the solar industry has exploded over the past decade and that includes putting panels on Farmland to capture electricity maintaining the land underneath those panels could be a pricey proposition but now there are workers doing it on the cheap CBS News correspondent Jason Allen explains about an hour outside of Austin Texas in the Tiny Town of buckolz sits the fifth largest solar project in the US capable of creating up to 900 million watts of power and the panels soaking up all that sun are getting an assist from new helpers willing to work for food we want
to be good sewers of the land one of the challenges to that is the very difficult problem of how do we effectively control vegetation management s SP energy found an answer sheep the animals naturally graze the land keeping vegetation from growing too high as this industry continues to grow so will the demand for sheep business is booming you can find sheep on solar farm arms in about 27 States from Texas to Minnesota to Massachusetts companies say it's more cost effective than bringing in mowers and it's environmentally friendly the Sheep naturally eat the grass so it
benefits them so instead of us just mechanically mowing it we are lower in the carbon footprint historically been a reluctance to transition from gas mowing to uh livestock as vegetation maintenance we're starting to see a widescale adoption the national renewable energy Laboratory says there are currently about 60 solar grazing projects in the US and that number is expected to grow Jason Allen CBS News Dallas
