighbors were initially suspicious of the wind turbines. The 500-foot-tall giants loom over the Southeast Texas landscape, prompting many to express concerns about how they would affect property values and threaten migratory birds.

He added that skepticism diminished when the first turbines were built five years ago.

RWE, the third-largest owner and operator of renewable energy in the U.S., owns the turbines but leases the land from Cornelius. The farm owners typically earn money on long-term contracts lasting 20 years or more that pay royalties, including guaranteed minimums, for power generated on their land.

In return, the company builds wind turbines — some as tall as 600 feet — and pays for infrastructure construction, including roads and connections to the power grid.

Construction can be disruptive. Rice and crayfish production have been halted this year at the 5-acre turbine construction site on the Cornelius family farm.

Utilities typically also absorb property tax increases due to the value of new equipment. Texas law requires utilities to enter into contracts to cover the removal of decommissioned equipment.

Hanson Wood, head of utility-scale development at RWE Clean Energy, estimated that the turbines disturb about 2% of the earth’s surface when they are up and running. The company, which owns and operates the state’s second-largest wind farm about 230 miles west of Dallas, has found it relatively easy to integrate with almost any type of farm or ranch, he said.

“Frankly, the compatibility of wind farms with agricultural practices is underestimated,” Wood said. “People are more focused on the visuals, but there is a very, very real benefit to developing wind farms.”