Australian farmers have long relied on windmills to power parts of their farms and now those behind the Sheep Sustainability Framework are attempting to quantify just how many producers use renewable energy in some capacity.
The Framework's recently released second annual report includes data from the National Producer Survey - a joint initiative between MLA and AWI that involves over 1200 Merino and 800 non-Merino producers.
While the data is still in its infancy, it shows 50 per cent of Australian livestock (cattle, sheep and wool) producers generate their own renewable energy.
Of those, 11pc of producers utilise renewable energy from their retailer and 43pc don't generate or buy any renewable energy.
Results show that of the type of renewable energy that Australian livestock producers generate and utilise on-farm, 80pc use solar without battery, 19pc solar with battery, 6pc wind, 1pc biomass, 1pc hydroelectric, 2pc other and 1pc geothermal.
Sustainability Steering Group Chair Dr Scott Williams said that of the 50pc of Australian producers generating renewable energy, some may be using "a couple of solar panels on electric fences and others may have 10 or 20 kilowatt systems".
Dr Williams said there had been recent discussions towards getting a metric that is more specific to how this energy is being used on farms.
"It's a trade off between getting people to complete the survey and actually having all the answers," he said.
" As a metric it's got some limitations but it's better than nothing.
"It's the challenge for an industry level framework, all of our metrics need to be something we can measure at that very high level. We sometimes have to swap simplicity for level of detail."
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Director of Farm Renewables Consulting, Karin Stark has always been a strong advocate for on-farm renewables.
Ms Stark recently met with New Zealand landholders and a solar developer to showcase the benefits of grazing Merino sheep under solar panels.
"They are in the early planning and design stages of solar farms, so it's really important that those new developments consider agriculture in using that land so we aren't out of production," she said.
"We can combine agriculture and renewables in really successful ways."
Tom Warren, Dubbo, NSW runs 180 Merino sheep under a 20 megawatt solar farm and highly recommends farmers in the right location to jump on solar grazing.
Mr Warren has been reaping the rewards of solar grazing for seven years.
He said even during drier periods, his sheep have sufficient feed under the panels.
"On a night with 4mm of rain it would be significantly more due to condensation along the strip of each of the panel arrays, because it concentrates in ribbons," Mr Warren said.
"The panels come back to a fixed sleep position overnight, slightly facing about 4 degrees off horizontal to the west.
"So that same strip is being watered all the time. You only need a couple of mm of rain and you magnify that along those strips."
Mr Warren has faced obstacles when grazing sheep under the panels but has been able to adapt accordingly.
"There have been a few issues of injury of the sheep along the array systems when they get long wool," he said.
"Once the wool gets to a certain length and you get a bit of a shower, it gets sticky and they can get tangled up in those drives.
"I resolved that by changing the shearing pattern to 10 month shearing.
"The wool is then compliant with the minimum length and it's a far better outcome in terms of looking after your animals."
Mustering is also a challenge, particularly in summer.
"Normally in an agricultural situation you'd muster in the mornings when it's cooler, whereas in solar farms you muster in the middle of the day when the solar panels are flat so you can drive straight under them," he said.
The National Renewables in Agriculture Conference Expo, will be held on Wednesday, June 21, at Dubbo Regional Theatre and Convention Centre.
Ms Stark, founder of the conference, said she is looking forward to talking through these learnings at the conference.
"Not everything goes smoothly and we need to ensure that the learnings we've had from our project are told so industry can work on better solutions and technologies and understand the issues that farmers have," Ms Stark said.
The conference program includes a two hour tour of Mr Warren's farm.
