914: The Real Reason Farmers Are Turning to Solar | Rebekah Pierce

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Somebody actually asked me if the sheep glow in the dark

because of the panels. They don't. The meat is fine. Nothing is leaking.

But that is a concern. Obviously not one we hear from developers.

That's more of a kind of general public thing. But there's no risks.

Like it's very safe. The sheep are safe. They're incredibly happy.

They're incredibly fast. And they love it.

Hey, welcome back to Suncast.

Modern solar development has a land problem.

Or at least the perception of one. We hear it all the time.

Solar destroys primary farmland. Solar contaminates soil.

It reduces yield. Solar isn't real farming.

My guest today is built her life at the center of that debate, I can say.

She's the first generation farmer in rural New York.

And she and her husband converted their struggling farm into a

seven-site solar grazing operation across four counties.

She wrote a book, Agri Energy, Growing Power and Growing Food,

arguing that it isn't a niche solution anymore.

It's a systems level correction for American agriculture.

If you are new here, thank you for giving us the only non-renewable resource

you've got. That of course is your time.

Suncast exists to help shine light on those that are on the front lines

of our energy transition. And how the work they're doing can inform

not just their legacy, but yours. Rebecca Pierce, welcome to Suncast.

Thank you for having me.

Rebecca, you once described solar as this necessary evil.

I'm curious, what did you mean by that at the time?

When my husband and I first started exploring the idea of solar grazing

on the on the very micro scale that we existed in the very beginning,

we really viewed it as like an economic means to an end.

It was a way for us to get access to additional land

to graze our animals and also to provide an additional revenue stream.

But at the time, I didn't really view it as anything beyond that.

I say it was a necessary evil and that it allowed us to get from point A to point B

to advance our farm to where it needed to be.

But at the time, I didn't really recognize all of the other

ancillary benefits that were wrapped up in it.

So what changed economically, philosophically, that moved you from skepticism to advocacy?

Being enmeshed in these systems, I think, is really what kind of opened our eyes to it.

So I wouldn't say that we were solar naysayers or anything like that at the very beginning,

but like I said, it was very much, this is going to help us pay our bills,

this is going to open up new grazing access, and that was it.

As we expanded our operation, we started with just a small community solar site,

a few miles from our house owned by another set of farmers,

a parry gentleman that actually sell us the hay for our sheep in the winter time.

We got on that site in 2022, and really just within the first few weeks of being there,

we kind of looked around and we were like, wow, this has the ability to be something so much

bigger than just this one site. As we expanded, we realized all of the benefits of solar grazing

or agrivoltaics in general, not just grazing livestock. We realized all of the benefits that existed

for things like soil health for wildlife, for the ability to take land that wasn't necessarily

prime farmland and convert it into something better, something that could be used as prime

farmland in the future. As we saw these puzzle pieces come together, that's when I really started

thinking that this was something a lot bigger than what I had originally conceptualized it to be,

and that it was about so much more than just the dollars and cents, which was really how we had

always pitched it votes to ourselves, and to people we were talking about what we were doing,

and also to the developers where we were pitching new projects. We are now able to articulate

this message that isn't just, hey, solar grazing could potentially save you money on your vegetation

management contracts, but look at all of these other benefits as well.

Was there a moment where you realized that it wasn't just about helping save your rural New York farm,

but in a real sense, you were stepping into a national land use debate.

I think those concerns had really existed in my brain and elsewhere, even prior to us getting

on solar. I think anybody who's listening to this will recognize that land is in short supply

in the United States, whether that's even just land to build a house on. It's prohibitively expensive,

even if you want to go buy a few acres, build a house, but especially if you want land that can

be farmed, farmland is selling at a premium. It's going away quickly, and I think it's really easy

to point fingers at renewables and say it's renewables taking up all that space, but I write a lot about

this, this idea that it's not necessarily renewables that are the threat to so-called prime farm land,

but development, and also the status quo of how we've been farming, which is not the most efficient

way of using land. How did you get into farming? By accident.

My husband and I are both first generation farmers. Neither of us grew up with any kind of a

background in farming. He went to school for wildlife biology. I have an English degree and an

education degree. We both taught for several years before making the transition into our careers now,

and so we originally, when we bought the property of land that we live on back in 2015,

our goal was to build a house, and we wanted enough land so that our dog, when it goes to

crazy, so we didn't want something right on the road. Fortunately, we were lucky enough to purchase

the land we did, which is just around 22 acres. Before, I think, COVID made real estate, the sky rocket,

even more. So the land that we purchased, not great farmland, half of it's extremely wet.

The other half is just heavy clay soil. It's not great for growing anything, or I should say it

wasn't great then. We've done a lot of improvement here in the last 10 years, 11 years now.

But we didn't really care at the time because we weren't in any realm of our imagination,

we were not thinking about becoming farmers. We just wanted some space. Once we got here, my husband

convinced me that it would be a good idea to raise chickens, and I always joke and say that chickens

are the gateway drug, because once you raise chickens, everything just snowballs. So we had six chickens,

then we had 12 chickens, then we had 50 chickens. Then we got pigs, and then we found ourselves

interested in sheep, and then that's kind of where all of this spiraled. I like to say out of control,

but I think we're in a good spot, right? Just to be clear, it was never a growing vegetable food

kind of farming for you guys. It always centered around foul on livestock.

Absolutely. Yeah, we grow vegetables for ourselves, but my green thumb is sorely laughing, so we're

here. We're deficient in that department. Well, let's talk about the first solar grazing

contract. How did that deal actually come about? What did it look like? And kind of putting

into the context of how you thought about making money with livestock up till then?

So up until that point, like I said before, my husband and I were working as teachers, so we had

those off-farm jobs. And really at that point, the off-farm jobs were fully supporting the farm.

You know, at that point, our finances looked like a hobby farm, but we were putting in the work

for a commercial farm. And he had our son in 2020 right in the middle of the pandemic,

and it was at the time that we realized that the way we were doing things wasn't working anymore.

We were both working, you know, 80 hours a week, trying to, you know,

meet all of our commitments at our full-time jobs, while also funneling any extra money we had

into supporting this farm, which wasn't giving us any, you know, monetary return back.

And so about 2020, we realized that something had to change. We wanted to be able to continue

our operation in the way that we always had, which is in a regenerative fashion. So we don't,

you know, stock animals in a barn, we have them out on pasture. We believe that, you know,

grass and sunshine are what bruminants need to be healthy. And we really wanted to

continue that model. The problem being, of course, as I mentioned earlier, land is extremely

expensive. And to have enough land to support a growing herd at a level that would allow us to,

you know, sell enough meat, to sell enough product to actually make a living off of that,

it was next to impossible without, you know, taking out pretty much never-ending line of credit with the

bank. And so as we started exploring options, you know, we looked at everything. We looked at

maybe we do transition to vegetables, even though we're not great at it. Maybe we consider a

CSA model. Maybe we do this. Maybe we do that. But none of it seemed like it would really be the

silver bullet. And then around that time, we were approached by the friends of ours who owned

some land about 10 miles from our house. They're a pair of older gentlemen, their brothers. They sell

us hay for our sheep in the winter. And they didn't necessarily want to get out of farming,

but they wanted to pursue a path that would allow them to retire without having to necessarily

sell off all of their land. And so they decided to put that into solar, to lease to solar,

because they wouldn't have to sell the land. You know, it would still be in their name,

but they would still get that generous lease payment that they needed to retire on.

At the same time, they didn't want to see it, you know, completely go out of agriculture.

And they had heard about this idea of solar grazing. We were just starting to hear about it,

you know, kind of in our own scope of reference. And so we had a conversation with them about what

that might look like, and then they connected us with the folks who were putting in the project.

It took quite a long time to finally get the green light for us to graze on that site.

I think a lot of that had to do with, you know, at the time in 2021-2022, a lot of the conversation

around solar grazing really came down to the dollars and cents. Like, is this going to be cheaper

than mowing? Is this more effective than mowing? Here's kind of your, you know, your ROI for

for choosing solar grazing over traditional mowing. And so with that being like the only scope

of discussion, it took a while for us to really communicate with benefits and to communicate,

you know, the idea that this wasn't as risky. We also had, you know, no personal experience.

So we couldn't say, it's really not as complicated as this people think it is. It's not as risky as

people think it is. We just kind of had to say, trust us. And we think this is going to pay off

for you. But once we finally got on that site, you know, since then, it's been a lot easier for us

to get a full of on other sites as well. From a transaction perspective, how do you as a

sheep grazing farmer providing the service get paid? So we're service providers, right?

So I think the easiest way to conceptualize it is we are the, you know, the de facto mowers.

So rather than a solar company paying a landscaping company to come in and mow the site for

use herbicides on the site, they're paying us instead with our sheep. So we are paid directly

by the solar company, whoever it is that's handling the O&M on the site, we're paid for that service.

In some cases, that also includes things like exterior mowing. You know, we always explain

that we are service providers first. So our main priority is making sure that the vegetation

doesn't save the panels to, you know, at a level that would hinder operations. And then at the

same time, we're also looking out for the health of our sheep while they're on the site.

And so that's something I think, you know, for people who aren't super familiar with the idea

of solar grazing, they think it's just you, you know, you dump sheep out on a site and you come

back in two weeks and see how they're doing. And that's really, I mean, I guess you could do it

that way. I would not recommend it. I don't think it's going to be effective both for vegetation

management or for the health of the sheep. Our model is highly intensive. So we, you know, we're

we're in a part of the country where we don't have sheep on site year round. Some grazers do

just because of our weather conditions here in upstate New York, it doesn't make sense for us to

to have sheep there, 365. So during our season, which is generally April through November,

kind of weather dependent, we'll have sheep on any of our sites that we rotate around too.

And so sometimes they're there for two weeks, sometimes they're there for a month, sometimes

only there for a few days. But when we do have sheep on site, we're there daily every other day

making sure they're moved to a new paddock because they don't have access to the whole site at once.

How interactive is that with the developer? Are you deciding the grazing pattern is the developer

providing guidance or even being sort of in any way demanding of your time and access on site?

That's a good question. So no, we we pretty much dictate how often the animals are moved

and when they're on site. You know, really the only time the developer needs to do anything is

sometimes if they have, for example, if they have texts coming on the site to do any work,

often they'll let us know ahead of time and we'll just move the sheep to like the other side

of the solar farm. It's kind of funny because we have some sites, you know, where it was our first

year working there. And the texts were like petrified and like terrified, but the sheep were going to

attack them or something and they're like, don't they? They want nothing to do with you.

So they will run the other way. But well, usually we do that just so that the texts aren't

interacting with like our temporary electric fence and we're not having to worry about people

tripping over that or the fence getting taken down.

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I can imagine all manner of tees and seas that would be forced on you in contracts. Are there

minimum requirements? You have to keep the grass under certain inches or something like that?

How much standards are set? It depends on the contract. It depends on the site and it depends

on the company. But generally, it's beneath the leading edge of the panel is the minimum standard

there. Some companies we work with will have additional criteria that need to be met.

I think I mentioned earlier, maintaining that vegetation that's just outside the exterior

fence. But really, it's not super complicated. I think people overthink it a little bit, but it's

basically just making sure the sheep are getting the vegetation down. Then there are standards that we

impose upon ourselves as well. We're not going to leave our sheep on a certain section of the

solar front to the point where it gets grazed down to bear dirt, because that's not good for the

vegetation. It's not good for the soil. It's really not good for the sheep or the optics of the

site. Nobody wants to drive past the solar farm and see bear dirt fully eroding away. Those

are some standards that we uphold. On the solar company side of things, it's usually just

to make sure the vegetation is maintained close to the level that would be with traditional

mulling. Are there risks that you as the grazer absorb that developers might not see?

When we're looking at these models of us grazing sheep on solar sites versus traditional grazing,

this is so much less of a risky endeavor for us than it would be to graze on, say, for example,

rented faster that doesn't have solar on it. The reason for that is purely economic,

because we have a one, three, five-year contract, whatever it might be, where we know we are getting

pasture for our animals, and we know that we are having that revenue stream coming in. So,

kind of, regardless of what happens with meat sales, we have that, and we can count on that.

And it's not something where the pasture is getting turned over to other feedstock that you have

to worry about. And I guess one of the things I'm curious about, because you hinted at it earlier,

is what are the known unknowns that you know you have to help overcome as objections,

walking into a pitch versus a developer who's already bought in and really gets it?

There's really no additional risks. Sheep aren't in any more danger around solar farms,

and they are anywhere else. You could also make the argument that they're a lot weaker.

More say, there's a sense. There's a huge fence, right? And there's secure fences.

There are fences that, you know, we don't have to worry about things being cobbled together.

You know, predators getting in and things like that. There are some people, and I think the people

listening to this podcast will probably chuckle at this, but this is something that people are

concerned about. But a lot of people have expressed to us worries that the sheep are going to be

contaminated by all of the chemicals in the solar panels. And so that, you know, that's a tangled

one to unweave with them. I'm sure you have a LinkedIn post on that. All of the toxic chemicals

that leach out of solar panels into their prime farmland. We've had some folks express

genuine surprise that the panels are not leaking anything. And also that I've

I always laugh when I say this because it sounds like I'm making it up. But somebody actually

asked me if the sheep glow in the dark because of the panels. They don't. The meat is fine. Nothing

is leaking. But that is a concern. Obviously not when we hear from developers. That's more of a

kind of general public thing. But there's no risks. It's very safe. The sheep are safe. They're

incredibly happy. They're incredibly fast. And they love it from the developer side of things.

Again, the risks are not non-existent. I think there's risk in everything, but they're

vastly, I think, overblown. And so that's something where, you know, we now we weren't able to do this

well when we first started our business. But now that we've been on sites for a few years and

we're in meshed in this every day, we're able to articulate this a lot better. So some of the risks

that they will express concern about are the sheep going to interact with the panels or the modules

in any way. And they really don't. I think that's the beauty of using sheep versus something

like goats. They're not up there jumping on things. They're not chewing on things. Occasionally a

sheep will brush against a cable. And that's really it, right? Another concern is that the sheep,

as I mentioned, are going to interact with the techs or the people working on the site in a

negative way. The sheep want nothing to do with them. We generally don't keep, you know, if we

have aggressive rams or anything, those are generally not animals that we keep in our flock

for long. And they're certainly not animals that we keep on a solar site for that reason.

So those are two of the big ones. I mean, the major one is that the sheep are going to interact

with the equipment in some way and they really don't. And that's something that we try to articulate

now in conversations with developers is that not only are sheep not as risky as you think they are,

but they can also be significantly less risky than traditional vegetation management models.

You're not having to worry about a mower kicking up a rock and damaging a panel. You're not having

to worry about fire risks. You know, that's not something we really thought of heavily

until this year when we had a really dry season. We live in a part of the country where

it's very humid throughout most of the growing season. And so fire is not something we worry about,

but in a lot of places where these installations are going in, especially some of the larger

steel installations, just a small spark is enough to set off a grass fire. And so sheep aren't doing

that, right? They're not kicking back panels that are creating sparks and inducing that fire risk.

Do you get into helping developers understand in terms of that they have in their model

the economics of grazing versus the alternative? We do. And again, this was something that we

struggled to really articulate while ourselves until recently, because a lot of those economic

benefits aren't necessarily things that you can pencil out easily. Intangible. Right. You know,

it's all those kind of fringe benefits. So not only, so yes, we might be incrementally cheaper

than mowing. But even if we're not cheaper than mowing, you're paying for so much more than that

cutting the grass service. So you're paying to have somebody on site pretty much constantly

throughout the growing season. Because as I mentioned, we're not dumping sheep out. We're there

every day, every other day at the very least several times a week checking on things. So if we

notice a problem, you know, if we notice that a cable has been knocked out, we get an ad hoc site

manager. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We're kind of the unofficial eyes and ears of the

RNM. That's amazing. I can tell you because one of my cousins runs a business that does the mowing.

They are they are not trying to get anything out of it other than in and out and mow and be done.

They're not looking around at your site. They don't have the time with the luxury or the skillset.

And where we are in the state too, we're pretty isolated. We're up pretty pretty far north

in New York state. Yeah. And so we were talking to companies who were hiring landscaping crews

that were coming from as far as five or six hours a week. So you can bet that they weren't

spending a ton of time there once. 100%. 100%. I'm speaking from experience. My cousin

flies in from South Carolina to places as far far a field as Houston hobby airport, right? Like

it's remarkable. But I mean, especially specialists. So you know, I find remarkable. So just

to be clear, what I think I heard you say is solar grazing using sheep as an alternative

for remediation is cheaper in most cases. It can be. Okay. You know, I think that was always the

the traditional that was our selling point that we had. And sometimes it is cheaper, but it's not

always cheaper. And sometimes it's comparable. Sometimes it's more expensive. You know, it obviously

it depends on the layout of the site. It depends on the, you know, where the site is, who owns it,

who's grazing it. So there's so I will never say it's always cheaper, but it can be. So that's

something to consider. If the solar contracts, which are relatively new part of the business,

if they disappeared tomorrow, does the farm survive at this point? I don't know. You know, it's

a significant portion at least at least 50% if not more of our business. You know, the reality is

for a small regenerative farm like us to turn around and sell meat. We are generally doing it

at a break even point or at a loss. A lot of that has to do with location. We're 90 minutes from

the closest USDA inspectors Latterhouse. And that is the only legal option for us to process our meat.

You know, unless we want to charge $30 to $40 a pound for lamb, it would be tough.

And I think this is something we're starting to see not just with the sheep industry,

which is really, you know, declined in the United States over the last 100 years or so,

but we're starting to see some of that now with the beef industry. It's difficult for producers

to make a living and to charge the prices that consumers are used to seeing at the grocery store.

And so I think that's one of the reasons why we're starting to branch out with other

livestock as well. And there's not, at the moment at least, any sort of branding along lines of

grass fed that would help you demand a premium in the marketplace. There's not, you know, there's

pasture raised, there's organic. There's all those labels. The problem with those labels is

that to fetch, you know, so say, for example, you wanted to convert to an organic operation.

The process to get that certification is not free. And so a lot of producers like ourselves,

we generally don't use things like fertilizers or herbicides on the, on the pastures.

We grace obviously because on solar there's not really any need for us to decide.

But what we have never pursued the organic certification, just because the math does

a pencil out for the increase in price. It's too much. We need to come up with a label that the

USDA can authorize called sun raised R-A-Y-S-E-D. I don't know much. I'm drawing threads here, but

I think pasture fed sun raised would be, you pay another dollar of pound for it. I don't know.

Especially if it glows in the dark, right? Well, yeah, of course. It's got certain

new crime fighting aspects to it, I suppose. It's a big problem. You know, I'm working on

another book right now that's talking about some of the restrictions that small local meat producers

face in terms of selling and processing and marketing their products. And the labeling is one issue.

But there's some other really thorny issues there too in terms of processing restrictions and

others. So it's something that's really messy. But for right now, I think solar grazing and

agrivoltaics in general are really serving as not even a band-aid. I don't want to use that word

because I don't think that's accurate. But they're serving as a very valuable resource that's

helping farmers get through these really challenging times. Did you always know that you had a

writer inside of you? Well, I think so, but I don't know how good I thought that writer was.

I kind of have always wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid,

but growing up in a rural area, that wasn't really a career path that I think most people

would have taken seriously. I went to college originally. I was a journalism major and I was

kind of talked out of that to pursue an education degree instead because that would be the better option

for helping me get a job. I graduated college right when print journalism, well, really,

I entered college when print journalism was on its way out. And at the time, I don't think people

realized how big online media would get. And so I was discouraged from pursuing journalism.

I got an education degree and I loved teaching. It was great, but there was always something that

was missing and that was writing. So I was thrilled. I started freelance writing just on the side

in the summer, in the evenings when I was still teaching. And it grew into something a lot bigger

that allowed me to pursue it full-time, which I'm grateful for. At least for me as a writer,

one of the things I really enjoy doing is looking at systems. So not looking at the traditional way

of farming has always been very extractive. And so what are we going to get for yield out of this

particular crop, out of this particular acreage? How much can we pull out of it? But what interests

me is looking more at how does this practice that I'm doing here? How does it interact with everything

else? How does it interact with a larger economy within my community? How do we pull in soil health?

How do we pull in wildlife? How do we pull in livestock health? And I like looking at how those

things work in tandem, which is really at the heart of any regenerative agriculture system.

You're not looking at those variables in isolation. You're looking at them as part of the bigger

picture. And so for me, it's been really rewarding to talk and to write about topics like this.

Because now I feel like people are finally not just paying lip service to these ideas and saying,

we need to be organic or we need to do this practice or this practice, but really looking at how

everything kind of meshes together. I think you've become known for taking down common criticisms

that are foisted upon sort of all of our industry writ large. Anything that goes against the grain

of the way we've always done things. I want to kind of document a few of them here and get your

response. Many of these you've put out in LinkedIn posts and we can link to some of the top 10

or the greatest hits ever back appears. Let's start with solar destroys prime farm land.

What's the strongest for a bottle? The first one that I always come back with is what is prime

farm land. And this one's really thorny because it requires us to look at how we're utilizing the

farmland that we have and also what kind of quality that farmland exists as. So here in the US,

I think it's almost 28% of all of the US craft area is dedicated strictly to corn and people say,

well great corn, that's food, we need that that's great. But what people forget is 40% of that

isn't food, it's for ethanol. Much of which is used as an export crop. We're not keeping that

domestically and is not the most efficient source of energy for us. Outside of that, a significant

portion of our land is also dedicated to soy. I don't know about you, but I don't have a pallet of

soybeans in my basement. Obviously, I know soy is used for a variety of products, it's used for

livestock feed, it's still important. But the crops that we're growing aren't necessarily on this

prime farmland aren't necessarily crops that are saying local. You know, everybody always wants to

talk about this idea that regenerative farms are great, but they can't feed the world. And we need,

you know, these monoprops fields of corn and soy to be able to do that. But there's been multiple

studies that have come out that show that I think it's something like 90% of Americans could be fed

entirely with food grown that's been grown within 100 miles of them. So we really need to think

about how we're using the farmland we currently have because for the most part, we're not using

it efficiently and we're not using it in a way that's actually feeding America's people. The other

part of that, you know, prime farmland conversation is, and this is one that I talk about a lot,

is that prime farmland is great, right? Everybody wants to drive past a farm field and see it being

used to grow something. But the reality is that for most people, unless you're the person who

farms that field, or unless you are, you know, maybe you've done a soil test on that field, you

work for the local cooperative extension or something, you don't know that a plot of land is

prime farmland just by looking at it, right? You need to talk to the farmer who's actually been on

that land for 20 or 30 years or whatever it might be. And that's also an important point to make

because without that farmer, prime farmland ceases to exist. Prime farmland is valuable,

but if there's not somebody there who can work that prime farmland, it doesn't just stay

agricultural land and perpetuity, right? It reverts to something else. Nature, you know,

a force of vacuum, so it's going to get grown up, it's going to get brushy, it's going to be turned

into something else. Maybe that maybe it goes back into forest land, which, you know, wouldn't

necessarily be a bad thing, but more than likely, it's going to get turned into a housing development

or a dollar general or something else that we would rather not see. And so we need to be really

careful about saying prime farmland needs to stay prime farmland without also taking steps to make

sure that the farmer who's working that land who owns that land has the ability economically and

otherwise to keep farming it. I point number two, you brought it up earlier with the chemicals.

Solar contaminates the soil. What does the data actually say? So I think this one is a really

important conversation to have both from a variety of perspectives. One of them is this idea that

people have not necessarily obviously in the solar industry, but people who just aren't familiar

with it and see these solar farms going in, they're like, oh, that looks like a lot of

metal, it looks like a lot of materials. I don't like what that looks like. The reality is that

almost all the components in a solar panel are things that aren't going to contaminate the soil

regardless. Even when you're talking about things like heavy metals, that may exist in small

quantities, what we need to remember here is that soil is not a regular soil. So soil that's not

under a solar panel. Soil is not perfect. It naturally contains heavy metals already. And we

also need to consider the impact that conventional farming has had on those soils and the contaminates

that exist in those soils already before you even install solar. So agrochemicals introduce

heavy metals through things like pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, you're adding things

like cadmium-led copper zinc. I don't know if you remember a few years ago, I think it was,

there was this huge recall of, I think it was baby food. And a lot of that has to do with

chemicals that were in the soil and being taken up by things like carrots. So those chemicals

aren't there anyway. We're still dealing with the fallout of things like leaded gasoline.

And we're still, if you look at the alternative, which is fossil fuels, those certainly aren't

innocent. Those are introducing far more chemicals into the atmosphere and into the soil.

And so that's worth mentioning too, is that you really need to compare apples to oranges here.

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forward slash suncast and give me a virtual two thumbs up. All right, back to today's episode.

What is your favorite or perhaps the most

raucous response of a myth takedown that you've done on LinkedIn?

So I think I had a post back in, I don't know, last summer, if maybe it was June or July.

And it was really talking about that prime farmland question.

And that one got a lot of traction for whatever reason.

Is that the one with like 700 likes on it?

Yeah. Oh, I was like three thousand. Like it was a lot.

Oh, yeah. Okay. It was a lot. And it was like one of the first to say road on LinkedIn,

I was not very present on LinkedIn. I heard that. My publisher said social media is important.

And so I said, okay, let me write something. And it just did blew up. Yeah.

So that one was big lately. I've been getting a lot of pushback on posts that I've been writing.

And there's a few. So I don't know that I would call it a specific one.

But I've been writing a lot about the potential for

agrivoltaics to be this larger model that extends beyond just sheep and shade crops.

I think for for a long time. And I think still,

sheep are really the plug and play option for solar farms, right? They work really well

on existing sites. You don't have to modify a lot. There's like not really any brisk as we

already talked about. The problem, of course, is that we eat on average. The average American eats

about a pound of lamb per year compared to many times that of beef, right? But what we're seeing,

as I mentioned earlier, is our agricultural markets are shifting. And so beef is also

becoming expensive, both for consumers to buy and producers to raise. And so there have been a

lot more conversations about expanding agrivoltaics beyond just sheep and broccoli and kale.

And including more of these crops that I think American agriculture is really in

mesh. So can we raise cattle on solar? Can we grow corn? How does soy fit in? So how do we

figure out how to do those things at a scale that makes sense for the developer and for the farmer?

A lot of the pushback that I get on those is being accused of not being a real farmer,

because I am a sheep farmer. And that's always, you know, and that's that's kind of a cultural issue.

I think we have an American agriculture is that you are not a real farmer unless you are producing

cattle corn or soy. But I think that's starting to change. And I'm hopeful that agrivoltaics is

changing the narrative around them. You said that renewables as an industry has a massive PR problem.

What are we getting wrong? How do we fix it? So as a freelance writer, you know, writing books is

my my passion project, but unfortunately it doesn't really pay the bills. So as a freelancer,

I do a lot of work subcontracting for companies writing, you know, like website copy or blog

purse or things like that. And the number one thing that I think has made me successful doing that

is the understanding that when you are writing something, you're writing anything, you need to do so

with your audience in mind, right? You wouldn't you wouldn't write a, you know, a blog post for your

HVAC company, you know, targeting kindergarten students. You need to think about how you are

articulating things so that you are speaking to the person that needs to hear that message most.

And where I think renewables have gone wrong is that the messaging has always been and this is

important messaging, but it doesn't always resonate with sometimes the people who need to hear it,

is that we need solar and we need when we need renewables because of climate change and we need to

reverse climate change. Unfortunately, the reality is and obviously I don't agree with this or I

wouldn't be on this podcast, but the reality is that a lot of Americans don't even believe that climate

change exists. And even if they do, they don't believe that it's a problem and admittedly for many

of them and you can't blame them. They may perceive it as a problem, but putting food on the table

and feeding their families is more important. So it's not an issue that's in the forefront of

their brains as to what's what's important and what's valuable to be listening to. And they,

you know, and they don't want to see their communities changed, right? Nobody, nobody likes change.

People don't want to see a land that was farmland for 30, 40, 50 years, maybe longer. They don't

want to see that turn into something else and that's understandable. And so where I think

the renewables energy needs to evolve and I see it evolving and it's wonderful, is finding ways to

speak to people who, you know, where climate change may not be the paramount concern. And I think

admiral takes is really valuable there because now you're putting the farmer as the spokesperson

of your of your organization. I think energy has gotten to be a very partisan issue. You know,

you're red or you're blue and your beliefs on energy and what's best aligned with whatever

those camps believe. But I don't think food is partisan. I think everybody recognizes the role

of keeping America's farms strong and healthy and supporting America's farmers. And this is really

I think where renewables need to lean into that as part of their messaging. What's the conversation

sound like when you're engaging with the developers as someone who has made a living and a home

in rural America about how they are failing to understand and respond and integrate into the

same rural communities they're asking a lot of. I think developers have gotten a lot better

at speaking to those rural communities. You know, we've worked with, I think all of them that we

worked with have made a very conscientious effort to go in and say, you know, what is the town

need? Does it need a playground? Do you need an addition to the firehouse? What do you need?

And that's great. But I think what we still need to be cognizant of is that one rural community

is not the same as another rural community, even if those communities are right next to each other.

And so going in with a plan for how things will work and for what messaging you want to put forth

into that community is great, but you need to make sure that messaging is tailored to that

specific community. And I think this is, again, an area where agrival takes is really valuable,

because when you partner with a grazer or a farmer of any kind, you know, early on in the project,

that person is in the community. And they know what that community needs. They know what that

community is concerned about. They know what people are posting about on Facebook or going to

town council meetings, worry about, and they can help bridge that gap between the developer and the

town. What do you find is the most challenging or common mistake that developers make when they

begin to start thinking about and integrating grazing as a land management strategy? I think

kind of, you know, hardening back to my last point. I think it's assuming it's all one size fits

all. You know, we'll be on calls with developers early on, and they'll say, well, you know,

how many sheep are you going to need for this site? And the answer is always, I don't know.

Right. Well, I don't, you know, and it's like, well, we haven't, you know, we need to walk the

site. We need to see what the topography is like, how rocky is it? What's the soil like?

What kind of vegetation is growing there? How disturbed was that by construction? Oh, you know,

what stage is this project that has it been, you know, has it been operational for a few years or

did you just build it? You know, what's the weather like that year? You know, is it a dry year,

is it a wet year? What stage are the animals? Are they, you know, are we putting on, you know,

dry use? Are we putting on lactating use? Are we putting on ram lands? So there's a lot of variables

there. And often these really don't ultimately matter to the developer. It's all about how we manage

our herd. But those are our questions that I think developers tend to get a little concerned about

early on. And they think, well, you know, it needs to be formulaic, like you need to do x, y, and z.

And really there's, there's a lot of variation, just like there's variation in, in what towns

care about, there's variation in how different sites are managed and need to be managed based on,

based on all those factors. You mentioned that you've gone through several cycles, one being droughts,

where you were able to see kind of how others have to deal with periods of, you know, no water.

How did four original performance on those solar sites compare to conventional pastures?

I'm curious what you, what insights you've leaned from that, did you change how you think about

solar as a climate resilience tool, more than just an income tool, and just generally going through

a drought, how I helped kind of expand your horizon there. That was actually kind of a cool

experience for us, because I wrote about, you know, studies that were demonstrating that solar can

be beneficial for animals in dry weather in my book. But I hadn't really seen this firsthand. I

think, you know, I mentioned earlier to you that we live in a relatively human climate. So the first

few years we were solar grazing were relatively wet years. Actually, a couple of them were wetter

than normal. And so this last year when we had a drought, it was very interesting to see those

studies kind of playing out in real life. So we went through the entire, I think it was almost the

entire month of August last year where we got next to no rainfall. And while grazers around us were

having to resort to hay feeding, because the pastures just wasn't growing, we kept animals on

solar throughout the entire season. I took some pictures and I posted them on my LinkedIn. And it

was kind of hard to see in the pictures just because I'm taking, you know, pictures with a crappy

iPhone. But if you were there in person, you could see that the vegetation that was underneath

the panels or even anywhere the shade touched was still lush and green and tender and the sheep were

just having the time of their lives. So they were accessing higher quality forage and they were

also staying a lot cooler because when they're not eating, they're lounging and they're lounging

under the shade of the panels rather than out in the direct sunlight. So that was really, really

interesting for us to see. And, you know, brought just another one of those benefits of solar

grazing to the fore. I grew up in farm town and I watched farmers sort of reach their sort of

physical boundaries. They might have hundreds of thousands of acres, but it's usually two or three

counties. At what point does a solar site become too large or too far to manage effectively?

That's a really good question. So far, we haven't had any of those issues yet. We travel just by

virtue of where we live. We're traveling, I think, two and a half hours is our furthest site away.

I don't know that we'd want to go any further than that, just because it becomes really difficult

to manage animal health at that point. You know, we've got systems set up where we could realistically,

if we want concerned about animal health, we could check in once a week or every other week

because we have enough water for them on site. But we wouldn't want to do that because we don't

think that's good stocksmanship. We want to make sure we're checking on our animals frequently,

and so two and a half hours is our limit. We're only grazing at the time being. We're only grazing

small community solar sites, so they're all maximum 30 acres. We're not opposed to grazing larger.

There's plenty of grazers who are grazing sites vastly larger than what we are grazing. We just

don't have those in upstate New York yet. I think the largest site that we're in conversations for

the summer 70 acres, which is still drop in the bucket compared to others. I don't know that we found

our personal limit. It's kind of one of those things. Every year, my husband and I joke,

when we get another contract, we're like, well, are we going to have to buy a more sheep,

are we going to have to reconsider our breeding strategies, and it's always well. We'll figure it out

when we get there. We do. I think when there's a world, there's a way, and farmers are really good at

using balance wine and duct tape to hold things together. That's not a great answer to your question,

but it's a big, I don't know. Yeah. Well, I think, and I've had some conversations with

the folks who run the regenerative program at Light Source BP and Silicon Ranch. Have some

context. I actually will link to an episode that we did with the Light Source BP folks that

talk more about, I mean, all their projects are huge, right? 100 plus matter of what. For folks not

familiar with the conversion, like a 70 acre site, you can kind of roughly assume five acres per

megawatt. The sites that Rebecca's cheaper on are in the like one to 20 megawatt range. It

was broadly scope in there. We talked about how you are inherently a writer. I have a sense of why

you wrote the book, but what drove you to write this specific book? Go ahead and introduce and talk

about the topic of the book, but I'm really curious why you decided to write it and how you thought

about it being something that is relevant, not just restricted to your friends and family in Facebook.

So I originally started writing this back in 2022, which was about the same time we got our first

solar grazing contract. And when I started writing it, I did so because I knew that sheep worked

really well on solar. And I wanted to find a way to learn about and connect with people who

were doing other things as well. I wanted a book that would not necessarily serve as like, you know,

when I first started drafting it out, I'm like, is this going to be kind of like a how-to for

people who want to get into solar grazing? And as I started working on that, I realized that

wasn't what I wanted to write. What I wanted to write was a book that would appeal to the general

public. And it was funny because when I first started working on proposals, my agent and my publisher

eventually, when I got a publisher, it was like, well, you can't just say the general public is

your audience. Like, that's not an audience. And as somebody with a marketing background, I'm like,

I know, but like, that's that's what I really want to target, right? Like, it's not necessarily,

it is a book for primers and it is a book for solar folks. But it's a book, what I want it to be,

and I hope when it became, was a book that would address all of these concerns that I write about

on LinkedIn, about that people have about solar and how solar and agriculture and not just solar,

but also things like wind can come together and and and form real solutions. So as I started writing

it, again, it was a very much a solar focused book and very much solar and cheap. But then my goal

was to branch out and discuss all of the other methods of farming and all of the other different

crops that can be produced under solar, but also under wind and also even things, you know,

like on farm solar for farmers, you know, on farm wind. So all of those different models of

integrating the two systems together. Because again, I'm a I'm a systems person. And so that's

what I wanted this book to look at. Is there sort of like an inner circle for folks like you and

Byron Commonek and others that are like promoting agrivoltaics mostly here in the United States?

Like, do you guys talk? Is there like a click of WhatsApp chat?

Kind of. So there's a lot of different organizations here in the United States. So the American

Solar Raising Association is really the the foundational. And I think right now probably the

most important group that exists. They've been in it for the long haul on and and they've done

a really great job of bringing people together both from the agriculture world and from

the energy world and talking about solutions and those practical ideas. You know, there's also

groups that are sponsored by organizations like American Farmland Trust that do a great job

of bringing people together the solar farm summit. That's a great

shout out there. You know, they've done an excellent job and especially when it comes in person

dialogue, I think the solar farm summit is superior to all the rest. And then there's other, you

know, informal networking groups that have been popping up. I'm in a few myself. You know,

I've started one myself. And so I think the conversations are beginning and there's been more

dialogue about, okay, like our group of people. Like if you get in this in this group and you

you know, like, you know, I recognize Byron Sam immediately. He's interviewed in the book.

Like we all know each other. We all talk to each other. And I think now the goal is taking those

internal conversations and figuring out ways to evangelize a little bit better. Well, I'm glad

you actually took it there because as we begin to wrap here, I wanted to talk a bit about

the notion as a writer of finding a stride around the line between thought leadership and

self-promotion because you didn't go to LinkedIn because you thought to yourself one day, I

should be a writer on LinkedIn. It was more selfishly driven. And that's not a bad thing as an author

by a need to find your audience and to test the message, right? So you have become an evangelist.

And quite a good one. I'm super impressed, which is why I reached out. I'm impressed at your

ability to articulate things that folks like us who've been in the industry for 20 years failed

to articulate in public, right? So your LinkedIn presence exploded. You mentioned one that hit like

3000. It's like 160 plus thousand impressions. I'm sure it's way more than that now. What do you think

made has made these posts resonate that seem to be going viral for you? And then how do you navigate

that line between thought leadership and self-promotion? What I always say is I'm for somebody who works

in marketing as a freelancer. I'm probably the worst person in the world when it comes to marketing

myself because I don't like doing it. But I care really deeply about these topics, about

agriculture and about energy. And so I think that has made it a little bit easier for me to put

myself out there in that regard and to write about these things. And I think I hope, and I'm not

going to speak for anybody, but I think I'm just I'm honest. Like I'm not trying to sell anything.

Some people will call me out on LinkedIn. They're like, well, you're just trying to get views or

you're an influencer. I am the furthest thing from an influencer. Trust me. That is not a career path.

I'm interested in. And I'm not working for anybody. I'm not selling anything. I just I really care

about these topics because at the end of the day, they affect my farm. And I have a five-year-old

little boy who wants nothing more than to run the farm one day. And so I want to make sure that

there is a farm left for him to run. And so that's why I'm so passionate about these topics. And I

think, I think being genuine shows through more than any other kind of, you know, canned

messaging that you could write up there. How much time do you spend thinking about

jotting down? Like what's what does it look like in your head to get a LinkedIn content calendar

together? I don't think you want to know it. It looks like it's terrifying. I don't have a content

calendar. I try to post at least once if I can two to three times a week just to keep the conversation

going. But, you know, it's running the farm. It's busy. So that doesn't always happen. And it's

not curated. You know, I manage content calendars for clients, you know, five days a week. And so

for me, it's just, what am I interested in right now? Who am I talking to? And what is current?

Like so what what topics are coming up? So I wrote a post, you know, a few months ago when the

beef Argentina news was coming out. Right. Because I thought that was really relevant for

for cattle voltage. And so yeah, I just try to kind of keep my pulse on what's going on. And then

I sit down and I draft something and then I edit it heavily. The biggest challenge for me on LinkedIn

is the character limits because you can't write more than I think it's 3,000 characters. And I am

not a short form writer in the slightest. I like to ramble on. And so yeah, so that I mean,

that's my process. I guess I just get the get the word vomit out there on the page and then

edit it so that it's as concise as it can be and still get the message across.

If there's one to ask I have of our listeners is not necessarily like go out and buy Rebecca's

book, although I would encourage you to do that because it helps support her as a writer. But

the easiest step is to just go subscribe and follow her on LinkedIn and watch what she's doing.

I mean, not every post is a viral success and a banger, but she's there consistently,

which is the number one rule. And she does it her way. Like there's no, I can tell you

having looked at all of her posts. There's no structure that she pulled from somebody else who's

successful. It's Rebecca just putting into written form the way she's thinking about a problem

that she thinks needs to be addressed. And I really admire that. I want to move into a segment we

call quick charge. Just quick answers. Don't ever think it. And then we've got one final question

to close out the interview. What's one myth about solar that you are most tired of hearing?

That it only works well with sheep. So there's this huge myth. And I've written about it a lot

that solar, you know, agriboltayx is really a system that only works well with sheep. And

therefore it is not valuable because we don't have a strong sheep economy. The reality is that it

does work really well with sheep, but that we're also seeing a million other things that can be

done. Cattle is one. And yeah, crops, you name it. Yeah. The problem is that we just need to build

all of the solar in New Zealand. Yeah. One myth about, all right. So one thing, what's one thing

that developers underestimate about farmers? Our ability to solve problems. I think I mentioned

earlier that if you give us some duct tape and some valentine, we can figure it out. I've heard

from some developers and I really like this that we need to start treating farmers as subject matter

experts rather than just, you know, Joe, the farmer down the road. And I think that's really

valuable. You know, we can figure it out. We know what we're doing. If I could give you a team

and a five million dollar check to go champion one policy, what policy would we have the most

effect on accelerating agribot energy adoption? That's a tough one. And I'm torn on that. I always

like to say that it would be great if there was a policy that mandated agriboltayx non-every solar

site in the United States. However, I think we've already seen the impacts of the solar industry

being a little bit too hamstrung. And I think the problem when you have a policy that says you have

to have agriboltayx, then you get solutions that aren't necessarily respective of the individuality

of that site. So a site might not be great for grazing sheep, but it might be great for growing

broccoli. A site might not be great for cattle, but it might be good for pumpkins. And so I think

a policy that mandates agriboltayx in some form would be great, but we need to make sure we're not

too narrowly defining what agriboltayx means and what it looks like. What's something this

solar industry needs to stop saying? That doesn't work. And I say that doesn't work as applied to

a medley of situations. So as an example, when we first started doing this literally just four

years ago, it's not ancient history by any means. We were always told and we always repeated

this idea that you can't put cattle on solar because really at the time not that many people

were doing it if anybody was doing it at all. And now cattle on solar has become so popular

that it has a name, cattle botayx. And people always say we can't put goats on solar. And I always

say let's not say can't. Let's say we aren't doing it right now. Or it's not easy right now because

I think once you put the word can't in there, it puts up this mental roadblock of there are no

possible solutions. And I'm a farmer and there's a solution for almost everything. You just have to

be willing to put in the thought and the ability to budge a little bit in order to get that job done.

Rebecca, you've said the aggravoltax isn't a compromise. It's really the future of farming

as evidenced by sort of the wish list sort of policy that you would implement. But there's

you know always sort of there's always going to be sort of jagged edges around around our ideal

future states. If it's true that aggravoltax isn't a compromise and it's a future of farming,

what kind of farmer does that future require? A farmer who is willing to push boundaries.

And to say it's okay that that's not the way that I've always done things. I'm willing to see

how I can do this. Is there something that needs to happen for the solar industry to stop

treating aggravoltax like it's an add-on? You know maybe even like sheepwashing and start designing

projects around it from day one? And that's where I'm torn on this like the do we need a larger

policy initiative? Do we need to force the solar industry to say this is how things have to be

done from now on? And I'm torn I think in many ways it it would provide it you know provide

that assurance that they're not treating it as an add-on? Yeah I don't know. I think that's a good

first step but again not being too prescriptive and how that's laid out. Rebecca Pierce is a farmer

an author and a LinkedIn influencer on the realities of solar grazing and aggravoltax. Rebecca

thanks for doing what you're doing. Keep it up really. I'm a huge fan. I hope that others

through this medium will become fans. I appreciate you so much. Thanks for joining us on Suncast.

Thank you so much. Rebecca thank you this has been a masterclass not just in how grazing works

for solar but in thinking about the systems that serve both industries farming and solar. If you're

listening and you care about the future of farmland, the future of energy or the survival of our

small farms, please go pick up her book Aggra Energy Growing Power and Growing Food. Rick Pierce

I appreciate how you show up as I said before and I want to ask others to please take a page from

Rebecca's book you don't have to have some magical content strategy or a content calendar pre-planned.

You do need to intentionally and consistently set time aside to communicate in public about the

things that matter to sticking points, the myths that are foisted upon us like solar panels are

somehow leaching chemicals into the soil. The only time I've heard that as any possible feasible

reality is when we when we fail to do the right thing with them at the end of life and they end

up in a landfill. We have to prevent that from happening and there are some amazing folks doing

work to that. And speaking of folks doing amazing work, I'm grateful for the companies that support

Suncast you've no doubt heard their ads here on the show you can check them out at suncast.media-forward-slash-sponsors

they help pay the bills so all you have to pay is attention it's not lost on me that ain't free

either so thank you for being here remember you are what you listen to thanks again for showing up

solar warrior it's half the bat