That’s how I feel about the wind turbines too. I’m not sure if they would be uglier with solar panels affixed to them or not 
As with anything manmade, I suspect there are some negative health risks associated with the panels (EMF fields or other) that are conveniently hushed up in the name of manufacturer profits. Green. In someone’s pocket for sure.
Put them in the Big Box store parking lots. It makes no sense to waste farmland or clearcut forests when there’s all this developed land being used poorly right now. People will always find reasons to justify their opposition.
In terms of scenery. I actually like to drive oil set on farm land. Since I was a kid, I always liked watching the pump jacks go up and down. There are quite a lot of them in Kansas.
I also like driving by wind farms. I guess I’m just fascinated by machinery.
I’ve seen it all my life, but I never get tired of watching a tractor in the field, or a combine harvesting crops. (I always turn my head and look.)
I see one of the drawbacks of solar farms are that a farm can’t really scale them to larger equipment. I think it only scales for small farms. That’s OK, it’s just that I can’t see widespread application with larger equipment, which has been the key to the phenomenal agricultural labor productivity in the U.S.
Here is what I found to be an interesting link regarding a solar project soon to be built near me, in Nebraska. A 500 acre project, built on farm ground. They address a lot of the points raised here - though that link is from the people developing the project, so of course they’re going to portray it as rosily as possible.
Some interesting notes to me:
Those are just a few of the exhaustive list of items in the FAQ. It should give one an idea of the gammut of issues that solar projects need to address. And I think it also indicates some potential reasons that ‘parking lot solar’ is not very common.
Number 1 issue is cost of course. Having to hoist solar panels above parking lot is going to be more expensive, not just from a materials standpoint, but also from the planning and engineering standpoint. Not to mention the zoning. You’ll have to get individual permits for every single separate property. Interacting with planning and zoning departments is usually not a fun part of any building project.
To the degree that actually consequential solar projects are, I imagine, almost always developed by companies whose business is utility-scale solar (because most people aren’t willing to mortgage their farm/business on such a thing themselves), It will be much simpler and more cost effective for these companies to have few points of lease and contact (both grid contact, and people contact). So leasing 500 acres from 1 or 2 farmers is much, much simpler, than leasing the same amount of area from hundreds of business owners, and the number of potentially-offended neighbors in rural areas is FAR fewer. Moreover, that land can be very contiguous, reducing the necessary numbers of inverters and other non-panel infrastructure.
In my climate, I can only imagine the snow related nightmare that might occur in an above-parking solar situation. Snow and ice dropping on and damaging cars. Panels creating potential giant drifts. You either have to elevate your panels high enough to fit a decent-size wheelloader underneath, or you will be using probably 4x or more the personnel and time in skidsteers. Honestly the snow issues alone I would think virtually preclude above-parking solar from, idk, Kentucky on north? It’d be very interesting to see some case studies from snowy climates.
Developing solar in an area that the public can ‘access’ it will likely require hardening all of the infrastructure against vandalism and theft (copper wire theft, primarily).
Also I think it cannot be emphasized enough the liability angle. Liability drives a huge amount of business owner decisions. A project which might be marginally profitable in a given case, will likely be torpedoed if it exposes the business to much added liability at all. So parking lots by retail stores and malls, yikes. Parking lots by warehouses and other non-public facilities, better.
So ya, I can definitely see where the attractiveness of greenfield rural solar is much higher vs over-parking. As for inter-farming, I am pretty skeptical, but again, that’s coming from corn country. Corn and soy alone account for over half the farmland in the US, and they are rotated one with the other. So corn controls in that case. Another 10% or so is wheat, not sure how that would respond to intercropping with solar. It’s nice that some crops play well with panels, but stuff like raspberries is only ever going to be niche, I fear, in the scheme of things. It’s all well and good to show that the plants and panels can co-exist. But I have a suspicion that the other barriers will probably be too high for very widespread adoption.
OK, so soy could possibly be grown alongside a solar farm. I am confident that a traditional crop other than corn that is smaller in stature could also be utilized. The point I made about shade tolerant bushes touches on this.
If solar only takes 30% of the land area of that project, surely there is enough sunlight left to grow food.
It will be interesting, or perhaps sad, to see what happens to yields and the demand for tillable acres as herbicide resistant weeds (such as pigweed in beans) start to win the war.
Multi year research project In Arizona growing conditions showed 2-3x the yield of Tomato and Pepper plants. The results would likely apply to middle east and African growing conditions
Food crops do better in the shade of solar panels – pv magazine International (pv-magazine.com)
Agrivoltaics good for agriculture and panel efficiency – pv magazine International (pv-magazine.com)
Solar PV Power Potential is Greatest Over Croplands | Scientific Reports (nature.com)
Regarding the 30% land area, I think a large part of it may be some extremely large setbacks in certain areas of the project, on the order of 500 feet! So those area’t aren’t really ‘among the panels’ per se, and should be able to be farmed normally. Would be interesting to see if they do that. Too bad there’s not a map or something.
Berries are great and all. But they’re about one tenth of 1 percent of cropland in the US, and that’s berries of all kinds - mostly ones with an actual market like strawberries and blueberries. Currants and gooseberries are about 1% of that one tenth of a percent!
All those berries combined are only half the acres of farmed tomatoes. Tomatoes and peppers are probably good target crops. Tomatoes especially since apparently 95% of them are grown in California, so the electricity cost is high(?). Anything grown in hot and dry states with expensive electricity will be most benefited, due to the dual-whammy of water and electricity costs (especially water). Though I think if you exclude California, most if not all of the states with the most farmland, also have the lowest electricity costs.
From a farmer’s perspective though, I’m not sure even a 2-3x crop yield will be all that compelling. If you can only farm between the panels, and that’s say, 50% of the ground, then a 200% yield only gets you back to where you’d be with no panels. Possibly using less water, sure. Maybe even less fertilizer and pesticides. But again, how many farmers are going to ‘mortgage their farm’ for this? Skeptical.
In the end, what’s needed is ‘real-life’ studies, of farmed ground, and the profit in the end. Have a farmer farm 10 acres conventionally, and another 10 acres inter-cropped with solar. What’s the profit per acre on each? In the end, profit per acre is what will speak to farmers.
I agree with you! I’m interested to see how the concept progresses. As long as farmers take into consideration the energy generation I think many will consider this a win. If I was in charge of a project like this, I would consider structuring the lease similarly to a gas rights lease where the farmer gets a % of profits from generating each quarter like they do with gas taken from the ground as a royalty check.
Not farming, but an example of using a rooftop for the collectors:
Solar array produces 1/5 of the jails electricity needs.
If you grow 2x food on 50% of the land and use less water which is a critical research and also earn money from the power solar produces. Why wouldn’t a farmer mortgage the farm for it. Also I’m sure you will be the first choice for labor given the shade.
Depends on the farming. Around here, with farmers heavily invested in combines and planters that are a mile wide in order to farm a lot of acres, solar doesn’t seem compatible.
Well, they might not mortgage the farm for that because it might not bring in enough extra revenue to cover the new mortgage they just took out, in addition to all their other expenses. We don’t know yet. When we see farmers doing this without being backed by research grants, we’ll have a pretty good idea though I think.
It seems like there’s probably only two ways for this to happen; farmer takes on the risk, or developer leases the farmland, and takes on the risk.
So for the farmer, This page gives a range of cost for solar farms from $225,000 to $500,000 per acre. That’s for a normal solar farm that is not built to have men and machinery operate under the panels presumably. Where I live, I think farmland is around 10k an acre. So I’d guess here you’d be mortgaging at somewhere in the ratio of oh, 30 to 50 acres for every 1 you develop? Not sure if that’s how it’d work or not, but if so that sounds like a pretty hefty outlay. And now the farmer has the headache of maintaining a solar farm, in addition to their farming. and each developed acre probably needs to generate $15k+ extra income per year, just to pay the mortgage. and that’s assuming extremely favorable rates and long timeframe. This is all very back of napkin, of course, based on quick googling.
On the other hand, leasing their land takes that all off the farmer’s back. But now the at risk party is the solar developer. What is their incentive to let huge machines waddle around in their solar field? There can be only 2 I think: they get to pay less per acre on their lease, or having inter-cropping is the only way they get the permit. Otherwise I see no incentive for them. If they get to reduce the farmer’s lease, well, now the work is back on the farmer. Except now he’s also probably liable for any damage he causes to the solar facility. I think the motives are rather at odds in a scenario of developer-financed project.
And in both cases, as Snowflake alluded to, for certain crops you probably have to presume that entirely new machinery is made for this purpose, to fit between the panels, and to offload the crop to a truck shadowing the harvester behind, rather than in front. That or you’re limited to hand-harvested crops. Which from what I’ve seen still use giant mobile harvesting stations as collection platforms. Though that’s probably easy enough to downscale. Conveyors built into the framework to transfer the crops to the ends of rows for pickup? Hmmm.
Really, an interesting point to be made in the whole conversation is that 1/3 of corn that is grown, is grown for use in ethanol, for IC vehicles. If corn farmland is straight up replaced with pure solar panel farms approximately in line with EV growth rates, you’re not really disadvantaging the human food system - that corn wasn’t going to people anyway. The land is still being used to fuel vehicles. Except that this fuel can do so many other things, and isn’t basically a scam.
Ahhh, now we are getting to the meat and potatoes of the conversation. If electricity is used to directly fuel vehicles, and that electricity is produced closer (relatively speaking) to where it is used compared to traditional power plants, I see this as a win - win too. Less line loss, less crops need grown, less power needs to be made, less work needs done, all for the same result which is pushing the accelerator pedal to make the car go.
It’s not the focus of this article, but incorporated solar in the fields worked in would be a pretty efficient way to power electric farm equipment. Can you imagine how easy it would be to saddle up to a charging port at the end of a row of solar panels and fill up the tractor? Or to have panels charging a swappable battery that you could take out a few bolts, replace, and be on your way faster than it would take to fill with diesel? Gridtractor Launches Fleet Electrification For Farmers - CleanTechnica
Better hope your tractor doesn’t hit a rock or some mud. Mistakes get to be more costly when the fields are full of solar panels.
Also, a transition to all electric would put many small farmers out of business. New equipment is expensive. Big Agriculture can afford it. There’s many family farms using trucks and tractors that are older than me who can’t afford it.
Joe regardless of whether a tractor is electric or diesel it’ll hit just as hard. In most scenarios where this practice likely will be put in place, the farms will be massive and fit the bill. Also like the blueberry fields I shared above, the “equipment” is hand picking with blueberry rakes so I don’t see any harm to panels there unless someone is extremely enthusiastic about raking. In the local news where my family lives up there you’ll occasionally see that someone came in and illegally raked a field in the middle of the night, high crime rates… 
Regarding putting small farmers out of business, that has been happening for decades simply due to the economics of farming and economy of scale /efficiency of larger operations. They aren’t the ones spending a million dollars on a new diesel John Deere tractor either but that’s likely the price of entry regardless of fuel.
I’m just saying, small farms like the one my cousin runs will just have to close up if electric tractors are mandated. One less farm, more food to be grown by Big Ag or in Latin America. Just because “it’s been happening for decades” doesn’t mean we should accelerate the trend. If anything, this should be reversed. It’s a national security issue.
I don’t think anyone is talking about a mandate. If that was going to happen, antique and classic cars would be gone first as they are just “toys”, not actually serving a purpose. Work vehicles have always been held to a different standard anyway and I don’t see that changing for a long time.