this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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A lot of crop land is perfect for this sort of thing. They’re finding that low ground crops do really well near solar panels. Leaving money on the table by not double purposing the land.
https://www.wired.com/story/growing-crops-under-solar-panels-now-theres-a-bright-idea/
Also not sure why anyone would be resistant to turn empty unused pasture into solar farms. Other than astroturfing by fossil fuel companies.
The main reason to not farm between solar panels is irrigation and harvesting. Modem farms tend to rely on big equipment to accomplish those sorts of tasks.
Now, with giant arrays of power production, you could theoretically make a rail system with an electric motor/s running the farm equipment up and down the rails. That would be custom equipment (Though it could be standardized). The irrigation would still be a challenge. Pivot irrigation works so well because it's a single tube carrying all the water. That makes for much lower maintenance. I'm not sure how you could get similar maintenance with panels. The naive approach would be tubing carrying water under all the panels. That, however, would frequently clog requiring someone to constantly go around fixing nozzles and plugged pipes.
Seems like a great space to rewild to allow pollinators to repopulate.
Can this really scale up though? Large farms have equally large tractors.
Depends on the crop. See the linked wired article for more info. Also robots are now being used to pick both crops and weeds. They don’t take up as much room as tractors.