SEARCY, Ark. — On hundreds of acres of former farmland outside the small town of Searcy, Arkansas, the Raines family operates a type of farm that most Delta residents aren’t used to. 

Herds of sheep, wrangled by Turkish sheepdogs, and rows of wide solar panels take up the same land that used to be covered in the rice and soybean fields typical of the Arkansas Delta, the rich alluvial plain along the Mississippi River.

Chad Raines doesn’t own the land. But he earns an income managing the property for Lightsource BP, a subsidiary of energy giant British Petroleum. Raines used to run his family row crop farm in Texas, but now he’s full-time “solar grazing,” in Arkansas and Texas. His hundreds of sheep graze around the solar panels, preventing grasses from growing too high and blocking the sun from powering the panels. 

“Agrivoltaics is the art of raising crops of some kind, whether it’s livestock or row crops, mixed in with solar production,” Raines said. Before partnerships like Raines and Lightsource BP, land was either for agriculture or solar – leading to unexpected land use tensions in many rural areas.

Arkansas, like many places in the United States, is in the middle of a solar boom, and projects are sprouting up on prime farmland across the Delta. While solar only makes up a small percentage of current energy production in Arkansas, industry groups project massive growth in coming years. The challenge? Whether the state can retain its agricultural character in the face of all this change.

Agrivoltaics projects like solar grazing have seen growth in the Midwest as a solution to tensions between rural communities and solar developers. But row crops, common to the Delta, are difficult to farm with solar panels, meaning Delta farmers would have to reinvision agriculture they’ve done for decades to make agrivoltaics work. Growth of solar installations on Arkansas farmland likely won’t slow down, but whether successful agrivoltaics projects like Raines’ will expand on those solar operations is uncertain.

Same land, new tricks

The landowners who used to farm the land outside Searcy retired and leased their land out to Lightsource BP to build a sprawling solar installation that sends its power to the central Arkansas town of Conway, population 64,000. The retired farmers earn money passively from their lease, the solar producer earns an income selling renewable power, and Raines earns an income managing the project with his sheep, which he butchers and sells for meat. 

“There is a lot of conflict between agriculture land use and solar land use,” said Peggy Hall, director of the Agricultural and Resource Law Program at The Ohio State University. “It’s been a contentious issue in Ohio, and sometimes it pits farmers against farmers.”