NC State University and solar tracker company Nevados have opened the Southeast’s first agrivoltaics training site, pairing sheep with photovoltaic panels on rugged terrain at the university’s Lake Wheeler Road Field Lab near Raleigh, North Carolina.
The site broke ground in November 2025 and is already drawing solar professionals, farmers and engineering students who want practical experience in solar grazing, the practice of using livestock to manage vegetation beneath and between panel rows.
What the site looks like on the ground
The demonstration site sits five miles from campus on the edge of NC State’s 1,800-acre Lake Wheeler Road Field Lab.
It is the first facility in the Southeast to use an all terrain solar panel system from Nevados designed to adapt to uneven ground.
The site features three rows of Nevados’ TRACE All Terrain Tracker system alongside three types of solar modules.
Most large scale solar trackers are engineered for flat land, and steep or rolling terrain is typically left out of solar development.
NC State has set aside land surrounding the agrivoltaics site that can be divided into paddocks and could ultimately accommodate several hundred sheep.
Panels are mounted at a clearance height designed to allow sheep to graze beneath and between rows.
Why sheep are the preferred animal for solar farms
Sheep are typically chosen over cattle because they maneuver easily underneath and around solar arrays.
Solar developers have been recruiting herds of sheep as a low emission, low cost way to keep vegetation from shading panels.
Mowing the grass under a large solar farm requires diesel equipment making repeated passes across the site throughout the growing season, adding operational cost and carbon output.
There are currently about 130,000 acres of solar arrays in the United States grazed by sheep.
Despite growing industry interest in solar grazing, research remains limited.
The economics for farmers and solar companies
Land unsuited for conventional crops can support sheep while simultaneously generating renewable energy, meeting a growing US demand for lamb.
In Vermont, sheep farmer Lewis Fox and his wife Niko Kochendoerfer run Agrivoltaic Solutions, hired by solar companies to manage vegetation on solar farms.
Fox says the added revenue is a major boost: “For us as livestock producers, being able to use the animals in another way is very significant in terms of farm viability.”
To preserve topsoil health, the grazing plan uses movable paddocks with electrified fences, rotating the flock across the site.
A study in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems found that sheep grazing within commercial solar sites influences soil health, forage quality and pasture conditions compared with mechanical mowing.
Sheep also spend meaningful time resting in the shade directly under the panels, which Frontiers research suggests may improve lamb weight gain in summer heat.
What students and professionals will learn
The project was made possible through more than $100,000 in donated equipment and services, including solar modules from Boviet Solar and installation services from CF Solar.
A new course launching in Spring 2026 equips solar professionals with skills for navigating grazed solar sites, including working with electric fencing and guardian animals.
The training also covers guard dogs that stay on site full time to protect sheep from predators, and herding dogs that move the flock between paddocks.
Solar companies must work with farmers to establish palatable grasses that nourish the sheep, preferably before any panels are installed.
In Minnesota, solar farms seeded native prairie under their panels within five years, showing that thoughtful land management beneath arrays can restore habitat and cut costs.
The site will also host solar industry workers who need on the ground exposure to livestock integrated installations, a gap the Southeast has lacked until now.
Scale, limits and what comes next
The NC State site is a demonstration and training facility, not a commercial power plant, and the panel capacity installed there is modest by industry standards.
Researchers want to show that the all terrain tracker and sheep combination can work on land that solar developers have historically passed over.
Nationally, the US solar industry installed 43 GW of new capacity in 2025, remaining the top source of new energy capacity for the fifth consecutive year.
That scale of land use puts vegetation management front and center as a cost and sustainability issue for every developer in the country.
Cost comparisons between sheep grazing and mechanical mowing vary by region, grass type and flock size, and researchers note that more long term data across different climates is still needed.
“Grazing sheep on solar farms offers a multitude of benefits for the solar and sheep industry,” said NC State Extension small ruminant specialist Andrew Weaver. “These benefits include reduced mowing needs and more cost effective vegetation management, farmland preservation, improved public perception, and career opportunities for local sheep producers.”
The NC State and Nevados partnership positions North Carolina as a regional hub for agrivoltaic research at a moment when the industry is looking hard at how to manage the land it is rapidly covering with panels.
