The largest solar grazing project in the U.S. will reduce mowing costs and emissions — and make for some happy sheep.
Oh boy this comments section is wholesome and uplifting! :)
I was just trying to share a story I found positive, and made me feel good. I had no idea grazing sheep was such a controversial topic 😃
I guess I’ll have to scrutinize any future post I contribute
Not your fault, after the sheep disaster of 2003, people are very mixed on their existence.
But for real, you couldn’t do anything about what the comment section became.
Fairly sure 2 of them are those vegans and the other is just being contrarian for the sake of it.
It’s a genuinely uplifting post, and there’s not much to say other than it being good news, so the more disagreeable sort are poking holes
It is what it is, keep the good posts coming!
Sheep lawnmower go brrrrrrr
*baaaaaaaaaaa
where’s the article op
The website reduces its carbon footprint by not connecting to the internet or even turning on the web server
Removed by mod
Wake up sheeple
I like it, but wouldn’t goats be better?
I’ll admit I’m not sure of the pros/cons of either. All I know about sheep/goats is that sheep produce wool, and goats produce milk…and I’m pretty sure the only reason I know that, is due to one of the many city builders I’ve played 😂
couldn’t they just let it be wild lands instead?
Solar fields and random trees growing out of the ground do not mix well…
Sheep aren’t zero maintaince at all though.
That’s true, but they are more efficient and cost effective than running gas powered mowers around solar panels. The added bonus of not needing to purchase feed during parts of the year is also a nice plus
Is it not also a great way to achieve harmony with life on earth and our technological advancements? Seems pretty cool that we can farm energy, while providing space and shade for other life as well.
Fuckin’ cool.
So? Op didn’t say they were and it isn’t even relevant anyway
I’m in favor but I’m just not sure that sheep maintenance will be any less trouble and expense than mower maintenance. Mowers don’t get contagious diseases, break out of their fences and get on the highway, or have trouble giving birth at 3:00 a.m.
You can sell their wool for profit. So you gain profit from the sheep, profit from the solar panels, and save money on mowing.
You’ve completely missed the point.
I think meat is the only way to make money from sheep. That and the fact they make more sheep.
The wool is mostly inconvenient unless you’re a third world farmer. Clarkson’s Farm found it cost £1.50 per sheep to have them shaved, but the wool was only worth about £1.20.
What exactly is uplifting about animal agriculture?
The largest solar grazing project in the U.S. will reduce mowing costs and emissions — and make for some happy sheep.
Will it make for happy sheep? Unless they have the veterinarian capacity to take proper care of these 6,000 sheep then they are simply being exploited rather then protected.
exactly. we should have all our animal agriculture be seperate in more factory style conditions. These sheep should be penned and fed off feed like normal.
You can have sheep without solar or sheep with solar. Not having sheep isn’t an option on the table.
Either be happy about the solar or don’t comment.
Actually no sheep is absolutely an option.
But Lamb is delicious and wool is a renewable natural fibre that doesnt shed microplastics… so yeah sheep and green energy please.
They’d all be dead without it.
I bet a lot of the animals in animal agriculture wish they were dead. This isn’t a good argument imo
Neither is animal genocide imo
Who is talking about animal genocide?
They are fully domesticated so if you stop farming them they all need to be killed / will die.
Is it really a bad thing to stop abusing animals even if it means the species dies out except for their wild counterparts?
It’s up to you if you’re okay with genocide
Sheep can, and routinely do, go feral.
I doubt they took into account the emissions and other climate effects due to the animal agriculture they will be supporting.
What deference would it make if they did?
Moving sheep from on pasture land to another doesn’t change the emissions from these sheep.
The question is what happened to the land these sheep use to be on.
When I saw your post, I initially dismissed it entirely and thinking how embarrassing it was for you to take a story that does produce a positive net benefit for climate and try to turn it negative from a completely unrelated view. Obviously I assumed from your statements that your opposition was due to you being vegan. A 5 second view of your post history confirms this. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and understand where you’re coming from and what you want to accomplish. It got me thinking about what your thought process was when you posted here on this story. I have some questions about your motives and methods I wouldn’t normally ask, but you’re putting yourself in the spotlight for your cause so you might be open to a discussion. If so my questions are:
-
You clearly support veganism, and I assume you would want others to adopt it too. Did you think your delivery here here would make omnivores suddenly abandon their diets and adopt yours? Did you consider that your message (while containing some accuracy) would actually turn people off from veganism because they didn’t want to be associated with people that do what you did here and crap all over otherwise good news?
-
How did you decide to just inject your veganism into this story? What criteria did this one meet that you thought “this one, this one needs to have passive aggressive veganism representation”? Was it just random that you saw this one and weighed in with veganism or do you spend lots of time scouring for all stories that don’t have an unrelated vegan view and then you inject one? It makes me wonder how effective that is for your movement. Or is this more of a act of martyrdom? Are you “fighting the good fight” whenever and where ever it can be?
If your overall goal is reducing livestock agriculture have you considered your highly negative approach actually working against your goal? Alternatively, are you intentionally cultivating the negative stereotype against vegans for some reason I don’t understand? If so, can you explain so I can gain understanding?
Different vegan here. I’ll be blunt about it: There’s facts about animal agriculture, which are uncomfortable, if you’re not vegan.
Actually being ignorant about them rarely happens as a conscious decision, it’s more a matter of it just not making for a great smalltalk topic when you’re not vegan.
I’m not saying this from some smug position either, as I was non-vegan at some point, too (like the vast majority of vegans), and I know how much shit I didn’t know back then.Animal agriculture organizations will also gladly add to the confusion, by talking only about CO2 emissions, when they should be talking about CO2-equivalents.
This post has too little info to really know what’s going on, but it happens that people think grazing animals are 100% climate-neutral, so it mentioning lots of grazing animals and a reduction in emissions also had me wondering, if that is actually true.
If some of these sheep would not have otherwise been raised, then it’s possible that mowing the fields with a CO2-exhausting mower would be less bad for the climate. Of course, electric mowers would be even better.
Different vegan here. I’ll be blunt about it: There’s facts about animal agriculture, which are uncomfortable, if you’re not vegan.
Thats just it. This isn’t an article about animal agriculture. Its an article about solar power first, and reduction of carbon from mowing second. Both of these are good things! What the OP vegan did was look past all of that positive to try an extra a negative from it.
Actually being ignorant about them rarely happens as a conscious decision,
Strange phrasing, but I believe you’re describing “willful ignorance”.
it’s more a matter of it just not making for a great smalltalk topic when you’re not vegan.
That can be true of lots of distasteful, but necessary topics necessary for life. I don’t usually engage in small talk about mortuary science, sewage treatment, or surgical removal of tumors, but all of those are certainly incredibly important to life as we are biological animals ourselves.
Animal agriculture organizations will also gladly add to the confusion, by talking only about CO2 emissions, when they should be talking about CO2-equivalents. This post has too little info to really know what’s going on, but it happens that people think grazing animals are 100% climate-neutral, so it mentioning lots of grazing animals and a reduction in emissions also had me wondering, if that is actually true.
Assuming the sheep are only fed from the grass they eat on-site, how are they NOT carbon neutral?
This sounds like a “perfect is the enemy of good” situation. Saying using sheep used here to eat the grass around solar panels is not good enough encourages abandoning the idea and going back to fossil fuel based mowing. Or worse, that this is a “problem with solar” and “solar should be abandoned”.
If you google the title you find this article which is the one I assume OP used.
That can be true of lots of distasteful, but necessary topics necessary for life. I don’t usually engage in small talk about mortuary science, sewage treatment, or surgical removal of tumors, but all of those are certainly incredibly important to life as we are biological animals ourselves.
Yes, but we have experts for these topics, like we also do for animal agriculture. It’s just that the broad public has relatively much knowledge for certain topics, like sports, whereas it’s quite natural that most non-experts are relatively ignorant of less sexy topics. That’s all I wanted to say with that, that I’m not berating anyone for not being an expert here.
Assuming the sheep are only fed from the grass they eat on-site, how are they NOT carbon neutral?
You’re correct that they take in the same number of carbon atoms as they eventually exhale/excrete/etc… So, in that sense, they are carbon-neutral.
But that doesn’t mean they’re climate-neutral, because when you combine carbon atoms with 4x hydrogen, you get methane, which for physical reasons has a significantly stronger greenhouse effect than CO2.
And ruminants (like sheep and cows) belch out lots of methane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruminant#Ruminants_and_climate_changeThat’s why even people who would immediately choke to death, if they ate a vegetable, could still help out on the climate front, if they switched from beef (and mutton) to poultry and pork.
See this graph, for example: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprintsAnd yeah, reading through the article, I’m happy that it’s being used for solar, I’m happy that if we’re already raising sheep, they’re at least being used relatively efficiently, I’m even happy that the sheep are living a relatively happy life.
What I’m less happy about, is that OP vegan was pretty spot on.
They’re raising additional sheep for this endeavour. And no one had the expert knowledge to ask, if the belching sheep maybe somewhat undermine the climate advantages of solar.Assuming the sheep are only fed from the grass they eat on-site, how are they NOT carbon neutral?
You’re correct that they take in the same number of carbon atoms as they eventually exhale/excrete/etc… So, in that sense, they are carbon-neutral.
But that doesn’t mean they’re climate-neutral, because when you combine carbon atoms with 4x hydrogen, you get methane, which for physical reasons has a significantly stronger greenhouse effect than CO2. And ruminants (like sheep and cows) belch out lots of methane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruminant#Ruminants_and_climate_change
I wondered if you were going to go the methane angle. Like most of the points here, you’re not wrong, but focusing on it negates the overall good.
That’s why even people who would immediately choke to death, if they ate a vegetable, could still help out on the climate front, if they switched from beef (and mutton) to poultry and pork. See this graph, for example: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints
But every conversation has to be injected with this message?
And yeah, reading through the article, I’m happy that it’s being used for solar, I’m happy that if we’re already raising sheep, they’re at least being used relatively efficiently, I’m even happy that the sheep are living a relatively happy life.
What I’m less happy about, is that OP vegan was pretty spot on. They’re raising additional sheep for this endeavour. And no one had the expert knowledge to ask, if the belching sheep maybe somewhat undermine the climate advantages of solar.
Because that wasn’t the choices. It was mow with fossil fuels or mow with sheep. This is what becomes so tiresome about the vegan injection. Yes things can be better. Yes this isn’t perfect. No, veganism isn’t the only way to achieve improved results.
Cool. So, why did you pretend to not know about methane? Was it really necessary to waste my time explaining it?
They didn’t do that. They were talking about other aspects of the situation that make this preferable to people mowing the fields. You just assumed that, since they didn’t specifically discus methane emissions, they didn’t know about it, or pretended not to. This is weird.
-
I think the sheep predate the panels
For a second I thought you said that the sheep are predators of the solar panels
oh I’m sure they actually did. if there’s one thing Republicans are good at, it’s being contrarian assholes about all climate related policy. I’m sure someone tried to poke every hole they could in this.
but you’d have to have a pretty warped understanding of emissions to think that mowing a field with sheep is even close to a lawnmower. this field needs to be mowed to keep the solar panels clear. even if these sheep weren’t eaten or used for any other purpose, this would still be a good policy. as is though, we will also be getting wool, because these sheep will die without being sheered. we will likely be getting other products too. I’m not sure if they will be eaten, but probably not. they aren’t very popular for meat here.
sheep are legitimately a very green way to mow a field when you consider alternatives. like, i guess they could use those hand push manual mowers or scythes or something, but that would mean hiring thousands of people. that may be ultimately the best thing for everyone but the billionaires that profit on it, but let’s bee realistic here. that’s not happening.
Ok vegan which is it?
Renewable energy or fossil fuels?
Natural fibres or man made petrochemical based polyester constantly shedding microplastics?
Ethically raised ree range grass fed protein or factory farms?
Ethically raised ree range grass fed protein
How do you ethically raise a being with the intent to kill them and then send them off to a violent death?
Idk, but I got this little sticker on my food that says they did, so I don’t really question it.
Honestly what makes it ethical to do this to plants? I am curious where exactly you draw the line. Is there any animal that is ok to kill, is there any non-animal it’s not ok to kill?
Plants aren’t sentient. Animals are
Is there any animal that is ok to kill
Mosquitoes, ticks, bugs that try to steal/destroy your crops, rat infestations
is there any non-animal it’s not ok to kill?
I mean yeah. You shouldn’t walk into a national park and burn down the prarie. But that’s for conservation reasons, not because the plant is sentient (its not)
Those things you are still ok killing are sentient still, is part of your hangup with the animals being raised? Like is hunting more ethical to raising livestock in your opinion.
Those things you are still ok killing are sentient still
The difference is that mosquitoes, ticks, and infestations are harming us. Pigs on the other hand are innocent and we simply breed them and slaughter them for greed.
Like is hunting more ethical to raising livestock in your opinion.
I guess you could argue that, but I oppose hunting as well.
How about raising crickets or insects for food? I am guessing against because it follows the sentient plus raised to kill.
Chicken raised for laying eggs are not in bests of conditions so I would assume that is unethical to you and a no go. But what about honey? I would by no means consider honeybee conditions unethical. But interested in if you think so.
Feral hog would be the best thing I can thing of where it’s something that is a pest that is not too far out of a usual diet. So is that something available to your diet?
