Wow!! Thanks to @foodtank for highlighting "Agri-Energy: Growing Power, Growing Food" as part of their Fall 2026 Reading List. Truly humbled to have my book included among these outstanding titles below (and grateful for some reading suggestions to get me through this long snowy winter 😉 ).

Throwback Thursday to the time in 2019 we decided we should purchase, disassemble, and reassemble an entire 30x96 hoop barn ourselves. 😬 When we first started the farm, we scraped by with smaller homemade barns and huts for farrowing and lambing. But once we started to expand, we had to build out, and a stick-built barn of this size just was not in the budget (still isn’t).  Luckily, some friends of ours were getting out of the greenhouse business and sold one of their old hoophouses to us at a great price, provided that we take it down and move it ourselves.  About five months of work later (some of the progression is evident in these photos), and we had a structure that has gotten ample use ever since, first for our small flock of Icelandics and laying hens (and an ill-fated experiment in growing tomatoes, more on that another day), and now as a dedicated lambing barn for roughly half of our ewes.  The ewes come home from solar grazing in the fall and spend the winter here, with additional access to fenced-in pasture on the home farm. They lamb in the barn (which stays nice and warm despite not being heated) and then head back out to graze in late April.

Whenever I post pictures or videos of the cows grazing solar, we are told, with absolute confidence, that cattle CANNOT graze on solar farms. It’s a real headscratcher for me, since we have, in fact, been doing just that. But we’re obviously wrong. Because obviously the cattle WILL destroy the panels, they WILL rip out the wires, they WILL knock over the equipment, and probably dismantle the entire electrical grid and plunge the Eastern Seaboard into darkness while they’re at it. One cow gets a little unruly and we’ve got Mad Max with a little more manure. Now, here’s the thing: as is the case with all dumb comments, there is a little bit of truth there: some cows WOULD do all those things. If you unload a trailer full of cattle that have never seen an electric fence, that aren’t used to being around humans, into a solar array, if you turn them loose and just hope for the best…yeah. You might have a few problems. Which is why we don’t do that. We train our cattle to respect hot wire. We introduce them to fencing in controlled environments, on our pastures back home. We consider their temperament, as well as their stocking density and grazing rotations, with attention to their surroundings. We don’t open the barn door, slap Tina on the ass, and tell her to get out there and enjoy that good clean American energy. It’s called livestock management. And I know this may come as a shock, but different farms can manage the same species of livestock with wildly different results. A cow that has never respected a fence could very well make a mess of a solar array. But a cow like Tina here, who has been properly trained and managed, can graze without incident. Does it mean there’s no risk? Of course not. Cattle are large animals with the occasional decision-making ability of a shopping cart with a broken wheel. But that’s why we manage them. We monitor them. We adjust our behaviors accordingly. Humans have spent generations figuring out how to graze cattle around roads, buildings, expensive equipment, and other things we’d rather they didn’t destroy. Just because YOUR cows might destroy everything doesn’t mean OURS will. Your management is not my management, Linda. And respectfully, we don’t need a 47-comment explanation of what your cousin’s neighbor’s sister’s bull did to a gate in 1998 to understand how cattle behave. We can see it for ourselves.

I’ve been informed, many times, that because we graze sheep on solar farms, we’re “suckling at the government teat.” (Those are my words. Usually the accusations aren’t quite as flowery, but do contain more expletives than I’ve ever seen written on a bathroom wall basically anywhere). So here’s how our business works: a private solar company needs vegetation managed. We own sheep, carry insurance, have the equipment, and provide that service. The company pays us. “bUt tHe SoLAr CoMPany gEtS tAx CRediTs!!” Yep. Well aware. This is usually tied to the accusation that we, as the hired graziers, are freeloading off the taxpayer’s dime. But let’s play that logic out. Does that mean that, if you buy feed for your chickens at Tractor Supply, the corn in which was grown using federally subsidized crop insurance…that YOU are a freeloader? Does that mean an electrician hired to wire a warehouse is inherently corrupt because the manufacturer paying them receives tax incentives? What about the contractor hired to construct a commercial building for a company that received an economic development grant? Or the truck driver utilizing public roads to deliver the materials needed for all the above? How many degrees of separation from a tax incentive are required before someone is allowed to earn an honest living? I don’t have the time or interest in investigating the tax records of every single person or company I have a financial transaction with during the course of the day. That’s exhausting. I don’t want to have to do a full “Law & Order" investigation every time somebody pays an invoice. (Special Victims Unit: Tax Credit Edition). And I’m not campaigning to preserve solar subsidies. If policymakers decide to take them away, so be it. But the same logic should be applied to every other industry. We need to have consistency in these conversations. Apparently, it's only an honest day's work if you can trace every dollar back through the economy and confirm that nobody, anywhere, ever received a government benefit. Good luck with that. Full breakdown of my thoughts (read it before ya bitch, please) here: rebekahpierce.substack.com/p…

Over the last few days, I’ve seen a lot of posts about John Rich coming to Upstate New York to help protect and defend “our farmland” from solar development. And I think that’s wonderful news. Because, surely, that means we’ve collectively decided to start helping farmers pay their property taxes, mortgages, equipment loans, insurance premiums, and all the other expenses required to keep “our farmland” in production.  Right? There’s so much irony in this “movement.” There’s the irony that those rallying about the “environmental degradation” wrought by solar have absolutely nothing to say about the proven damages of continued fossil fuel use. Or those who complain about the aesthetics are quite mum about the appearance of a nuclear plant, coal mine, or natural gas refinery.  Or, perhaps one of the more entertaining, watching people who warn ominously of a looming “socialist takeover” of agriculture while simultaneously referring to privately owned farmland as though it belongs to the general public. Have we forgotten what socialism truly is? In New York State, and elsewhere (the exception being solar development on public lands, which does not occur here and largely exists in the West, and is something I've already voiced my opposition to), solar developers can’t just show up, declare eminent domain, and start planting solar panels in someone’s hayfield. Even large-scale solar projects that go before the Office of Renewable Energy Siting must start with agreements from willing landowners. In New York, no farmland is put into solar without the farmer’s sign-off. There is no exception to that rule. Not a single one. So…are we suggesting that farmers are incapable of making informed decisions about their own property? That we’re a bunch of gullible country bumpkins who can’t read our own contracts? That we aren’t capable of consulting our own legal counsel with questions, of understanding the financial implications of a solar lease, or figuring out what’s the best choice for our land and families? Are we planning to pass the hat around to pay for attorneys who can help farmers review those contracts? Because if you’re really, truly worried that we’re too dumb to make these decisions, by all means: I think a dedicated fund for legal counsel would be an excellent use of everyone’s time, money, and energy. Truly, I’m glad that we all have this sudden, passionate interest in protecting farmers’ financial interests. I just wish that enthusiasm extended beyond TikTok and into real life.  I’m tired. I’m tired of listening to people rant and rave, people who have never had to sweat out the terms of an operating loan, or subsist on just four hours of sleep a night for months during lambing or calving or sugaring, or worry about how they’ll make the mortgage payment when milk prices continue to tank. I’m tired of being called “a sellout” by people who have made themselves guardians of somebody else’s acreage while continuing to get their food not from farm stands and CSAs but from Walmart and DoorDash. I am tired of the complete and utter cognitive dissonance. Look. If we want to advocate for farmers, or even for farmland, that’s great. But we sure as hell aren’t going about it the right way. The way to do it is not by saying, “Hey, have you considered making less money so I don’t have to look at solar panels?” You want to support a farmer? Be willing to pay what food actually costs, not what the government says it costs. Be willing to trust farmers when they say they know what’s best for their land. Stop treating us like unpaid caretakers of the rural scenery you enjoy driving past.  And spare me the lectures about solar subsidies. Especially when those lectures come from content creators who are perfectly comfortable using taxpayer-funded agricultural grants to finance their “self-sufficient” barns with in-floor heating that they did not build themselves and have never been used to grow a single ounce of food to be sold to the public.  I’m all for protecting farmland. But I care a hell of a lot more about the farmers who own it.  Not every square inch of farmland needs to be put into solar. I’ve never argued that it should. I HAVE argued that these decisions need to be made by actual working farmers, not neighbors, not politicians, and certainly not social media influencers playacting as changemakers. Farmland doesn’t remain in production through manufactured Facebook outrage, celebrity appearances, or inspirational speeches about how valuable American farmland is.  It stays in agriculture when somebody can afford to continue farming it.

We recently began the long process of moving the stock home for the winter.  One of the more common questions we get is what our operations look like when the grazing season is over. Sometimes, this is paired with a bit of derision that really serves no purpose beyond just highlighting an ignorance of what ranching is like in the Northeast; there’s an underlying “gotcha!” when we “admit” that we do bring our animals home for the winter and don’t keep them grazing solar sites year-round. This may come as a surprise to some, but grass does not grow in January in Clinton County, NY, when there’s as much as two or three feet of snow on the ground. Now, sheep are actually pretty good at finding forage beneath a little snow - they will paw and nose around to find any residual vegetation under a few inches. We do frequently stockpile graze sites later into the year as long as the growing conditions cooperate (a few feet is a different story).  This year, our management plan and the early season frosts we got just didn’t allow for much leftover grazing. So we’re bringing them back home, where we will finish grazing out any of the forage left on our home pastures and then hay-feed until the spring green-up.  The other reason we bring animals home for the winter, besides the weather, is lambing. While we know many producers who lamb on pasture; we prefer not to do it. It would add an extra management layer for us, and we prefer to keep them close by during this season in case problems come up. With several hundred lambs expected this year, having to drive offsite to tend to the flock would be incredibly cumbersome.  Plus, selfishly, I really like popping out to the barn for lamb snuggles and snoot-boops whenever I want.

While the rest of the garden now looks like a crime scene (RIP to my tomatoes and squashes, which took a final killing frost last weekend), the raspberries are in their Michael Myers era. Every time I think they’re finally dead, I turn around and…there they are again. We’ve been harvesting several quarts, several times a week, since early summer, with only a brief hiatus when things were super hot.  Even though we’re now approaching Halloween and we’ve had several nights of freezing temperatures, these babies are holding on (so, too, are the bees; I learned the hard way a few weeks ago not to stick my hand blindly into a cluster of berries 😬). Anyway - send me your raspberry recipes! I’m running out of ideas faster than we’re running out of berries.

We’ve discovered a serious problem with our solar grazing operation. Despite the Internet’s repeated assurances that “nothing grows beneath solar panels,” our sheep have been violating the laws of photosynthesis, agriculture, and the rabid Facebook comment sections all summer long. Each fall, we measure our rams to get an idea of who to retain for breeding, who to send to market, and to get a benchmark of our management that will guide our decisions in the upcoming year. This year, we averaged 0.41 pounds per day across our ram group. For reference, Penn State and Washington State extensions cite typical pasture-raised lamb gains of 0.25 to 0.35 pounds per day. Not bad for animals who are supposedly grazing their way through the tenth circle of Dante’s Inferno. The lion’s share of the credit goes to Josh for excellent grazing management, but shade and rotation each played a big role here, too. I explained more of the science of forage quality beneath solar panels in my latest Substack, complete with research, citations, and receipts. It's linked in the comments, so give it a read before you throw shade yourself. Our sheep have already made better use of it, anyway. 😎 rebekahpierce.substack.com/p…?

I'm frequently informed that grazing sheep on solar farms isn't real agriculture because our sheep are supposedly “just lawnmowers,” and we're not producing an actual agricultural product. Somebody better tell Meb, one of our herd sires. He's currently working VERY hard to increase agricultural production, apparently unaware that he's supposed to just be mowing the lawn. Enthusiastically, actually. Wildly inappropriate levels of enthusiasm. He's attempting to turn every available lawnmower into approximately 1.5 lawnmowers. The man has a business plan. Please respect it. And I gotta say, his work ethic is inspiring. HR has, however, received several complaints from the ewes.

Who pays to clean up a solar farm when it shuts down? Ah, yes. One of my favorite questions, one I’m asked several times per post, in comments that smugly assert confidence without expressing a single ounce of critical thinking.  Now, here’s something that might come as a shock: we have regulations for this. Strict ones. Let’s talk specifically about New York, since that’s where I’m writing from, but keep in mind that almost every other state has similar-looking regulations as far as solar decommissioning goes.  (Yes, I’ve researched it. I wrote a book on agrivoltaics and believe it or not, traditional publishers prefer manuscripts with cited sources instead of 200+ pages of “trust me, bro, I know a guy.”). Back to New York.  Here, large solar projects permitted through the state are required to have decommissioning plans AND financial security to pay for equipment removal and land restoration. The financial guarantee is calculated using estimated cleanup costs, plus a 15% contingency, minus projected salvage value. The financial security must remain in place until the project is fully decommissioned. Now, before you darlings start furiously typing your “gotchas,” NO, that doesn’t mean every solar installation automatically has a decommissioning bond. Projects under 25 MW are permitted locally, so towns can (and typically do) require their own decommissioning plans and financial guarantees. Requirements vary by municipality, and some are stronger than others.  Should every commercial solar farm have an enforceable cleanup plan backed by adequate financial security? Absolutely, yes. Should those guarantees be reviewed periodically to account for changing costs? Also yes. Look at me! Acknowledging that regulations can be improved without pretending the entire industry operates under the honor system. (There’s that critical thinking at work, folks!). So let’s talk numbers. NYSERDA examined more than 100 New York solar decommissioning cost estimates produced between 2021 and 2024. The average was approximately $50,000 per megawatt in 2024 dollars, before contingencies and salvage value. For perspective, that's roughly $5 MILLION in estimated cleanup costs for a hypothetical 100 MW project. The actual amount of financial security required depends on the project's specific estimates, contingencies and salvage value. And providing that financial security is the developer’s responsibility, tied to the project, and meant to protect communities if the developer fails to fulfill its cleanup obligations. While we're expressing such enthusiastic concern about who pays to clean up energy infrastructure, I'd love to discuss something else. In November 2021, the federal government authorized $4.7 billion to address orphaned oil and gas wells and another $11.3 billion for abandoned coal mine reclamation. That's $16 BILLION in federal funding allocated to address legacy pollution from energy infrastructure, including sites where the original operators are no longer available to pay for cleanup.  And yes, the coal industry contributes to certain reclamation funds, and modern fossil fuel operations have their own cleanup requirements. Still, the historical cleanup bill is substantial enough that we're still committing billions in public funding to address it to this day. Somehow, though, I can post a picture of a sheep or cow standing under a solar panel and immediately get interrogated about who’s going to clean everything up in 30 years. Listen, I’m delighted we’ve discovered environmental accountability. I’m a huge fan.  But perhaps we could find the same enthusiasm for addressing the environmental damage we're already spending billions to clean up, rather than reserving all our outrage for a hypothetical solar farm that hasn't even been decommissioned yet. I'm all for holding energy companies accountable. ALL of them. Apparently, environmental accountability is controversial when you apply it equally. I'll update my invoice for my Big Solar Shilling accordingly.

Our pigs have been enjoying an exquisite five-star farm-to-table dining experience, courtesy of North Point Community Farm. Our friends at this local vegetable farm have been sharing their scraps, and the porcine reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. Big thanks to our neighbors down the road!

Internet: “The grass is too tall. Those sheep obviously aren’t grazing.” A quick note before we begin: most of the photos I post are taken right after we move the sheep or cows onto a fresh strip. They’re much easier to photograph when they’re busy eating and ignoring me, so yes, the forage often looks tall in those pictures. But if “too tall” means “it doesn’t look like a golf course,” then, yeah. The Great Grass Detective are correct. However, nobody is hiring us to manage pastures that way. Nor should we. We’re managing a biological system, not detailing a putting green. We don’t leave our animals in one place until every plant has been shaved down to a uniform two inches. We move them through sections, let them eat, then give the pasture time to recover. Why? Because grass needs leaves to regrow. Because bare soil gets hotter and loses moisture faster. Because repeatedly grazing fresh regrowth weakens the plants. And because with sheep, parasite management is literally a life-or-death proposition. Allow the animals to return to the same short grass, and they’re more likely to graze close to the soil surface, where parasite exposure can be higher. There may indeed be grass left standing, and there may be weeds the sheep don’t touch. That’s not a “solar grazing” problem, that’s a grazing problem, and it’s one we know how to manage already. Our fields don’t look uniform. Good. That’s the point. Nature isn’t symmetrical, either. New blog detailing more of our approach (linked below). jrpiercefamilyfarm.com/blog-…

Anyway, here’s the unusable farmland. If you’re interested in the actual data behind why the “solar panels are toxic” claims are mostly silly goose science, check out my Substack. rebekahpierce.substack.com/p…

People hear “renewable energy” and think it’s just code for “green” or “good for the environment.” That’s part of it. But the word renewable is actually pretty literal. And I’m largely an advocate for renewables not from the environmental perspective (although that’s obviously important), but from an economic one.  Here’s why.  Coal, oil, natural gas and uranium are fuels. You have to dig them up, process them, transport them and keep buying more of them because once you use them, they’re gone. They’re nonrenewable because their supplies are limited to what we can mine or extract.  Solar and wind are different because the energy source itself is naturally replenished. Yes, solar panels and wind turbines cost money to build. So do gas plants. In 2024, the average construction cost of new utility-scale solar was about $1,865 per kilowatt, wind about $1,882, and new natural-gas generation about $1,004 per kilowatt.  So yeah. Gas can absolutely be cheaper to build upfront. But the wallet doesn’t seal shut once the facility is built. Then the plant has to run. Solar doesn’t need a tanker truck full of sunshine every Tuesday. Wind doesn’t get a monthly wind delivery. A gas plant has to keep buying gas. A coal plant has to keep buying coal. And a nuclear plant needs uranium fuel. That ongoing input is significant because fuel prices move, and they become part of your operating cost every hour that plant runs.  Utility-scale solar has fixed operating and maintenance costs of $4 per megawatt-hour. A natural-gas combined-cycle plant also has an O&M cost of about $4…but an additional $23 per megawatt-hour in fuel costs.  Not cheap.  But unfortunately, a lot of people have the same relationship with resources that my six-year-old has with chocolate cake. If there’s a whole cake sitting there, his first instinct is: eat the cake. That’s a great plan…for the next five minutes. Once the cake is gone and you feel terrible, you start questioning your life choices.  That’s basically the resource question. We can keep burning through fuels that took geological time to form because they’re convenient right now (eat the cake because it tastes good and it’s RIGHT THERE), or we can build more systems that use energy sources that keep showing up. None of this means solar and wind are free, impact-free, or capable of doing everything by themselves. It means there’s a pretty significant difference between paying to build a machine that harvests an ongoing energy flow and paying to build a machine that then requires you to keep feeding it fuel forever. Eventually, that fuel is going to run out, but before it does, it’s going to get scarce. And it’s going to get a hell of a lot more expensive.  That’s what “renewable” is getting at.  Not magic. Not infinite electricity. Just a resource you don’t use up by using it.

A few weeks ago, our son decided we should make scarecrows to round out our fall decor. Meet Stacy and Gerald. PS: Several hours into that project, I realized that what should have been a cute little autumn craft had taken a hard turn into something a little more...unsettling. (Peep Gerald, the scarecrow on the right with the nightmare face - he knows what you did last harvest. 😂). Ostensibly, they're here to keep the crows away, but also...anyone else who comes within 500 feet of the farm, I guess.

Nobody looks at a brand-new Mason jar and screams, “Checkmate, homesteaders! So much for being sustainable and independent. That wide-mouth came from a FACTORY.” Because we understand that sometimes you buy infrastructure once so it can keep producing value. That’s one reason I advocate for solar. Done well, it can improve energy independence, strengthen farm viability, and reduce how much we depend on fuel that has to be extracted, transported, and continuously purchased. And yet the energy conversation often goes like this: No solar because mining. No wind because birds. No nuclear because waste. No hydro because rivers. No coal because (obvious). No transmission because ugly. Excellent. Now, please proceed to Door Number Three, where the electricity is harvested organically from the forest floor. We all know that doesn’t exist. I’m including a photo of my own canned apple pie filling for homesteading street cred and to prove I have, in fact, interacted with a Mason jar before forming this opinion. And I’m also including a link to my latest Substack where I elaborate on this only somewhat half-baked idea in more depth. rebekahpierce.substack.com/p…

Sheep proved, quite a long time ago, that they work exceptionally well under solar. So, this summer, we asked a different question: what about cattle? @Nexamp published this piece about the pilot we proposed at its Fort Covington sites, where five cattle have now completed several grazing rotations beneath the panels. Our biggest lesson (and a surprising one): size was less important than temperament. Read more: nexamp.com/blog/from-sheep-t…

Some solar projects are bad. Solar itself is not bad. For whatever reason, folks struggle to grasp that. It sounds so simple to me. One bad solar project doesn’t invalidate solar (and especially not solar grazing), just like one bad dairy operation doesn’t invalidate cows. The problem is that the smoking gun comes buried within 400 pages of permitting documents, which few of us take the time to read and even fewer comprehend. Every time a project gets tossed at me of Exhibit A for Why Solar is Evil™, I try to read the documents. Here are some thoughts. rebekahpierce.substack.com/p…?

We talk a lot about preserving farmland. But what, exactly, are we trying to preserve? The soil itself? The view? A family name on a mailbox? A way of working that existed fifty years ago? The possibility that someone can still make a living from the land? The concept of preservation has become rigid: we say we want farms to survive, but only if they look exactly the way we remember them. It’s a strange and impossible standard to meet when land costs rise, margins thin, equipment gets more expensive, and the next generation has to find a reason to stay. To me, “preserving agriculture” is less about keeping a hayfield untouched for the next fifty years and more about passing on a legacy of land stewardship we can be proud of. So we ask these questions: Is the soil healthier? Are the animals well cared for? Is the land still productive? Can this farm support a family? Are we leaving behind something useful instead of merely something familiar? And maybe most importantly: what are we teaching the next generation who's watching all of this? We want our son to inherit more than acreage. We want him to see that good work means paying attention, solving problems, adapting when something stops working, and taking responsibility for the things in your care. We want him to understand that stewardship isn’t passive: you don’t preserve something by freezing it in place, but by doing the work required to keep it viable. I want to preserve working land. Useful land. Land that can adapt and produce something, support a family, and be worth handing over to someone else someday. Land with healthy soil, healthy plants, and healthy animals. I don’t think legacy always has to be about keeping everything exactly the same. Sometimes it means changing just enough that there’s still something worth passing on.

We talk a lot about preserving farmland. But what, exactly, are we trying to preserve? The soil itself? The view? A family name on a mailbox? A way of working that existed fifty years ago? The possibility that someone can still make a living from the land? The concept of preservation has become rigid: we say we want farms to survive, but only if they look exactly the way we remember them. It’s a strange and impossible standard to meet when land costs rise, margins thin, equipment gets more expensive, and the next generation has to find a reason to stay. To me, “preserving agriculture” is less about keeping a hayfield untouched for the next fifty years and more about passing on a legacy of land stewardship we can be proud of. So we ask these questions: Is the soil healthier? Are the animals well cared for? Is the land still productive? Can this farm support a family? Are we leaving behind something useful instead of merely something familiar? And maybe most importantly: what are we teaching the next generation who's watching all of this? We want our son to inherit more than acreage. We want him to see that good work means paying attention, solving problems, adapting when something stops working, and taking responsibility for the things in your care. We want him to understand that stewardship isn’t passive: you don’t preserve something by freezing it in place, but by doing the work required to keep it viable. I want to preserve working land. Useful land. Land that can adapt and produce something, support a family, and be worth handing over to someone else someday. Land with healthy soil, healthy plants, and healthy animals. I don’t think legacy always has to be about keeping everything exactly the same. Sometimes it means changing just enough that there’s still something worth passing on.