JR Howard has been raising sheep in Texas for over 20 years. Since 2020, his Texas Solar Sheep business has provided solar farm vegetation management services to rural solar farm hosts. He speaks here about partnering with Ørsted to help power the local economy.

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In 2021, my wife and I moved with our two boys from a small town in West Texas to Lamar County on the northeastern side of the state.

The boys like the schools here, and my wife teaches at one of them. The whole family is also involved in our sheep grazing operation, Texas Solar Sheep. We herd sheep on utility-scale solar farms, where the sheep graze and basically act as a mowing operation around the solar panels. It’s a relatively new industry, and we kind of just jumped into it. No one was doing this on a large scale, and we began with one little solar site. But the business has grown well since we started.

Sheep are great for this type of vegetation management. They do a better job than conventional mowing, especially in muddy or wet weather conditions. They can get into spots under equipment on the solar farm that the mowers can’t reach.

We first got involved with Ørsted at the Mockingbird Solar Center in 2024. They’ve been a great partner for us. They really embraced the idea of farming on their solar facilities. They also made a lot of local hires, which is something we believe in deeply. So we’re generating revenue for the local areas where we do business. Mockingbird Solar Center is going to be a great project over the long term. Thanks to our work with Ørsted here and on other sites, I’ve built the business and now have a crew of 27 locally hired employees. We manage a little over 12,000 sheep on our solar sites.

The community is benefiting in a lot of ways. We’re seeing a lot of new construction of school facilities. These rural areas have a very small tax base, so the additional tax revenue coming from solar farms goes straight to our schools and other needy community areas.

And on a larger scale, solar is providing a huge opportunity for the sheep industry in America. In some cases, our sheep are grazing on land that hasn’t seen sheep for over a hundred years. Right now, America imports about half of the lamb consumed in the country. We’re helping revive the industry here in the U.S.