Completely off topic but I'm fascinated with this. How much acreage do you devote to this?

I've done hobbyist exotic (legal!) mushroom farming for a while, at a scale that is more than I could use but not like 100x what I could use. I've thought about selling but it seems like a lot of hassle doing the marketing and business parts of it.

How do you sell? Do you have a distributor that purchases product from you or is it a farmers market type deal?

> cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season.

But surely only certain places need to do this? for the UK, you need to make hay for the winter, assuming that your meadows flood, or are otherwise muddy. But if your in one of the more temperate areas of the southern USA, surely you don't need to do that?

> The best solution is still to put solar panels and farmland in different places where each can be optimized without concern for the other.

There's significant evidence "add solar panels" is an optimization to at least some kinds of farmland.

> farmers can't bring in tractors and cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season

That season is typically "winter", and you wind up without much hay to cut at that point.

Huge isolated fields of solar end up with the same problem as nuclear: they introduce multiple single-points of failure.

The source can be attacked, the transmission infra can be attacked, the delivery point can be censored.

I think most people want highly distributed, reliable, affordable power. That's why off-grid tech is experiencing such a boom.

I live in a 36' skoolie, so I'm nomad-indexed, but I can confirm that over the past 10 years or so, most RV-lifers have transitioned their focus from recreation / comfort to off-grid experimentation. Essentially everywhere I go in the US, if I'm camped near others, they are going to have minimum viability for boondocking. That was not the case when I started.

Especially amidst the current political instability and apparent looming collapse of the US state, one of the simplest things that most of us can do is stabilize off-grid power in our neighborhoods, and that is quietly happening all over the place.

So, the role of vertically integrated solar (both literally and metaphorically) has more to do with the grid shape that serves our stability needs, and less to do with large-scale differences in efficiency.

> However there's almost no dimensional constraint for farmland in the United States

Everyone forgets about Hawaii. Hawaii is quite constrained on any land for any use. Putting PV over farmlands where we can is probably very smart for a place like Hawaii.

In the theorical sense, sure. We could cover all of the world's needs with a solar panel in the Sahara that's 700 km on each side and handwave the transmission lines for that.

The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how the real world works.

Some of us are interested in ways to do things outside the US. Yes, even some who live in the US.

In the theorical sense, sure. We could cover all of the world's needs with a solar panel in the Sahara that's 700 km on each side and handwave the transmission lines for that.

The real world however, a farmer owns a specific plot of land, has $w of capital in the back, owes $x in loans, owes y tons of crop, owns z tractors and seeds. Without centralized planning, plopping down solar panels in an optimal place isn't how things work.

> The best solution is

is it?

I believe that, while a cool technological innovation, the cost of installing and maintaining these panels will be significantly higher than doing the same on open land.

The article’s biggest claim is that devoting one percent of US farmland to agrivoltaics could cover 20 percent of the country’s electricity, pointing at the Texas to Nebraska to California corridor, which is exactly where big mechanized farms are most common.

They run large equipment (combines, sprayer booms, center pivot irrigation systems[1], etc). To keep that working under panels you need tall posts, wide spans, and a layout that matches the equipment paths, which would push structural cost significantly above a ground installation. All maintenance would require a boom truck, not just a ground crew. And center pivots in particular (very common) need an entire circle cleared for the system to pivot, meaning a multi-acre span with no posts for the pivot to hit, which is simply infeasible.

That’s before accounting for pesticide spray and dust on the PVs, or the logistical burden of running PV crews through a working farm.

It’s also worth noting that the study itself was broccoli, which is hand harvested and about the best case crop for this. Even so, the broccoli took 25 extra days to mature. On a farm running multiple rotations a season that lost time has a real cost, separate from the structural costs.

This innovation has a lot more promise on smaller plots. Co-ops, market gardens, specialty crops, and the like that don’t rely on large equipment. I’d be surprised to ever see it on a large farm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation

You can farm and do industrial scale solar on the same land. It works extremely well for lamb herds, shade tolerant crops like strawberries, and greenhouses. I'm extremely interested in this area and actually starting some personal projects where I live, around agri-solar that is actually farming.

Optimization for land area in agriculture is already a catch-22 type affair: We subsidize the planting of corn to produce ethanol -- one of the most inefficient forms of solar energy 'harvesting' possible. So going directly to electrical harvesting while retaining the ability to grow high-value crops is certainly still advantageous...

To put some numbers: ~40% of the corn grown in the US (approx. 5.4 billion bushels out of roughly 14.9 billion bushels total production) goes toward ethanol production

> this isn’t an either-or question. a farm owner may want to add some revenue with electricity generation.

Also: Many plants don't want/need full sun. In fact, they adapt by varying production of a chemical called zeaxanthin throughout the day to manage the amount of energy they take in.

Partially shading crops with bifacial panels (which are semi-translucent) can be beneficial to the crops as well as producing energy.

https://www.science.org/content/article/too-much-good-thing

Initial reaction is how do you harvest? Is the farm well connected to the grid? Is the cost of making this practical just much higher than land. Land is cheap in the scheme of things here.

https://farmbuy.com/1595-florina-road-katherine-nt-0850-4368...

1% of panel cost according to Gemini.

Sure, but given that a 100 acre corn farm in Ohio would make about $80k in revenue and if you're lucky about $40k in profit

A 100 acre solar plant in Ohio would make well about $1m-$1.5m in revenue

Why would you increase the cost and complexity to try to increase your revenue from $1-1.5m to a massive $1-1.5m?

Or you could just lease the land to a solar operator for about $100k a year, with no expenses

It's a solution looking for a problem.

> The USDA now expects 5.65 billion bushels of corn to be used for ethanol production in 2026-27

> The department has raised its corn production forecast by 234 million bushels to 16 billion bushels.

https://bioenergytimes.com/usda-raises-2026-27-us-corn-use-f...

About a third! Way more than I thought. I wonder how much of that would have to be covered in panels to get the same energy.

They certainly do mention this:

> Broccoli cultivated under them grew more slowly, requiring an additional 25 days for harvest, but produced roughly the same yield. Meanwhile, these magenta sunscreens improved the microclimate below, reducing the “vapor pressure deficit”—a measure of when plants need to halt photosynthesis to avoid excessive water loss. This may have improved the plants’ efficiency in converting sunlight into plant biomass, which increased by 2.8- to 4.5-fold compared to unshaded plants.

> The shaded plants’ levels of macronutrients such as calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus were either higher than or similar to unshaded plants, while levels of some micronutrients such as iron, copper, and zinc were slightly lower.

One thing I’m curious about this from the plant perspective - we’re pretty sure we’re passing everything relevant down to the plant, but nature doesn’t normally leave signal or energy lying around without leveraging it somewhere, so what don’t we know about how the broccoli use the parts we’ve been assuming they don’t?

I'm current taking composite construction certification courses because modern manufacturing provides for customizing the material for very specific uses. Low volume production with very specific mechanical and physical properties.

I feel the same way about how fiber optics can create bandwidth by just slicing up the spectrum for different channels of data (my rudimentary understanding anyway). I like how even after all this time we find new and clever ways to work with light.

Wait we could reflect back infrared heat into space and still collect solar energy as electricity - so doing two jobs at once in, say, a desert.

Re-greening at a profit?

Depends on what the crop is. Broccoli I imagine, is manually cut. same with tomatoes.

Smaller scale market gardens could benefit. Many rely on more manual labor and smaller machines.

There are some small organic farms using a system of chained paper pots and frames to quickly fill them with soil and sow with seeds, then once they're sprouted you use a hand pulled machine that spreads the chain out while directly placing each plant into the soil automatically.

> Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?

It's hard to see how this would work well with corn, since corn is pretty tall, corn harvesters are pretty huge, and putting panels even high enough for a different set of smaller, realistic harvesters would still require supports that I can't imagine would be cost effective given all the other hurdles they would cause.

Other crops like cotton, alfalfa, and hay aren't as tall, but have the same harvesting problems.

Most harvesting efficiency gains are directly tied to GIGANTIC machines. Farming is insanely efficient and competitive. It's hard to see how smaller machines could be viable and no one would have discovered it until this tech.

I'd guess there is far more potential in grazing land (unrelated to this tech), which is already actively being developed at scale.

You can see there are already huge examples of this in Australia with sheep grazing under panels and it's just barely starting in New York state with a cornell pilot. In my opinion it's the future of electricity in agricultural areas.

Given that it's about as abundant as platinum (which trades at ~$50000/kg), tellurium is pretty cheap right now (~120$/kg, about 10 times the price of copper).

Since it's an almost free byproduct of copper electrorefining (>1% concentration in copper anode slime, but low annual production of ~800 tons, limiting CdTe panel production to ~100GW/year short term [1]), I don't think that mining it in space is ever gonna pay off for terrestrial panel production, because if it was priced somewhat comparably to platinum group metals you could never ever justify any demand for it (panels would be much too expensive compared to alternatives, tellurium is already a relevant cost factor for them despite being cheap-ish) => and you'd obviously use all interplanetary mining/transport capability on platinum and its ilk instead.

[1]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/02/10/global-cadmium-tellur...

There's the minor issue in that the technology to bring all that metal back home is also a weapon of mass destruction :-/

For a larger greenhouse a mix of clear non solar and solar pv pannels optimised for different plants could be the way to go. The polycarbonate clear pannels are actualy cheap and likely strong enough that I am considering mounting solar pv directly to them. So: scratch building a greenhouse frame, that will support all the loads, and attaching the panels, and run the wires right through the polycarb, standard solar pannels, install@40" width and that works out to 3 per 12', 12 pannels for 40', for a neat eve to eve install.

The US is huge. The problem is efficiency of transmission. But maybe we just install 2x the solar to overcome that? When energy is so low cost we can afford to be a bit less efficient.

A huge amount of corn goes into producing ethanol to burn as fuel in cars. We can safely take a small portion of agricultural land out of "food" production and replace it with photovoltaics and electrical production instead of using it to produce ethanol and produce productive stable returns for farmers instead of subsiding corn and fuel.

That vacant land tends to be far away from electricity users. Not always - lots of desert around Las Vegas - but people historically like settling around arable land. Producing electricity close to where you need it is great, both because of transmission losses and because building more long-distance transmission lines is neither easy, cheap nor fast

The better solution to this vacant land is to remove the regulatory and permitting burden that made it vacant in the first place.

Let the people build.

I feel like starting with parking lots might be better than filling "empty" land though?

Theory is always more interesting than practice, because theory never has to make money.

Remember spacex is a public company and you can short the company at any time if you believe what you're saying. Why not profit off it?

> Economics would suggest full spectrum panels on the outside + LED-lights on the right spectrum on the inside will always be more affordable than specialized panels.

Lookup the energy needs to grow plants, panels are like 25% efficient, you'd need to put most of it back into the LEDs to grow anything. Growing LEDs aren't your regular 5w home light bulbs, you need a lot of energy to grow plants.

This is the classic out of depth HN take

Answered in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50428018

Yes but it's sealed between panes of glass:

Image: https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.xcrp.2026.103555/asset/c8...

Paper: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...