Across rural New South Wales, flocks of sheep are grazing beneath rows of solar panels, quietly turning large-scale renewable energy sites into working farmland. The practice, known as solar grazing, pairs livestock management with clean energy generation on the same parcel of land, offering farmers a second income stream while potentially reducing vegetation maintenance costs for solar operators. With NSW Government agencies now promoting the approach through guidance, this low-profile arrangement is gaining traction as renewable energy projects expand.
How Sheep and Solar Panels Share the Same Paddock
Solar grazing works on a straightforward principle: sheep eat the grass and weeds that grow beneath and around ground-mounted solar arrays, replacing the need for mechanical mowing or chemical herbicides. In return, the panels provide shade and shelter for the animals, a meaningful benefit during Australia’s harsh summers and unpredictable weather. The NSW Government now highlights this model of dual-use solar farming as a way for landholders to maintain productivity on sites that might otherwise be locked away behind security fencing for decades, reframing solar farms as part of the rural landscape rather than a replacement for it.
The arrangement is not purely about convenience. For solar farm operators, unmanaged vegetation poses real risks, including fire hazards and shading that reduces panel efficiency. Sheep handle the job without diesel-powered mowers or the liability of chemical runoff, and they can move easily between panel rows that might be inaccessible to larger machinery. For graziers, the deal can offer added income stability, because lease payments from solar operators are typically set by contract rather than wool or lamb prices. That financial cushion matters in regions where drought and commodity swings can wipe out a season’s earnings overnight, and where farmers are looking for ways to diversify without giving up their identity as primary producers.
New Government Handbook Sets the Rules
The practice moved from informal experiment to official policy when EnergyCo, part of the NSW Government, released a detailed agrivoltaics handbook in December 2025. The document sets out practical guidance on planning, design, and implementation of integrated grazing and solar in an Australian context, covering everything from standardized terminology to how developers should think about laneways, water points, and shade structures. It signals that policymakers see solar grazing not as a novelty but as a land management strategy that can be scaled across multiple renewable energy zones.
Risk management receives significant attention in the handbook. It addresses animal welfare protocols, biosecurity requirements, fencing standards, and fire mitigation, all areas where solar grazing can go wrong without clear rules. The guidance is designed to give both solar developers and farmers a shared framework, reducing the friction that has slowed adoption on earlier projects where contracts were negotiated ad hoc and expectations were misaligned. By codifying best practices, the handbook aims to make it easier for new solar farms to include grazing from the design stage rather than retrofitting it later, which in turn should lower costs and improve outcomes for both energy generation and agricultural production.
The Fencing Problem and Other Practical Hurdles
For all its appeal, solar grazing comes with complications that generic renewable energy planning rarely considers. Sheep are smaller and more agile than cattle, which means they require finer mesh or additional strands to prevent escapes or injuries near electrical infrastructure. A January 2025 analysis in The Conversation noted that specialised fencing and cable protection are essential to keep animals away from exposed wiring and junction boxes that can deliver fatal shocks. The cost of upgrading perimeter and internal fencing is not trivial, and it falls into a grey zone between the solar operator’s capital budget and the grazier’s operational expenses, making clear contractual allocation of these costs a recurring point of negotiation.
That same analysis argued that, despite these complications, grazing sheep on solar farms benefits everyone involved when the arrangement is properly managed. Solar operators save on vegetation control and reduce the need for herbicides, helping them meet environmental and community expectations. Farmers gain reliable lease income and sheltered pasture that can remain productive even in dry years, while local communities retain visible agricultural activity on land that might otherwise appear industrialised. The challenge is ensuring that contracts clearly allocate responsibility for infrastructure upgrades, veterinary access, and emergency protocols. Without that clarity, the mutual benefits can erode quickly, particularly on large sites where thousands of panels stretch across hundreds of hectares and minor misunderstandings can turn into costly disputes.
Climate and Forage Shape What Works Where
Not every solar farm is suited to sheep grazing, and the science behind vegetation management on these sites is more complex than simply releasing a flock into a fenced area. A peer-reviewed review in Small Ruminant Research examined the key factors that determine grazing success on solar farms, identifying regional climate variability and forage availability as critical constraints. In the drier parts of western New South Wales, for instance, natural grass growth may be too sparse to sustain a flock year-round, requiring supplemental feed that eats into the economic case for grazing. In wetter coastal or tablelands regions, rapid vegetation growth might overwhelm a small flock, demanding higher stocking rates that can increase the risk of soil compaction, erosion, and overgrazing if not carefully managed.
The review highlights that effective solar grazing depends on matching sheep numbers and breeds to site-specific conditions, including soil type, rainfall patterns, and the species composition of ground cover. This is not a one-size-fits-all solution: a solar farm outside Dubbo will need a different grazing plan than one near Wagga Wagga, and both will need to adapt stocking rates as seasons shift between drought, average rainfall, and wet years. Access to water and supplemental feed is another recurring constraint, particularly on remote sites where existing farm infrastructure has been removed or where panel layouts make vehicle access difficult. These findings reinforce the value of the NSW Government’s handbook approach: without standardized guidance that accounts for Australia’s climatic diversity and the practical realities of livestock management, solar grazing risks being adopted unevenly or abandoned after early failures that could have been avoided with better planning.
What Solar Sheep Mean for Australia’s Energy Transition
Most public debate about renewable energy in rural Australia focuses on transmission lines, battery storage, and community opposition to large-scale projects. Solar grazing sits slightly outside that contentious space, offering a practical arrangement where energy generation and agricultural production can coexist on the same land with fewer trade-offs than some other forms of development. For farmers wary of losing productive paddocks to infrastructure, the sight of sheep still moving under the panels can soften perceptions of solar farms as an outright land use change. For developers, being able to point to ongoing agricultural activity can help secure social licence and address concerns that renewables are displacing food and fibre production.
As New South Wales pursues its renewable energy targets, the integration of sheep into solar farm design illustrates a broader shift in thinking about how infrastructure is planned in regional areas. Rather than treating solar arrays as closed industrial sites, the emerging model treats them as multi-functional landscapes where energy, grazing, biodiversity corridors, and even community access can be layered together. Getting there will require continued refinement of technical standards, better sharing of on-the-ground experience between graziers and engineers, and contracts that recognise the true costs and benefits on both sides of the fence. If those pieces come together, the quiet work of sheep beneath solar panels could become one of the more durable, low-conflict foundations of Australia’s energy transition, keeping rural livelihoods and renewable power generation closely intertwined for decades to come.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
