Blazing a Trail in Solar Grazing
How Beau Stafford is farming for the future through solar grazing, scaling his operation, and opening doors for the next generation
Beau Stafford may be the first farmer in his family, but it’s his goal is to make sure that he’s not the last. Beau and his wife Grace bought a 56 acre farm just outside Madison in 2019. In just 7 years, their operation, called Wiscovery Farm, scaled up production from 15 head of Katahdin sheep to 525, all thanks to a serendipitous partnership.
Growing up near Newville in Rock County, his neighbors and friends were farmers. He helped plant tobacco, stack hay bales, muck the barn, and milk cows. His friend growing up had show lambs, so he learned what it was like to take care of sheep – in exchange for a free ticket to the fair, of course. Beau describes those early experiences as being especially formative for him and inspired him to provide something similar for his own family.
“Our story is probably a lot like others from the start,” Beau said when WFU staff members Erin Lenninger and Erin Thompson visited his farm in September 2026. “We had young kids, we wanted to raise them on a farm, and teach them to work hard. But it’s evolved from a smaller hobby farm to something that’s now steeped in production. We are now solar grazing for Madison Gas and Electric (MG&E) throughout the Dane County area.”
Not long after the Staffords purchased their farm, a meeting was held to give public input on a utility-scale solar installation that would abutt their property. At the time, Beau was producing certified organic, small square hay bales and was concerned about potential weed seed drift from vegetation planted on the potential solar site.
“I went to the meeting and OneEnergy listened to my concerns. They ended up asking me if I had ever considered raising sheep. They were interested in bringing on a farmer to manage vegetation on their solar sites.”
The connection to MG&E was transformative for Wiscovery Farm. Beau purchased 15 sheep as a starter flock, financed through the sale of compost from their farm, and then got to work learning about solar grazing.
“I’m a first generation farmer so I had to do a lot of research, talk to a lot of farmers, and buy a lot of equipment [to start out],” Beau said. “You can do it, but you just have to find ways to save money. I did a lot of construction early on before I went to college, I did a little bit of farm work here and there, and I was a forest firefighter out in Montana for a while. So I had the grit to be able to do it. But the challenges were lack of knowledge, infrastructure, and support.”
Expanding the farm to include solar grazing quickly doubled Beau’s production. He currently grazes three MG&E sites with potential expansion to additional sites coming soon.
“We started solar grazing for MG&E in 2024 and during that time we used the sheep to graze the solar sites off the farm while we used the farm to produce hay for our flock in the winter. MG&E were really happy with the results. They liked what the site looked like compared to traditional sites that are mowed and so they decided to add more acreage for us. Since then, we’ve been scaling up more and more to meet that demand.”
Wiscovery Farm utilizes virtual fencing to set GPS mapped paddocks for the sheep on the solar sites. Nofence collars keep the sheep in the paddocks and were purchased for the flock through a partnership between Dane County Conservation, Fund for Lake Michigan, and GrassWorks. According to UW-Extension, Wiscovery Farm is the largest sheep farm in the state and the third largest user of virtual fencing in the world.
Despite the farm’s fast growth, the process of scaling up wasn’t without growing pains.
“Our biggest challenge was scaling,” Beau said. “For solar operations, the appetite for having solar grazing happening on these sites is very difficult to meet. You have to make sure you’re keeping the animals healthy but you’re also investing in the infrastructure needed to do that. And to make labor inputs low enough where you can generate a profit. The scaling has been like drinking out of a firehouse. There’s no playbook for that, we had to figure it out ourselves.”
Despite the challenges, Beau is proud that Wiscovery Farm is proving the concept of solar grazing.
“We went from a hobby farm to a production farm because of the solar grazing opportunities and access to additional land,” Beau said. “We are in an area close to town where land prices are incredibly high. To purchase any additional pasture land would not be an option for us at all. We have a great opportunity to prove to utilities and solar developers that solar grazing can happen, it’s cost effective, and it can be done better than mowing. We’ve taken that responsibility very seriously and, because of that, we went from one site to three sites, and now potentially more.”
Wiscovery Farm’s success has been built on Beau’s vision of forging a path for his kids and other young farmers to enter into farming, and make a living at it.
“In 10-15 years I’d like to see the kids get really involved in the decisions and the work,” Beau said. “I like the idea of my kids taking this on, and not just our kids, but new kids. There’s such an opportunity with the amount of solar that’s out there right now that we can get more farmers in the pipeline. These essential skills can also translate into other types of agriculture too.”
Wiscovery Farm has been committed to providing opportunities to young farmers through a solar grazing apprenticeship program on his farm each season. Beau sees solar grazing as a pivotal opportunity for land access for beginning farmers.
“We are on the cusp of having thousands of acres being able to be used for other types of agricultural innovation because of solar, and farmers have to respond to that. The average age of farmers is dangerously high right now and if we do not get young people in the pipeline, we’re going to be in a bad situation.”
A barrier to getting more young farmers access to land under solar, as Beau sees it, is the tension around utility-scale solar.
“There’s a big disconnect between the public, utilities and developers, and between farmers,” Beau said. “We need to find ways to draw those lines between the three of us. Right now, people are getting upset about solar and I think it’s more so about farmland getting used up rather than concern about solar itself. More and more farmland is going into solar production. We need to have those individuals who are making the decisions about how to manage the vegetation, to talk to the farmers that are willing to do the work and are willing to do it well.”
Beau’s success wouldn’t have come without his leap of faith into farming. That leap was inspired by his family and the kind of life he wanted to provide for them.
“My family is the reason I wake up early in the morning and the reason I go to bed late,” Beau said. “Providing this opportunity for them to grow up on a farm makes all the long hours and hard work worth it. It’s fun too because our kids are gate bosses, they’re filling up water jugs, and they’re doing all the things they need to learn to be farmers in the future. It’s been really cool to not just have them do the work but be excited. And we do it as a full family.”
Author’s note: On the day that Erin and I visited Beau’s farm this fall, Beau was also leading a tour of his solar grazing sites with MG&E, the American Solar Grazing and Growing Association (ASGGA), and Nofence. Farmers from around the country were attending as part of the requirements to complete the ASGA Certified Solar Grazing Training Program. Beau shared invaluable information with the group during the tour and stressed how important it was to him to share what he has learned with beginning solar graziers. If you’re someone interested in exploring solar grazing, contact WFU Conservation Coordinator, Erin Lenninger, who can connect you to resources.
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