In a dusty Texas field, Chad Raines surveys his new crop — sheep.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine that I would be a shepherd,” Raines said.
The Raines family has farmed cotton for four generations. But years of bad harvests and low prices drove him to give it up for good.
“After about three to four years of just not making any progress, just not even breaking — I mean we were losing money and that debt was rolling over, adding to it every year. So I had to look at doing something different. I had to think outside the box,” Raines said.
So he became part of a growing trend: abandoning traditional farming for what’s called solar grazing, renting out sheep as lawn mowers for solar farms.
Green energy company Enel North America owns a solar farm near Waco, Texas. With more than a million panels, it’s one of the largest in the U.S.
“The sheep work when it’s raining, the sheep work when it’s muddy, sheep work at night,” said Adam Sotirakopoulos, who runs the site.
The sheep do most of the work, keeping vegetation away from the panels while their owners earn steady paychecks.
Farming has always been a gamble, but the odds have gotten worse recently. A 2024 U.S. Agriculture Department report found close to 40% of small and mid-sized farms operated at a loss the previous year.
“The small farming is going away. It’s the big companies, the bigger farmers are the ones who can farm a little bit better based on the economies of scale,” Raines said.
Between low prices and small yields, Raines says if he’d grown cotton, he would have lost almost $200,000 last year. Instead, he cleared a profit of close to $300,000, grazing 6,000 sheep across 20,000 acres while growing a business he can eventually pass on to his sons.
“One is a college graduate. One is in college, and when he graduates, he’s going to come to the farm as well. There’s plenty of work for all of us,” Raines said.
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