Note that if you purchase something via one of our links, including Amazon, we may earn a small commission.
Growers, brewers, and manufacturers using their resources for the good of the planet.
Farming the Sun
Utility-scale solar is the fastest-growing source of energy in the world, but it requires a lot of space. Farmers may have the answer.
It’s easy to miss a quietly revolutionary innovation hidden in the fields that farmers have been plowing for nearly 400 years along the picturesque rural roads of the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts.
One of those farmers, Joe Czajkowski, grows sweet corn and broccoli in the rich loam of his land in Hadley, producing local food for the nearby University of Massachusetts. On the same patch of land, he also produces a bumper crop of solar power.
Czajkowski worked with Jake Marley of Hyperion Systems, a solar energy company that helps farmers install solar projects on farmland, to design a solar array on two acres of his property. The panels are placed high enough off the ground and spaced far enough apart to allow Czajkowski to farm more or less as usual. Beneath the panels, he planted a sweet corn variety that does well in partial shade and won’t grow taller than seven feet, so it won’t interfere with the panels.
And the results are clear: You can get food and power from the same land.
One of the best places to install utility-scale solar is on farmland. Some arrays can be placed on marginal land that has been taken out of production. But they can also coexist with farming and grazing. Putting solar panels on still-productive farmland — otherwise known as agrivoltaics — can be a win-win for farmers and the planet.
Czajkowski’s farm, with gently rolling fields and low mountains dotting the horizon, demonstrates the innovation and promise of agrivoltaics, producing energy that utilities buy and feed into the grid seamlessly, while also helping the farm stay viable.
“The land is in agricultural production and strengthening family farms,” Marley says. “ That’s who we are mostly working with. And of course generating renewable power. It seems to me to be win-win-win across the board.”
– Jim Miller
How a Hot-Sauce Heir Helped Save the Snowy Egret
While he was at the helm of the family company that makes Tabasco sauce, Edward McIlhenny established a wildlife refuge on Avery Island.
On a salt-dome island in the coastal marshes of the Louisiana Gulf Coast, one of the best-known hot-sauce manufacturers in the world shares space with snowy egrets and alligators.
Avery Island, La., a 3.4-square-mile private island 180 miles west of New Orleans, is home to Tabasco, established in 1868 when Edmund McIlhenny developed the recipe that’s still used today. It’s also where you’ll find Bird City, the wildfowl refuge created by Edmund’s son, Edward Avery McIlhenny, that’s been credited with saving the snowy egret from extinction.
Around 1895, Edward brought eight snowy egret hatchlings to his private estate, built an aviary over a pond, and released them in the fall to migrate. In the spring, the birds returned to nest — and they brought friends. By 1911, Edward reported that 100,000 snowy egrets were nesting on Avery Island.
Bird City was just one of Edward’s conservation projects. He was active in wildlife preservation and research even as he served as the president of the McIlhenny Company for 51 years, from 1898 to 1949.
After Edward’s death, the McIlhenny family continued his efforts on Avery Island and in the surrounding coastal marshes. They planted cypress trees for habitat, left fields uncut for wildlife forage, and restored marshlands with cordgrass and bulrush to combat erosion.
Today, the McIlhenny Company participates in coastal restoration projects and habitat protection, while also protecting and conserving Avery Island’s wildlife and plant species. It also continues to use the low-waste recipe and methods developed by Edmund McIlhenny to make Tabasco sauces.
– Sharon McDonnell and Robin Jones
Cool Brew For a Hot Planet
Fire Bloom is the beer that rises from the ashes of wildfire — and gives back to a parched landscape.
It was in the “fire season” of fall 2022, that brothers Ryan and Collin Mortson, and their friend Cole Glendinning, opened a neighborhood restaurant and microbrewery in Calgary.
In honor of the brothers’ late father, who relished the social rituals of a good beer at the end of a workday, the restaurant — Best of Kin Social — was built around a shared love of brewing and creating a space that celebrates “the social qualities of good food and beverages.”
In 2023, Collin spotted fireweed honey at his local farmers market. Fireweed earns its name from its knack for blanketing a fire-scorched landscape with showy magenta-pink blooms swishing on slender green-leafed stalks. It pushes up through charcoal, sometimes only weeks after a burn, thanks to fire-adapted rhizomes that survive underground where aboveground plant material has burned.
This pioneer species quickly covers and stabilizes soil, feeds deer and other wildlife with tender new growth, and offers vital early nectar for pollinators. The beekeeper explained that they were collecting more and more of it every year, a bittersweet consequence of increasing wildfires.
The idea arose for a specific beer using fireweed honey from which some of the profits could fund wildfire recovery projects. Funds raised by sales on tap at Best of Kin Social, through its partner Pursuit’s properties and attractions, and in select Alberta liquor stores went towards relief efforts in 2023 — a year notable for more than 6,000 fires that burned across Canada, affecting a historic 15 million hectares, the most on record.
Born from disaster, this is the beer that Best of Kin doesn’t want to keep brewing. But Fire Bloom Honey Lager’s social good is acting like the wildflower itself: filling a need in the ecosystem when a disturbance occurs.
And for consumers, it’s a feel-good, tastes-good proposition. “It’s a bit of a different spin, where it’s about hope: the rebirth, the regeneration, and the pollination, as opposed to doom and gloom,” explains Ryan.
– Jennifer Cockrall
