WEST CHAZY — Local solar grazer, Rebekah Pierce explores the growing agri-energy industry in her new book about the integration of renewable energy and sustainable agriculture.
“Agri-Energy: Growing Power, Growing Food” is a non-fiction book written by Rebekah and published by Island Press in November. After seven years of first-hand experience of solar grazing and over a year of research, she offers insights on the growing trend of agri-energy practices and the opportunities for co-production of food and energy.
Rebekah tackles misconceptions about renewable energy sources like wind and solar farms, she discusses realities farmers are facing across the state as more opt-in to agri-energy as an economic lifeline and analyzes the impacts on the environment and economy of rural communities.
“The book looks at the economic benefits for farmers, as well as for developers and for the communities those projects are located in. It also looks at the environmental benefits, like improved soil health and carbon sequestration, improved health of the animals and the forage that’s being grown in these places,” she said.
Agri-energy is the combination of sustainable agriculture and renewable energy production. Some of the most popular practices include agrivoltaics, which is growing crops around solar panels, and solar grazing.
“That (solar grazing) is the process of using sheep to graze solar sites as the form of vegetation management, so that they’re not having to use mowers, which aren’t as great for the environment, pose a risk to the panels in terms of rocks kicking back up on them and things like that,” Rebekah said.
Current agri-energy projects and recommendations are reviewed for farms with different acreages, in different climates and with different crops, as well as farmers in different stages of their careers. Rebekah also gets into the specific approaches that can maximize benefits for all parties involved.
The book is recommended to farmers, energy developers, environmental activists and community members neighboring agri-energy projects for the latest information about renewable energy and sustainable agriculture.
“My goal for it has really been to get your mom or my cousin, or to get your regular neighbor down the road. That’s who I want to read this book,” Rebekah said.
Rebekah, of Lewis, earned an English degree from St. Lawrence University and a master’s in Special Education from SUNY Plattsburgh. She taught high school English for a few years at Northern Adirondack Central School until 2020 when she left to pursue writing full time.
In 2015, Rebekah and her husband, Josh, bought a farm in West Chazy where they raised some chickens and pigs as a hobby. In 2020, he left his job at CV-TEC to run the farm fulltime.
Together they turned a hobby farm into a business, J&R Pierce Family Farm.
Josh said the book is a valuable resource for those interested in agri-energy.
“Whether that be developers, farmers or folks like us that are bridging that gap between agriculture and energy production, as well as a good framework for those that are unaware of what agri-energy is,” he said.
They raise animals for meat, which is supplied to local restaurants, markets and directly to customers. They specialize in lamb, beef and pork. In 2022, the two had secured their very first solar grazing contract to have 70 sheep graze on a 23-acre solar site near Plattsburgh.
Rebekah thought the solar grazing would only benefit the farm financially but was inspired by the changes she was seeing in real-time at the solar sites to write the book.
“At the time, I kind of viewed it like as a means to an end, like this is going to help our farm be financially viable by giving us land to graze,” she said.
“Once we started doing this, once we got on a site, and we had sheep on the site, and I was able to walk around and see things, I was like, “The soil is improving.” There are tons of hawks overhead, there’s voles running around underfoot. There’s all kinds of pollinators.”
She originally planned to write a how-to guide for new solar grazers, but after developing the idea, she wanted to expose more people to the ideas of agri-energy.
“I came up with a proposal for this book, which, at the time, my idea was that it would be more of a how-to manual on how to be a solar grazer,” Rebekah said. “I realized that this would actually be more effective if it was a book that was more about the why, rather than the how.”
Since 2022, J&R Pierce Family Farm is now contracted with seven sites across Clinton, Essex, St. Lawrence and Franklin counties.
Encore Renewable Energy Founder and President Chad Farrell said this book validates agrivoltaics, not just as a “nice-to-have” niche, but as a scalable, standard practice with economic value for the farmers, the project owners and the land.
“It provides the proof points needed to show skeptics that solar doesn’t have to mean the loss of farmland. It really is the opposite. It can actually be an economic lifeline that keeps family farms in business,” Farrell said.
“We believe this book will empower more developers to see farmers as partners rather than just landlords, and it will give legislators the context they need to write smarter policy that encourages this kind of dual-use innovation.”
Encore Energy has a solar grazing contract with J&R Pierce Family Farm at a solar site in Constable, generating 3.6MW of clean energy while simultaneously producing local, sustainable food for the community.
“Working with Rebekah and her husband at J&R Pierce Family Farm on our Constable Solar Project has been a textbook example of how solar and agriculture should intersect,” Farrell said. “But the value goes far beyond just ‘cutting the grass.’”
Rebekah’s book “Agri-Energy: Growing Power, Growing Food” is available on shelves in stores and online.
