Why MNL grazes sheep under Minnesota solar arrays instead of mowing

MNL names one misconception above all the others it meets in its work: that land under solar panels is wasted. At the MnSEIA event in Minneapolis, the company laid out its answer, a flock of sheep and a prairie seed mix. Speaking with a Briggs & Stratton Energy Solutions interviewer in a MarketScale Studio segment, MNL's speaker said the company brings sheep onto utility-scale sites in place of mowers and plants native wildflowers and grasses that feed pollinators and rebuild soil.

The practice is no longer an experiment in Minnesota. In February 2026 the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources (BWSR) updated its list of solar projects that meet the state's Habitat Friendly Solar standard, and in 2026 it released a revised planning form for new projects. Enel North America said in a July 2025 announcement that a grazing pilot begun at a Minnesota site in 2017 had grown into what it called the largest solar grazing agreement in the United States.

Agrivoltaics is the use of one parcel for both solar generation and farming. MNL's speaker described the American version as grazing animals, growing crops or raising forage grasses among the rows of panels, with the aim of getting more from the land than electricity. NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, listed four forms it studies in a November 2024 feature: grazing, crop production, pollinator and native habitat, and greenhouses built with solar.

Sheep replace the mower one paddock at a time

Intensive grazing means confining a flock to a small area for a short time so the animals eat the forage down evenly before moving on. An April 2026 post on the UC Davis Rural Migration Blog describes the mechanics on utility-scale sites: a six-foot perimeter fence keeps the flock in and predators out, and temporary electric fencing divides the array into paddocks of up to 100 acres. By the UC Davis blog's account, a flock of 1,000 to 1,500 sheep clears a paddock in two to four days.

The sheep do not take everything. The same post says they consume 50 to 60 percent of the vegetation, so many solar farms mow after grazing and leave several inches of cover to hold topsoil and keep dust off the panels. Most California farms graze once a season, while in the eastern United States flocks can stay for months and regraze as forage regrows.

For the operator, the target MNL names is height: vegetation kept low enough that it does not shade or cover modules. Enel North America said in its July 2025 announcement that sheep are selective grazers that keep vegetation down while letting native plants come through, and that each of its arrays has one or two guard dogs living with the flock to keep coyotes off.

Minnesota law decides who may call a site habitat friendly

Minnesota law lets a solar owner claim pollinator benefits only if the site follows BWSR's guidance. That rule is Minnesota Statute 216B.1642, which BWSR cites on its program page: an owner implementing solar site management practices may say the site benefits gamebirds, songbirds and pollinators only if it adheres to the pollinator plan guidance from BWSR. Monarch Joint Venture, in a March 2022 post, dates the statute to 2016 and calls Minnesota the first state to incentivize pollinator-friendly ground cover on solar sites.

The standard itself is a planting rule. As a general principle, BWSR says, at least 70% of a site's land area must be planted with native seed mixes, following the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources' Prairie Establishment and Maintenance Technical Guidance for Solar Projects. A developer fills out a project planning assessment form and submits it with a site map, the planting plan, the seed mix showing seeds per square foot for each species, a long-term management plan and a plan to protect the site from pesticide drift.

Local government staff with approval authority receive that package and coordinate with BWSR, and the agency says some municipalities now require ground-mounted projects to meet the standard. Meeting it has a market value. BWSR's partnership with CleanCounts, the tracking nonprofit formerly known as M-RETS, lets qualifying projects sell habitat-friendly renewable energy certificates, the tradable records of a megawatt-hour of clean generation, as a separate revenue line.

The statute and the standard govern what is planted; the number of sheep on a site is not addressed. A February 2025 review in Small Ruminant Research by W.C. Stewart and co-authors examines animal and land performance against stocking rates, the number of animals per acre over time, and forage utilization, and lists long-term ecological impacts and sheep production practices among what it calls significant knowledge gaps.

The soil claim carries a number from a Minnesota site

MNL's reasoning is that the flock returns what it eats to the ground as nutrients, which mowing does not, and that native plants rather than turf are what make a soil healthy. One Minnesota site has put a figure on that. Enel North America said its Minnesota site showed over 200% improvement in soil organic matter.

Soil organic matter is the decomposed plant and animal material in soil that holds water and nutrients, so a rise in it is a direct measure of the soil-building MNL describes. The figure comes from Enel's own data at its Aurora solar farm, as stated in the July 2025 announcement. The company said that experience gave it confidence to commit 13,000 sheep across eight Texas sites and 12,600 acres without a further pilot.

The pollinator side has a state monitoring program behind it. BWSR says that during the summer of 2023 it monitored many Habitat Friendly Solar sites with Lauren Agnew, a PhD student at the University of Minnesota, and documented more than 40 native insect species, including bees from five of Minnesota's six bee families and six bumble bee species. The agency also reports treefrogs, bull snakes, sandhill cranes and white-tailed deer on the sites, and estimates the enrolled sites sequester about 4,800 metric tons of carbon a year and capture about 8,300 acre-feet of water, an acre-foot being enough to cover one acre a foot deep.

Earlier work set the baseline. In the summer of 2021, Monarch Joint Venture and the nonprofit Fresh Energy surveyed four Minnesota solar sites in Anoka, Chisago and Wright counties, each 18 to 68 acres and seeded with a native pollinator mix in 2017 or 2018, counting milkweed, flowering plants, monarchs and other pollinators from June through August under protocols designed with Argonne National Laboratory. Monarch Joint Venture frames the stakes with a 1994 estimate it cites from Samson and Knopf that up to 99% of native northern tallgrass prairie has disappeared since European settlement.

Native cover costs more for the first three to five years

The cost case is less tidy than the habitat case. A March 2023 study in Sustainability by James McCall, Jordan Macknick and colleagues at NREL gathered vegetation operations and maintenance data, O&M in industry shorthand, from 54 utility-scale sites. At those 54 sites, NREL's authors found total vegetation O&M for native cover slightly higher than for turfgrass.

The detail matters for a budget. The authors report that per-activity costs for mowing, trimming and herbicide ran lower at native and pollinator sites, and they attribute the higher total to the first three to five years of establishment, when a prairie planting needs more separate interventions than a lawn before it holds its own. Michael Noble, executive director at Fresh Energy, said in Monarch Joint Venture's March 2022 post that habitat plantings add a small amount to a project's cost, which he called an investment worth making for pollinators.

Enel's announcement adds two constraints of its own. The company said Minnesota's winters meant sheep could not stay on site year-round, which created seasonal logistics, and that there are not enough sheep nationally to meet solar companies' interest, with the flock growing roughly 25% a year and still not keeping pace. The Small Ruminant Research review puts the long-term ecological effects of solar grazing, and its effect on sheep production itself, among the questions still open.

Against those caveats, two sources put grazing on the right side of the ledger. The American Solar Grazing Association (ASGA) said in an October 2025 press release that data from operating sites shows grazing is cost-competitive with mowing and can reduce maintenance costs over time. The UC Davis blog says California solar farms pay graziers $50 to $150 an acre, which usually makes sheep cheaper than contractors running mowers and hand crews.

Farmers get paid to feed the flock

That inversion, income instead of feed cost, is how ASGA describes the contract too. In its press release the association said solar project owners pay livestock producers to manage vegetation, giving graziers access to land that had been unavailable or too expensive to rent, and that the arrangement has let family farms stay viable and in some cases expand. ASGA's 2024 census counts more than 130,000 acres of solar grazed by sheep across 30 states.

The census also describes who is doing it. ASGA said more than a third of solar graziers are women and that participants are younger on average than the national farmer population, and it noted the United States imports more than 70% of the lamb it eats, which it presents as room to grow. ASGA describes itself as a farmer-founded nonprofit started in 2018 with more than 1,300 members.

Enel's path shows the developer side of the contract. Rather than build agricultural expertise in-house, the company said it contracted Texas Solar Sheep, a vendor already working Texas sites, and credited its procurement team with moving the program from concept to signed agreements. The UC Davis post adds that landowners leasing to solar developers often retain agrivoltaic rights, so a farmer can keep grazing or pollinator access on land under a 25- to 40-year lease.

Neither BWSR's standard nor ASGA's census material sets out liability or insurance terms for a grazier working inside an energized array. What the public record does describe is the physical handoff: Enel said it has partnered with ASGA to educate other solar companies on how site teams should interact with livestock, what to monitor and how to coordinate maintenance with agricultural partners.

Sixty thousand acres and counting

NREL says U.S. agrivoltaic sites grew from 27,000 acres and 4.5 GW in 2020 to roughly 60,000 acres and 10 GW by November 2024. The lab counted nearly 600 operating sites across grazing, crops, habitat and greenhouses, and its InSPIRE project, Innovative Solar Practices Integrated with Rural Economies and Ecosystems, has studied the practice for more than nine years across more than 20 sites. Jordan Macknick, who leads InSPIRE, said in the feature that companies and farmers are seeing the benefits and testing agrivoltaics for themselves.

Minnesota's count is a list rather than an acreage. BWSR publishes the roster of projects meeting the Habitat Friendly standard as of February 1, 2026, and says the program has shifted toward technical guidance for projects from small community solar to utility scale, and toward recognizing developers, municipalities and schools that build in habitat, water and soil benefits.

For a developer, MNL's entry point is its website, mandlcorp.com, where a project intake form opens the conversation, and the company says it has worked in solar long enough to count itself a pioneer. For a Minnesota project that wants to claim pollinator benefits, BWSR's sequence starts earlier: the seed mix at 70% native, the 2026 planning form, and local approval before the first sheep arrive.