True but you also need to make those pretty robust and probably put deeper into the ground because the shear load increases significantly. That then eats into the actually money saved for putting the whole investment together.

As much as I want solar everywhere - it far from a sure thing for making/saving money.

Mowing bots are likely a cheaper solution. But kinda silly when sheep exist.

Why should the tractor be the old tractor when we are talking about a futuristic PV field? There is already a market for these autonomous tractors and seems they are all about half the height of a traditional tractor, basically the same vehicle with the cab cut off. Then for specifically mowers they can get pretty slender. I imagine a purpose built mower/hay harvester could be very slim. Huge advantage for the farmer if these are electric as well; power would be "free" from pv field and you only need a single technician or mechanic perhaps to maintain this operation.

> Ranchers cut hay to get their pastured cattle through the winter. They can't have portions of their field unreachable by a tractor.

No one's banning hay fields. You can do both.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/food-and-farms/wheres-t...

"The solar canopy also protects the grasses, keeping them green and dewy, even as nearby fields blanch and crisp in the sunlight. Shallanberger rotates the herd every few days, a key tenet of regenerative farming philosophy, so they munch on fresh grass while the rest of the field grows back. They move through all 15 paddocks in about 45 days; if the site relied on mechanical mowers, they’d trim every 45 days, too."

"Vegetation management is one of the most significant costs for solar plant maintenance in the Southeast, Shallenberger said. In the first six months, the cattle took care of about 75% of the mowing — he had to bring in conventional equipment for some woody weeds that the cattle don’t care for. Once the pasture is more established, the herd could handle up to 95% of the site’s mowing needs."

> Reasons like this are why this type of tech will always be popular on HN but they just can't figure out why farmers don't want it.

Farmers come in different sizes, shapes, locations.

The largest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_station is several times the size of the state of Rhode Island, and chances are there're some spots where a bit of shade is welcome. I can also assure you no one's mowing/haying that size a property.

HN has a particularly severe case of 'I can write software, so I know everything' disease. It turns out all the farmers, electricians, engineers, bricklayers, bakers, policy experts, and so so much more should have just come on here a few times a week and they'd be so much smarter.

I mean they are used on golf courses which are quite large acreages. I don't see why not. What makes the tractor manage those conditions is not really it being a sensitive instrument, but being a sort of crude and heavy dgaf machine. You can certainly make that in a slimmer package than one that needs the farmer to sit up high and has had the same "bodyplan" for what 150 years maybe, just because that's how its always been done not for any other reason, and no real pressure until now to actually constrain the vertical space of the tractor.

Attacks scale in the drone age, infrastructure left where nobody’s looking at it is a vulnerability. Solar stacked on an active farm has the benefit of having eyes on it constantly - detection, repair and recovery cycles are dramatically shortened.

> One isolated field of solar represents a negligible amount of power at grid scale.

Maybe I was unclear: that's exactly my point! That's the problem with grid scale for most everyday uses.

In 2026, it's fairly trivial to have a setup such that, if "the grid" fails, I don't even notice for days. That's a nice feature! And it makes sense to build out communities that way from now on.

"The grid" is great for industry, but for residential, micro-grids are clearly the future. Allowing the state and the electric company to cut us off - intentionally or otherwise, let alone having no power during a disaster when it's needed most, is a very silly thing to trade for a tiny efficiency increase.

I sleep well at night knowing I have four bigass AGMs under me.

You’re assuming such attacks cannot be automated. Which unfortunately they so often can.

Just take a look at the multiple fridge freezer attacks in the EU this year.

I bought my bus in 2015, so my personal picture is of the past 11 years.

The big changes seem to have been:

* Better / more varied solar panels

* Lithium batteries (which I don't use for a house bank, but still benefit from by dint of them having driven the price deep-cycle lead batteries down)

* USB-C everything

When I first started this lifestyle, almost everyone had lead-acid batteries powering an inverter, and a zillion wall warts converting power back to DC. Some people had solar for sure, but a solid majority only camped where they were able to plug in.

At festivals, powered sites sold out quickly and at a premium. Dispersed camping in national forests was the purview of tent campers, truck campers, and people who don't use much power (ie, not a ton of remote workers). New campgrounds always focused on power pedestals and seemed to regard that as the MVP.

Now, festivals are a sea of solar and/or off-grid-cooled beers. Campgrounds are often a de-facto swap meet of usb-c oddities (I have a USB-C coffee grinder - what a world!). Dispersed camping in national forests are often transient standing desk communities. Nary an inverter in sight - everything is direct-to-USB-C.

The difference between most people needing to plug in within a few hours in order to have their basic comforts vs. being able to live indefinitely without the grid has significantly changed what it feels like to be on the road.

But as we refine and revise power delivery to our communities, why then do we want to emulate the substation model?

Tiny deployments of off-grid solar beat the pants off that model.