Heritage Bred / Sun-Raised Chickens
THE FARM
Clean Energy / Ethical Farming / Healthy Choice
One of the unique aspects of Sun Farms is our collaboration with Hillston Sun Farm located just south of Hillston, in the New South Wales Riverina. This is a working 200-hectare solar photovoltaic power station owned by Amp Energy. It has over 200km of solar panels in rows that track the sun through each day.
Hillston Sun Farm is our first venture and given the scale of solar farm construction in Australia, we expect to expand our vision to other solar farms as the benefits of our system become more widely appreciated.
OUR STORY
Our solar farm collaboration allows us to produce pasture-based meat and enhance the solar farm’s electrical output. This is due to the heat reduction afforded by the irrigated green environment under the panels, especially in summer.
​
The shade and protection provided by the solar panels allows the Sommerlad chickens to socialise naturally, and forage freely for bugs, seeds, and pasture. Sun Farms expects to include prime Sun Farm lambs later in 2024.
​
At Sun Farms we embrace regenerative agriculture principles. This approach improves soil health, organic matter, and carbon sequestration, contributing to a more sustainable ecosystem.
​
It is well known that chicken manure is a wonderful fertiliser. We manage our birds across the farm to spread manure – so, rather than importing fertilizer, we bring onto the farm grain feed. It is processed via the chicken into natural fertiliser to enhance the soil biome and pasture growth.
​
By choosing a Sommerlad, you not only savour exceptional chicken meat but are supporting sustainable farming practices and the future of clean energy.
​
We are proud to produce both food and electricity from the same land.
AGRIVOLTAICS
Agrivoltaics combines agriculture and solar farming, creating a mutually beneficial relationship on the same land. It involves managing grasses and plants under solar panels and leveraging solar panel shelters for pasture-based farming.
​
While agrivoltaics has been practiced for decades globally and recently in Australia, it has primarily been focused on sheep grazing for vegetation management. The key to Sun Farms is to expand production and increase economic output from the same land.
​
This means double the economic activity from the solar farm – agriculture plus electricity.
​
The solar panels provide shade from high summer heat and shelter from winter rain and have a remarkable wind reducing effect. This produces a microenvironment like a grove of trees.
​
We are pioneering a system designed to ensure the solar infrastructure is not compromised or modified, so that the economics attributed to the electricity operation remain unaffected, but at the same time hosting an agriculture operation.
