Canada just turned a herd of pigs loose between the rows of a solar farm, a breed picked because it grazes weeds along the surface instead of digging up the wiring, cleaning up what the sheep skip under 109,000 panels outside Calgary
www.autonocion.com
Solar grazing is common enough now that the world's largest solar farm grew so much grass on a Tibetan plateau that its operator had to bring in 20,000 sheep

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8885560

It fits a pattern that keeps showing up at these sites, where the same solar farms accused of sterilizing the land quietly do the opposite once somebody manages the ground on purpose. An endangered California fox moved into two solar plants and survived as well inside the fence as the foxes living outside it. Strathmore is the agricultural version of the same surprise.

From the road, Strathmore Solar looks less like a power station every year and more like a slightly eccentric hobby farm (sheep in the grass, pigs working the weeds, chickens in a self-driving coop, bees in a shed) that happens to push 41 megawatts onto the grid while nobody’s looking.

Whether the rest of the industry follows comes down to the soil numbers, and those won’t be in for years. But the basic trick is already doing what it was hired to do. The weeds are down, the fire risk is down, the diesel mower is parked, and the land underneath is still, in every sense that matters to a farmer, a farm.