ASGA Teatime Replay – Wicked wins and epic fails: 7 years of solar grazing with Lyndsey Smith & Chris Moore

It’s one thing to get your solar grazing business off the ground, but what challenges and opportunities can you expect once your solar grazing operation is in its 3rd or 4th or even 7th (!) year of operating and you need more sheep and hands to keep growing?

For this Teatime, we invited the always entertaining Lyndsey Smith and Chris Moore from Ottawa, Canada to update us on their grazing business, Shady Creek Lamb. They have an inspiring story and are an instructive example for how to manage growth, with an expected 600 acres of solar to graze this year.

Lyndsey and Chris have had to adjust their operations to the challenges that many graziers experience. Two big issues they’ve run into include finding good labor to manage their sites and finding enough sheep to graze all the solar nearby. In addition, their northern location makes overwintering a key cost issue to manage for solar grazing.

They discussed how they’ve navigated those issues, including adopting cover crop grazing to follow their solar grazing contracts (keeping sheep out through February) to address the roadblocks to growth that overwintering can create. They also discussed the viability of bringing in flocks from other farmers in order to scale up, as well as how they’ve managed the various relationships involved. That includes working with other farmer partners (and the trials and tribulations involved) and keeping things running smoothly with site operators.

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