Solar grazing: ‘triple-win’ for sheep farmers, renewables and society or just a PR exercise for energy companies?For Hannah Thorogood, a first-generation Lincolnshire farmer, grazing her sheep on solar land gave her a leg-up in the industrySolar grazing: ‘triple-win’ for sheep farmers, renewables and society or just a PR exercise for energy companies?For Hannah Thorogood, a first-generation Lincolnshire farmer, grazing her sheep on solar land gave her a leg-up in the industry Guardian  14 Jan 2026 On a blustery Lincolnshire morning, Hannah Thorogood paused between two ranks of so lar panels. Her sheep nosedived into the grass under their shelter and began to graze. “When I first started out, 18 acres and 20 sheep was as much as I could afford,” said the first-generation farmer  “Now, because I can graze this land for free, I have 250 acres and over 200 sheep. Solar grazing has given me a massive leg-up.” Across the UK, a growing number of farmers are discovering that the free grazing opportunities offered by some solar panel sites are a toe-hold in an industry where land is often unaffordable or unobtainable.Dr Liz Genever, a farmer in south-east Lincolnshire, has been able to triple her sheep numbers thanks to free solar grazing. Here is how the disputes arose. Similar to the earlier cases just mentioned, as a new environmental nasty emerged, a community of specialists developed delicate, precise techniques to track the nasties and measure their impact, beyond any reasonable dispute. 

Scientists are, with good reason, persnickety about exact measurements and experimental controls. The analytical specialists who chase sometimes tiny quantities of pollutants and pinpoint their effects are arguably the most persnickety of the lot. But as microplastics got more attention, along came a bunch of researchers who often weren’t even analytical specialists, but medical scientists used to dealing with very different complex systems such as blood or brains or hardened arteries. They knew microplastics were everywhere, so they went to the analytical literature for ways to measure them. They then used these methods to measure microplastics in the biological systems they are familiar with. For instance, in one of the disputed papers, an Italian team found nearly five times more heart attacks and strokes in people with jagged microplastics in their hardened arteries than in those apparently without.But inevitably, the analytical researchers, mainly chemists, wrote horrified letters to journal editors. They contend, for example, that the methods being used can read ordinary bodily fats in a sample as plastics, potentially giving false readings; that there weren’t proper corrections for the amount of background plastic in the laboratory; and that more controls were needed. 

The clinical teams have replied that there is a steep learning curve, and that this sort of work hasn’t been done in biological material before. Maybe some more controls would help, but more background plastics wouldn’t account for some things, such as that five-fold difference in heart attacks. And it isn’t at all clear whether any of these methodological shortcomings mean that there aren’t microplastics in humans, or that they aren’t having ill effects. They just raise uncertainties.Eventually, the analytical experts will start working more closely with the clinical crowd, and they will all learn to measure microplastics robustly in human tissue and investigate possible impacts on health. That is, if the agencies that fund scientific research keep funding them.That’s why the uncertainties worry both sides. Any dispute over methods “only provides ammunition to deniers”, warns one analyst. And these days, there are plenty of science deniers around.......read on      https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/16/microplastics-bodies-debate