FITCHBURG — Leaning on the back of their pickup truck, farmers Jesse and Elspeth Robertson-Dubois kept a keen eye on their flock of sheep. As the sun beat down, the majority of the flock huddled together, sheltering from the heat under a row of silver solar panels closest to their buckets of water. But further up the hill, almost out of sight amid the long array of panels, a sleepy lamb suddenly awoke to find its mother far away.
“Is the lamb lost over there?” Elspeth Robertson-Dubois asked, in response to its faint bleating. Before long, however, the lamb found its footing and trotted beneath the shade of the metallic panels until it was reunited with the flock. Once an abandoned apple orchard, this land was converted roughly three years ago into a solar farm, with hundreds of panels spread across its 20 acres.
The owner of the panels, solar company Nexamp, is leasing the land from the orchard owner for 25 years. Not long after launching the site, the company partnered with Finicky Farms, owned by the Robertson-Dubois family. In exchange for keeping the grasses low, the farmers are paid by the solar company and also get to use the land as a free grazing site for a flock of 215 sheep, which they process and sell locally as lamb.
Advertisement For the sheep, the panels provide protection from heat, rain, and snow, with some sheep even using the base of the structure as a scratching post during shedding season. Meanwhile, Elspeth Robertson-Dubois said, the flock’s stead.