if your initial reaction is we have tons of empty land why would we ever build solar panels over a farm?

this isn’t an either-or question. a farm owner may want to add some revenue with electricity generation. just like a hospital may want to cover their parking lot to offset costs.

at giant scale do these solar location choices optimize the absolutely best use of land for cheapest possible electricity generation? no. but at small scale it can make sense for these individual owners

https://electrek.co/2026/10/05/six-flags-has-installed-one-o...

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kempbellt 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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ipdashc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> large equipment (combines, sprayer booms, center pivot irrigation systems[1], etc)

Something I've always absent-mindedly wondered about when agrivoltaics comes up is integrating a gantry/rail system of sorts for the farm equipment. It's definitely infeasible for many reasons, but it's fun to think about. Instead of equipment pulled by tractors, have the equipment ride above the field on rails, held up by the same poles the solar panels are on.

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Iolaum 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe today but with the rise of automation, who knows?

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kempbellt 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Center pivots are mechanical automation. They replaced traditional hand-moved sprinkler lines and automatically sweep the entire field at a defined rate. The concept is over 100 years old and has stuck around because of how efficient it is.

Unless we intentionally replace them with less efficient automation, it’s a hard sell.

It’s really more of a physics problem than an automation problem.

	▲	defrost an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Center pivot irrigation is hardly universal - its main use is in low / sparse rainfall areas in order to deplete the finite resource of the water table. There are already strong signs a number of significant basins are in terminal decline from agricultural use. There are no universal one setup suits all solutions here. One advantage of large scale agrisolar projects (trialled since at least 2020) is better moisture retention through shade of increased condensation drip. It's a balancing act - you appear to have a position hard up one end of a see saw.

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cm2012 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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botanrice 5 hours ago | parent [-]

any recommended reading resources or documentation of your projects? building a resource database on this field and don't personally know anyone with experience, especially being in the NE

	▲	defrost an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps of interest. March 2021: https://assets.cleanenergycouncil.org.au/documents/resources... Watch the Australian Agrisolar CRC partners: https://www.cooperativeresearch.org.au/resources/about-the-c...

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beambot 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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labcomputer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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

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polarsanel 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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wtch98 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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brainwad 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Don't know about the US, but where I live farmland is restrictively zoned to preserve its agricultural use. You can't just turn prime cropland into a (normal) solar power plant, but perhaps you can get away with this dual use trick.

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alex43578 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wonder how little farming you’d have to do if this did count. Does letting a few sheep walk around a solar farm count? Growing a few strawberry plants? If the economics from elsewhere in thread are accurate, the farming feels like it would add 0 value other than the regulatory dodge, and would therefore be minimized.

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wtch98 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Don't know about the US, but where I live farmland is restrictively zoned to preserve its agricultural use

So central land use planning? Rural America won't be that Commumist -- not even by law, just look at the way it votes.

Freedom means a farmer can do whatever they want with their land

	▲	brainwad 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Freedom-loving, R-voting America is full of restrictive zoning. I don't think it's necessarily the contradiction you make it out to be. Especially if, like here, the government doesn't tell you what or how to farm, only that farmland is for farming.

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dzhiurgis 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Solar plant in Ohio will likely require 50m in grid connection. If you find grid connection near the city the land there is likely more expensive and not growing corn but something more substantial.

What I'm saying - these dual-use agrivoltaics are for higher-margin crops, where land is somewhat constrained.

	▲	chasd00 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Solar plant in Ohio will likely require 50m in grid connection. there needs to be some way to harvest and transport electricity like you do corn or some other crop. Like an 18 wheeler size lipo that is charged up and delivered to a train of lipo cars and discharged. Then that train goes somewhere and connects to the grid and offloads all that electricity. Rinse/repeat. It's not as efficient as directly connecting ot the grid but maybe it's more feasible than waiting years for a grid connection.