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For some reason I pictured the sheep being hired like a regular, human employee would.
What do you think makes you qualified for this job?
Baaaaaaa!
You're hired!
They give the sheep a lawnmower and let em get to work
Yeah, no, they’re rented. It’s like slavery but with sheep. Or like contract work where food and security is the payment
That's more than can be said for a good chunk of jobs, so not a bad deal.
Slavery the same way using a dog to herd sheep is slavery. If you've ever seen one of those dogs at work, you'll realise that there is nothing else in the world they would rather be doing. You let them herd sheep and they're so happy they're basically out of their mind. I honestly think it's hard for us humans to even imagine loving just one thing so much that you would never do anything else if you had the choice.
I know a guy that rents out goats for a similar purpose of keeping down vegetation, they go under power lines in the mountains (places inaccessible with machines), and just graze there. These goats are literally living the best life a goat could ever dream of: They're chilling out in their natural habitat, with more food security than any wild animal could hope for, and are completely protected from predators. In the winter, they're kept warm and fed, so they don't starve or die of exposure as a lot of them would in the wild.
Imagine if we treated people this way, just providing for everyone's basic needs and let people do whatever made them happy...
Lol what, are the sheep being forced to eat the grass?
No, they are paid to eat the grass. But yes, since they're paid with grass. If they don't work they don't get paid, but it's not slavery because if they work they're getting paid.
I don't know the author, but British people often say "hire" where Americans say "rent."
Like they will say, "hire a car."
"Agrivoltaics" is a new word to me, and it feels like it makes sense off of seeing it in this application.
It's a field of ongoing research. Mostly looking into which crops do best growing in shade. Raising sheep for whool under solar is pretty simple though as they just graze and rest under the shade of the panels. Goats would climb on the panels and possibly damage them.
I'm already invested in large scale projects in Germany
Experiment? You see sheep grazing under solar panels all the time.
They're just gonna lay them off like those 50-100k workers they're trying to ditch right now.
As seen on Clarkson's Farm, sheep can be really hard to manage, they are stubborn escape artists that also find creative ways to kill themselves. Hopefully the rental comes with sheparding. Maybe the people studying are also sheparding.
Clarkson's also an idiot.
He absolutely is, but that doesn't make the things depicted on the show untrue.
It's kind of the point of the show, though. The main thing a novice needs explained to them is why bad decisions are bad. So the show provides a valuable public service, demonstrating to farmers which experimental methods work and which don't, so that farmers with less money to burn than Clarkson can gain the benefit of the experiment without bankrupting themselves.
that also find creative ways to kill themselves
I have a friend that's a sheep farmer, and this bit is what surprised me most the first time she showed me around the farm. Her sheep graze in the mountains as long as there isn't snow, so they're probably in decent shape compared to sheep a lot of other places. STILL, she said she would find sheep every now and then that had lain down wrong, tipped over, and were unable to get up. They would literally die if she didn't find them and right them up.
Apparently, it's something about how their organs move around, which makes them all slide over to the side if the sheep lies on its side. Once that happens, their center of mass is shifted too far over, and they'll fall over again when they try to get up. The way to fix them was to roll them over on their belly and keep them there until their organs had slid back into place...
Do sheep not have that thing where they jump up on stuff to get to a higher location?