Sheep and bees move onto solar farms in Vermont, joining a 130,000 acre national grazing shift

Sheep and bees move onto solar farms in Vermont

Solar developers in Vermont are turning the ground under and around their panels into working land instead of mowed grass. Solar supplies about 16% of the electricity generated in Vermont, and 2 specialist businesses are redesigning what a solar site looks like there. Agrivoltaic Solutions grazes sheep on solar sites, and Bee the Change, a nonprofit based in Weybridge, Vermont, plants native pollinator habitat, work it has done on 30 solar sites nationwide since 2015. Lewis Fox, a sheep farmer in Leicester, Vermont, and cofounder of Agrivoltaic Solutions, said the shift matters directly for farm income.

For us as livestock producers, being able to use the animals in another way is very significant in terms of farm viability.

Lewis Fox, sheep farmer in Leicester, Vermont, and cofounder of Agrivoltaic Solutions. Source 1.

Grazing sheep under solar panels is a national trade, not just a Vermont idea

Solar arrays now graze sheep on about 130,000 acres nationally, according to Vermont Public reporting from April 2026. The American Solar Grazing Association, founded in 2008 as the first farmer focused group of its kind in the country, now counts more than 1,400 farmers, solar developers and other members.

Bee habitat is newer in Vermont, and one company built its own numbers on it

Encore Renewable Energy, a Vermont based solar developer, built the first large scale pollinator friendly solar project in the state, in Hinesburg, in 2017. Encore reports that pollinator species counts across its project sites rose 612% in the first 2 years after planting and 1,174% after 5 years, measured against conditions before any native planting began. Planting native vegetation instead of turf grass under solar panels can also increase the soil carbon storage potential by 65%, per the same reporting. Mike Kiernan, cofounder of the nonprofit Bee the Change, said the group picks its plantings with that relationship in mind.

Our goal is to get the highest percentage possible of native plants, because they have the longest relationship with these species.

Mike Kiernan, cofounder of the nonprofit Bee the Change. Source 1.

Chad Farrell, co chief executive of Encore Renewable Energy, said the company plans for what the land looks like after the panels come down.

At the end of the useful life of the project, we're actually able to return that land in a better condition than what we found.

Chad Farrell, co chief executive of Encore Renewable Energy. Source 1.

Vermont has no mandatory standard yet, and 3 other states already do

National standard setting is ahead of Vermont specifically. Maryland and Minnesota both wrote pollinator friendly solar standards into law or code in 2017, and South Carolina adopted a voluntary Solar Habitat Act, according to a primer from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory federal InSPIRE project, which studies low impact solar development. Linn County, Iowa separately amended its own development code to require native grasses and wildflowers at solar farms and to ban insecticide use on them. No source states that Vermont itself has adopted a mandatory pollinator standard of its own. A separate national count found 596 agrivoltaics projects, sites that combine solar power with farming or habitat, covering 65,699 acres and 10,473 megawatts of capacity as of early 2025, according to a research brief from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Sheep grazing is the most common activity on these sites nationally, and pollinator habitat is most common in Minnesota, which the brief counts at more than 200 projects, and in Illinois.