"Look at all this sun!" exclaims Jeremy Rogers, as he walks down the center row of his four commercial broiler houses in Ranburne, Alabama. "This would be a pretty good place for some solar panels, wouldn't it?"

Rogers is just one of many poultry farmers in Georgia and Alabama. In 2012, there were nearly 12 thousand chicken houses in Georgia. According to the Georgia Poultry Federation, the poultry industry accounted for 47 percent of the state's agricultural production in 2014. In 2016, according the the USDA, Georgia and Alabama, respectively, were the number one and two states for broiler production in the U.S. Like other poultry farmers in the region, Rogers is consistently searching for and implementing new ways of keeping his chicken houses as energy efficient as possible.

"We consider all of our options when looking at energy sources," says Rogers. "We maximize energy efficiency as best we can because if not we won't turn a profit. We'll be losing money."

Rogers raises Cornish Cross chickens, which, in a broiler house environment, take around 60 days to raise. He and his family manage four 40 foot by 500 foot solid insulated wall broiler houses that each house a little more than 20 thousand chickens at a time. Chickens, Rogers explains, are able to regulate their heat better as they age. Therefore, it is the first few weeks of the chickens' life which require the largest use of energy on the farm. During this time, Rogers must keep the chicken house heated in the range of 85 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Moreover, heating the broilers, which are never allowed below 77 degrees, even when the chickens are into adulthood, is an especially expensive task in the wintertime.

To keep his houses heated at these temperatures, Rogers, like most broiler farmers, uses propane heaters inside the chicken houses. A way that Rogers, and other poultry farmers, help minimize the amount of propane heat used to warm baby chicks is by dividing the broiler house in half with a curtain.

"When the chickens are small, we pull the curtain down and keep all of the baby chicks on one side," says Rogers. "That way we only have to keep one half of the house heated."

"You have to think, we're rotating through chickens every couple of months," says Rogers. "We use a combination of electricity and propane to run the houses. Propane usually costs around $25 thousand every year, most of it from trying to give the chickens a heat source. Total utilities usually runs about in the $55 thousand to $60 thousand range. We have to cut energy costs in any places that we can."

Another way that Rogers has reduced energy consumption and costs in his broiler houses is by switching the lights inside chicken houses from fluorescent and incandescent bulbs to Light Emitting Diodes--or, LEDs. According to Solar Electric Power Company, LED lights are up to 80 percent more efficient that fluorescent lightbulbs, and a 36 watt LED will give off the same amount of light as an 84 watt fluorescent light. According to Energy Star, LEDs are 90 percent more efficient than incandescent bulbs. Rogers estimates that changing the lightbulbs in his broiler houses to LED lights increased his energy efficiency by 15 percent per year.

"We have about one thousand feet of lightbulbs in every chicken house," says Rogers. "Having bulbs that waste less energy--that's big. If technology is moving forward, then I'm trying to move with it."

Click here to listen to Jeremy Rogers discuss the benefit of switching to LED lights in his chicken houses.

But alas, while some farmers, such as Rogers, are focused on moving their broiler houses into the future, some farmers are still just trying to get their houses into 2018. Dr. John W. Worley, a professor emeritus of poultry science at the University of Georgia, has spent many years auditing chicken houses throughout the state of Georgia. He uses the money allocated through grants from the USDA to upgrade outdated chicken houses that are consuming unnecessary amounts of energy.

"A large majority--really, almost all--of the farms now have solid insulated walls," says Worley. "But the old standard was to have curtain walls for the outside of chicken houses which is an extreme inefficiency because if you're trying to keep the temperature inside the house at 90 degrees but it's 20 degrees outside and you've got curtained walls--well, you're letting all of your heat seep through the cracks."

"We still go through and audit some chicken houses where they have curtained walls. Fixing that is a priority," says Worley. "Then after that's fixed we can start doing things like getting rid of incandescent bulbs and fluorescent bulbs, and start installing things like attic inlets in the houses."

The attic, Worley explains, is a "natural solar collector." Attic inlets can pull air down from the attic, minimizing the amount of fossil fuel based heat needed to keep the chickens at their optimal temperature.

"Attic inlets, making walls solid, making sure the houses have no leaks or cracks--these are just some of the things that we do to make the chicken houses more efficient," says Worley.

Dr. Brian Fairchild, a professor of poultry science at UGA, says that strides towards energy efficiency in the poultry industry is nothing new.

"The poultry industry is not becoming sustainable, it is sustainable," says Fairchild. "It's got a much smaller footprint than other agricultural sectors already. It's been evolving itself for a long time, trying to become more efficient, and it has been pretty successful in doing so."

"People like to ask, 'well what is the poultry industry doing to become more sustainable?' and I ask 'well, what is there left to do right now?'" says Fairchild. "Everyone thinks of it as the big bad poultry industry. But it's always benefitted poultry farmers to be as efficient as possible. The poultry industry's big contribution to greenhouse gas emission is probably through transportation. Farmers don't control that part of the process."

"Not that it's perfect or has no footprint," says Fairchild, "but the poultry industry does it's part to minimize its energy usage, and it's not currently the most practical solution for farmers to switch completely over to alternative energy."

"You do see people trying to find better ways to fuel their houses, but it's all about what can be afforded," says Worley. "I've seen some interesting options being tried out. One house that we audited nearby tried using biomass, and one farm down in south Georgia started burning the tops of old telephone polls that had been taken down and sawed off."

And "yes," says Worley, "some places are trying out solar panels, but it's probably because they got a grant that was able to help them do it. Some people probably do it just because they believe in it and that it's beneficial long term, but it's too expensive for most farmers to install that out of their pockets like that in the early stages of solar. And it may be especially unattractive whenever the prices of natural gas are down, which they are slightly right now."

So, though Rogers may, indeed, have an ideal plot of land for solar panels in East Alabama, he says that they will have to wait. "The cost up front is so large," he says. "I think if I were building a new farm I might go ahead and install them and include it in the build cost. As is, I would have to retrofit the houses, and it would take too long to recoup that initial cost. It's not something that hasn't been thought about or looked into, though. Because if you're building a new chicken house now, solar is possibly the way to go."

For now, Rogers will continue to look for energy savings in other, more feasible ways in his broiler houses. Though the fuel he uses to heat his houses may be old school, the amenities on his farm are modern and help him keep the environmental and economic costs of his farm relatively low, nonetheless.

"You never know," says Rogers, finishing his thoughts on solar panels for his own farm. "Maybe one day."