Gray’s LAMBscaping manages a flock of about 100 sheep that control vegetation at Dominion Energy’s Puller Solar facility in Middlesex County. (Photo by Mark Newton)
About an hour east of Richmond, a flock of around 100 sheep huddles together, chewing grass and staring at passing cars. Surrounding them is a seemingly endless sea of solar panels.
The sheep aren’t remnants of an old-fashioned farm — they’re employees, working alongside Dominion Energy to ensure that the 58,800 panels at the 120-acre Puller Solar facility near Saluda in Middlesex County have an unobstructed view of the sun to provide solar power to the University of Virginia. Dominion is using as many as 1,000 sheep between the Middlesex solar farm and five others in Greensville, Louisa, Mecklenburg, Pittsylvania and Sussex counties to keep the vegetation in check.
Animal-driven vegetation maintenance has been on the rise in the last decade, but while goats have gotten the most attention — including those owned by RVA Goats and Honey that have cleaned up Richmond parks, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden and other local spots — sheep are proving to be more useful for more delicate sites such as solar farms.
“Sheep are really kind of ideal for this sort of situation,” Dominion spokesperson Tim Eberly says, “because they’re small enough to get under the solar panels, they’re not picky eaters, and they’re not as feisty as goats, whereas goats are a little bit more prone to eating electrical wiring.”
Marcus Gray of Gray’s LAMBscaping with some of the flock at the Puller farm (Photo by Mark Newton)
The flock at the Puller farm, shepherded by Gray’s LAMBscaping of Chatham, mows down roughly 40 acres of land in two or three days, and it can be contained to a specific area using a virtual electric fence. And, unlike a landscaping service staffed by human beings, the sheep spend the night and get acclimated to the weather, sleeping under the solar panels during rain and growing and shedding their wool as needed until, eventually, they’re sold for meat. They’re protected on the farm by a guardian dog, Honey, a Great Pyrenees, and herded by border collies Trip and Kit. The dogs are put to work by Marcus Gray, who started LAMBscaping with his wife, Jess, who is also CEO.
“We were living out of state,” says Gray, a wildlife biologist and a Chesterfield County native. “My wife coached collegiate field hockey and got her MBA, and we had an opportunity to come back to Virginia.” He describes coming across a huge solar array near their Chatham farm, and inspiration struck. “We were gonna have sheep anyway, but we could grow the flock and go after the opportunity of solar grazing,” which he had learned about by working with native seed companies and others that were starting entire grazing divisions with sheep and goats.
“I said, OK, there’s something here, there’s gonna be a need to address the vegetation maintenance.” At a solar summit about three years ago in Richmond, Gray says he “went kicking the door in” and won over Dominion representatives on the concept of using sheep under a pilot program. Gray now has about 800 ewes in total spread across both solar and nonsolar farms in Virginia. He visits each flock occasionally and schedules a veterinarian to check on them, but for the most part, the sheep spend most of their time in the same place — shifting among areas within thanks to the virtual fence — due to the logistics of moving that many animals around.
Photo courtesy Dominion Energy
Since 2018, the energy Dominion has generated from the 15-megawatt Puller site has exclusively provided about 9% of all the energy used by UVA, which gets another 12% of its power from Dominion’s Hollyfield Solar facility in King William County.
“As a company that’s focused on trying to be cleaner and greener and more environmentally friendly, that’s why we got into it,” Eberly says. Dominion, which has more than 30 large-scale solar farms throughout Virginia, has issued a request for proposals to expand the solar grazing program.
The sheep first arrived on Dominion solar farms in October 2022 and at Puller the following March, about five years after operations began there, and they are now doing about half of the groundskeeping in Middlesex, with the rest done with landscaping equipment. The goal, Gray says, is to work up to having the sheep take on 75% of the burden, but that requires getting rid of plants that sheep won’t eat, which is a multiyear process.
Photo by Mark Newton
But why go to the trouble of growing vegetation and occasionally shuffling ovine weed whackers around the state in the first place?
“The panels are actually more efficient if they have vegetation, because it cools the panels,” Gray says. “I’ve seen examples where they did a lot of gravel — there’s a huge cost associated with that material, and then you have runoff problems and pushback from the general public of making all of this impervious cover [and] increasing stormwater runoff.”
The reaction to the sheep, perhaps unsurprisingly, has been positive. “We hear stuff all the time or get messages,” Gray says, “like, ‘Oh, you [have] the sheep out there on Puller? We love them.’ There’s been a lot of banter about them, really.”
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