Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.

Putting solar panels in grazing fields is good for sheep

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Sheep living in pasture with solar panels benefit from shade in hot weather and more nutritious grass – and they stop weeds from growing on the panels.

probablyasocialecologist:

Sheep living among rows of solar panels spend more time grazing, benefit from more nutritious food, rest more and appear to experience less heat stress, compared with nearby sheep in empty fields.

Earlier research suggested that agrivoltaic farms – which combine grazing animals with solar panels – offer more efficient renewable energy at lower overhead costs, as well as reducing wildfire risks. The latest findings show that the practice is also good for animal welfare, providing further evidence for a win-win situation, says Emma Kampherbeek, who carried out the work while at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

[…]

As for pasture quality, the nitrogen content was higher and carbon content lower in the solar panel fields, suggesting that the vegetation in this pasture – which was greener – was more nutritious and more easily digestible. That might be due to the reduced exposure to intense solar rays and to dew dripping off the panels, providing much-needed moisture, she says.

The results are likely to be even more pronounced in warmer seasons, she adds. Additional research is under way to analyse the data taken from temperature recordings during her study.

Sheep make good candidates for agrivoltaics because they are efficient foragers, keeping weeds off solar panels, and are small enough to pass under the panels, says Kampherbeek. And, unlike goats, they don’t chew the electrical wires.

The findings strongly suggest that solar power centres should be designed with a partner animal species in mind, she says.

ruffboijuliaburnsides:

dogposts:

A herding dog at work (via)

i love how we took this creature that would want nothing more than to kill and eat our livestock, and we turned them into creatures that want nothing more than to protect our livestock (guardian breeds) or to move our livestock to precisely where we want them to be (herding breeds).

Dogs are amazing.

bemusedlybespectacled:

fittingoutjane:

unexpectedyarns:

captaindibbzy:

As far as ethical materials go you can’t really get better than wool.

The sheep need the hair cut.

Nothing dies for it.

Sheep live pretty much wild for most the year.

Placed correctly they maintain a landscape and help the wildlife that live there to thrive.

Doesn’t use Vast Quantities of land for little product.

Not draining inland fresh water oceans.

Been spending thousands of years perfecting the genetics for this purpose.

Comes in many different kinds of uses.

And the animal it comes off is fully edible.

My main issue with it is it has fallen so out of fashion that it pays the farmers who make it more to transport it than they get per fleece, and people have really fucking weird hang ups about the ethics of giving a sheep a hair cut.

Sheep can get infested with wool maggots if they are not shorn.

Also an unshorn sheep can drown if it falls into water, just by the sheer weight of the water its wool can absorb, dragging it down.

A Tunis sheep can live in a large doghouse, and staked in a different place every day, will mow your lawn (buy they get lonely. Buy two).

Light shearing nicks heal fast because the sheep’s waxy lanolin coats their skin. Though most sheep farmers won’t Nick the sheep bc it gets blood on the wool.

Sheep farmers MUST treat their sheep with care, because any little thing that upsets sheep affects the quality of their wool.

Even “natural” fibers like bamboo take TONS of water to process and alkaline dyes to color them. You can dye wool with unsweetened koolaid.

People have been raising sheep for close to 10,000 years. And all that time, we’ve been breeding them for better wool. Most mammals with thick coats shed naturally in the spring, sheep don’t because we bred it out of them.

Sheep and their farmers have an actual symbiotic relationship. Farmers remove their excess wool, keeping them healthy, and then sell that wool to buy what they need.

it’s also naturally antimicrobial and resists odors (unlike polyester, which absorbs them better and makes it harder to wash them out).

hedgehog-moss:

I was at the coffeeshop in the village and someone asked me how my llamas are doing, and a woman overheard and told me that when she was a kid, her parents used to have a couple of llamas in their sheep farm, and every single sheep in their flock imprinted on one of the two llamas. Each sheep chose the best most charismatic llama according to mysterious sheep criteria, and never wavered in their ovine loyalty. Each of the two llamas was worshiped by a small sub-flock of devoted sheep who followed him everywhere like Jesus’s apostles and only left their field for transhumance when led by “their” llama. The funniest thing is the way this woman overheard the word “llama” and immediately came to sit next to me to tell me this, like she had waited since childhood to share her bewilderment about the two religious congregations of sheep led by rival llama prophets in her family farm.