On solar grazing, poetry, and the uneasy duet of instinct and code
By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 27, 2025
In the rolling hills of Ohio, a young ecological entrepreneur turns his family’s land into a dual harvest of wool and watts. With a degree in Agricultural Systems Management and a minor in English Literature, he brings both spreadsheets and stanzas to bear on a new pastoral experiment. Between Marlowe’s seductions and Raleigh’s refusals, he seeks a grammar for an age when every heartbeat becomes data.
The morning light does not fall evenly anymore. It is broken into grids, caught on angled panels of glass and silicon that rise like a second horizon above the meadow. Beneath them, the sheep wander in soft clusters, backs stippled with shadow and light. From above—say, from the drone humming a lazy ellipse in the brightening sky—they look like pixels scattered across a living screen. He inhales: dew-damp wool, mingled with the faint static crackle that comes when the panels shift and catch the sun.
He leans on the gate, looking out over land his grandfather once worked, sustaining both feed crops and the family flock. The crook still hangs by the barn door, but he does not use it. He is not a shepherd by inheritance but by design: a graduate of Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, where he majored in Agricultural Systems Management and minored in English Literature. His degree taught him precision—soil analysis, GIS mapping, solar integration—while the minor gave him metaphors, the long pastoral tradition, and a habit of scribbling poems in margins. He came home believing the land could sustain both kinds of literacy: the technical and the lyrical, the grid and the grammar.
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove…
The line arrives unbidden, carried across centuries but also across classrooms. He had first encountered it in an OSU literature seminar on the pastoral tradition, where Christopher Marlowe’s seduction was paired with Sir Walter Raleigh’s rebuttal. Now the poems returned like half-remembered songs, threading themselves into the solar fields as if testing the promises of his own venture. His grandfather had quoted Marlowe too, walking the lambing fields with a laugh. It was a poem of timeless spring, of pleasures without consequence. Yet here, the pleasures are measured in kilowatt-hours and kilobytes, every pulse reduced to a data point. He murmurs to himself: I used to read clouds. Now I read code.
At Ohio State, he had learned to read code as landscape: GIS layers of soil health, yield curves, stormwater runoff. He could map a watershed in pixels, trace the energy loss of a poorly angled panel. But in literature courses he had learned to read differently: clouds as symbols, swallows as omens, the way a line of verse could contain both beauty and warning. Together, they gave him a double vision: the spreadsheet and the stanza.
Sometimes he scribbles in a notebook tucked into his coat—lines about thunder, about the smell of lanolin on his hands, about the drone’s insistent, high pitch that reminds him of an oboe tuned to one eternal note. The habit came from his English courses, where professors pressed students to “find the image” that carries experience. He still tries, searching for the metaphor that might hold the cyan-green shadow of the panels, the faint electrical ache of the atmosphere—the realities the algorithms keep reducing.
The solar companies had arrived with promises as lavish as Marlowe’s shepherd: income streams, ecological balance, a harmony of energy and agriculture. The sheep proved ideal partners. They slipped easily among the panels, chewing down weeds that machines could not reach. Their manure fertilized the soil. Their bodies, in motion, cooled the panels with faint breezes. Wool and wattage—an improbable duet.
Across the U.S., more than 113,000 sheep grazed under solar panels in 2024, covering some 129,000 acres of co-located land. Solar grazing has quietly become the most widespread form of agrivoltaics, a hybrid system that now generates between eighteen and twenty-six gigawatts of power per acre each year. In the Midwest, the projects are most numerous; in the South, the acreage stretches widest. His own valley is just a modest link in this network, but the statistics make his pasture feel like a pixel in a vast screen.
But the harmony hums—a constant, low electrical purr—and the balance is an engineering problem. The panels are not silent mirrors; they are active machinery, micro-adjusting throughout the day with faint, metallic clicks, following the sun with the relentlessness of a machine-god. Walking beneath them, the light is wrong. It is no longer the full, golden spill of a western sun, but a fractured, cool cyan-green, changing the color of the grass and the look of the sheep. It feels like living inside a computer screen, where even the air seems filtered and slightly electric. The corners of the panels are sharp; the wiring is a hazard underfoot. The terrain demands constant calibration, as much for man as for machine.
Then came the collars, snug at the neck like halos of necessity. They measured heartbeats, temperatures, gait. Every movement streamed upward to servers in distant cities where algorithms modeled the flock’s health and the land’s yield. He adapted readily at first—it was the language he had studied. His grandfather’s crook leaned forgotten, while a drone now circled at his command.
He knew, too, that his collars were not unique. They were part of a wave: biometric halos increasingly used across solar grazing operations to track stress levels and movement, feeding predictive models that optimize both grass and grid. Research consortia at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory had turned his livelihood into data points in acronyms: PV-SMaRT, which studied stormwater and soil under arrays; InSPIRE, which explored pollinator habitats between rows. Even the American Solar Grazing Association listed him on a map of participants. To the researchers, the tablet in his hand is one more node in a national experiment.
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields.
Raleigh’s reply feels sharper now than it ever did in books. Promises of eternal spring have always been checked by winter, and here too: the panels cast shadows that stunt grass. The sensors demand constant updates. What had been promised as endless harmony reveals its costs in the glare of maintenance schedules and corporate reports.
Then came the specific demand, the cold logic applied to instinct. The system recommends a grazing rotation: drive the flock north, away from the lush heart of the pasture. His instinct bristles. That grass is thick, ripe for feeding. The north corner is thin and brittle, still scarred from last year’s drought. But the model insists: moving them north will shade the panels more evenly, raising energy efficiency by three percent.
A shrill alert splits the air. Bramble’s collar flashes red. He kneels, palm pressed into her wool. She wriggles, playful. Alive, healthy.
“She’s fine,” he says. His thumb strokes the tight curl of wool at her neck, feeling the smooth warmth of health. He can see the alertness in her dark eye, the steady chew of her jaw.
A technician pulls up in a white truck, logo bright against the dust. She is young, brisk, tablet in hand. “The model says isolate,” she replies.
“For what? She’s eating. Breathing. Look at her. It’s a false positive, a glitch.”
She shifts her weight, avoiding his eyes. “Maybe. But my quota isn’t instinct. It’s compliance with the predictive model.” Her voice is steady, reciting a corporate catechism. “The system flagged a micro-spike in cortisol four hours ago. It is projecting a 60 percent chance of a mild digestive issue within seventy-two hours, which would result in a four-dollar loss of weight-gain efficiency. If we wait for the symptom, we’ve already lost. We have to treat the potentiality.”
Her thumb hovers, then taps. Bramble is loaded into the truck. The cage door rattles shut. For a split second, before turning away, the technician’s eyes flick to the lamb, then to him. A flicker of softness and shame passes, quickly extinguished, as if she too felt the weight of this small, perfectly calculated betrayal. It was the look of a person overruled by their own training. He watches the flock’s heads turn, uneasy, sensing the absence not of a sick one, but of a chosen one, a data-outlier removed for the good of the grid. He feels a sudden, choking silence—the kind that follows an argument you have been overruled on, where the logic is cold and flawless, and utterly wrong.
Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten…
Raleigh’s nymph seems to speak through her: no gesture lasts, no promise holds. He stands silent, jaw tight, remembering storms when he and his grandfather dragged lambs by hand into the kitchen, towels by the stove, breathing warmth back into shivering bodies. No algorithm advised them. Only instinct. Only mercy.
At night the panels fold downward, tilting like tired eyelids. The meadow darkens, sheep huddled in faint constellations. He sits with the tablet on his knees, stars overhead. The gains are undeniable. The sensors save lives: fevers caught before symptoms show, storms predicted before clouds gather. Wool weights are steadier, markets smoother. His livelihood more secure.
And yet what slips away is harder to name. The art of watching flocks as one reads weather: not in charts but in tremors of grass, in the hush before thunder. The intimacy of guessing wrong and carrying the consequence. The knowledge that tending is not optimizing but risking, losing, mourning. He thinks of writing this down, as a kind of witness. A sentence about what can’t be graphed. A metaphor to stand where data erases.
Scrolling, he notices a new tab on the dashboard: Health Markets. He taps. The page blossoms into charts and data points. The sheep’s biometric data is not only driving grazing maps and solar cooling forecasts. It is aggregated, anonymized, and then sold—a steady stream of animal heartbeats and gut flora readings transmuted into predictive models, underwriting the risk for major insurers and wellness clinics around the globe. A hedge fund in Singapore uses livestock stress data to predict grain futures. A health-tech startup in California folds ovine heart rates into wellness metrics for anxious human clients. He is not merely selling wool and power; he is selling a commerce in pulse itself.
We are the dreamers of the dust,
Our bleat is brief, our tread is trust.
Hardy had once put the sheep’s lament into verse, their bleats already elegies. He thinks of that now: the flock’s trusting tread turned into actuarial tables, their brief lives underwriting strangers’ futures. What Hardy wrote as pastoral tragedy has here become economic infrastructure.
His flock’s lives, down to the subtle tremor of an anxious breath, are now actuarial futures, underwriting the mortgages and investment strategies of strangers in distant cities. The vertigo is almost physical—his duty of care, his responsibility to the flock, has been financially weaponized. The simple relationship between shepherd and beast is now an extractive contract at the cellular level. He sits there, staring at the screen, understanding that he and the sheep are, in the market’s eyes, exactly the same: nodes of premium data, harvested until the signal drops out.
Marlowe’s voice whispers again of eternal spring, of belts of straw and ivy buds. Raleigh’s nymph interrupts, steady in her refusal:
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.
Between these two traditions—seduction and correction—he feels suspended.
He wonders if the sheep, their pulses pinging skyward, know they are data points in a network. Perhaps ignorance is a form of grace. “The lamb doesn’t know it’s part of a system,” he says aloud. “Maybe that’s mercy.”
And perhaps, he thinks, writing is another form of mercy: to keep describing, in words, what the system reduces to numbers.
A rumble of thunder reaches across the horizon. He glances up, reading it not as data but as sign. He does not check the forecast. He trusts the old grammar of the sky.
At the gate, he logs the day’s note: Grazing complete. Lamb born. His thumb hovers. Then he types: Named her Pixel.
The word glows on-screen, half-code, half-creature. He pockets the tablet, presses his palm into a woolly flank, and walks on, singing. He holds the tablet’s cold glass against the animal’s warmth—a final, stubborn duality. His song is a promise: that even when the field is run by the Algorithm, the Shepherd’s Voice remains.
THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI