Energy Bar: Farming the Sun

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. 

“This past growing season, the results are beyond what I could have hoped for going into it,” Marley says. “I think that’s a testament mostly to Joe’s work. He’s a fantastic farmer. I’d like to recognize the design; I think that the way we installed it has allowed for some of that, but of course, most of the recognition needs to go to Joe and his farm crew… It’s a whole team effort.”

Solar Power: Growing Like a Weed

When thinking about solar power, most of us picture panels on the roofs of houses. And although rooftop solar is important, accounting for over a quarter of all solar power and about 2% of all electrical generation in the U.S., the majority of solar power is harvested in big solar farms. It’s called “utility-scale” solar, and it feeds into the grid without us noticing.

In the decade from 2015 to 2024, utility-scale solar grew nine-fold, going from about half a percent of U.S. electricity to 5%. At the same time, fossil fuels declined in both total generation and as a percentage of total electricity. These changes are the result of one crucial factor: Solar power is now cheaper than fossil-fuel electricity.

There is one question that keeps coming up, though: Where should we put all the panels? 

Roofs are a handy place, but rooftop solar ends up being about twice as expensive as large-scale solar, since it’s just easier to build a big array in a field than a bunch of smaller arrays on various roofs. And rooftop arrays owned by thousands of individual customers are more difficult for grid operators to manage, who must carefully balance electrical supply and demand.

There are plenty of options beyond roofs, though. Utility-scale arrays can go on large buildings, cover parking lots (France has a law requiring solar on large lots), over bodies of water and canals (which saves water by reducing evaporation), and in the desert.

Estimates vary on the amount of land it would take to power the U.S. with only solar, but studies put it at around 20,000 square miles. That certainly sounds like a huge area, and it is. But it’s only about half of one percent of land in the U.S. By comparison, agriculture takes up 40% of land in the lower 48 states.

Growing Power

It figures, then, that 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.

The American Farmland Trust (AFT), a national organization that works to protect farms and farmland, actively helps farmers make solar projects work for them. Ethan Winter, the director of AFT’s “Smart Solar” program, works to improve the deployment of solar on agricultural land as landowners around the country are being offered checks to lease their land for solar production.

For Winter and AFT, the question is, “How do we really think about large-scale solar siting in a way that’s going to work for communities? We need utility-scale solar. We also need a smaller scale that just helps a farmer stay in business, and so I think the more we’re going to demonstrate that, the more support we’ll get for larger-scale projects that are, you know, thousands of acres … We’re going to need both.”

There has been significant pushback in some communities against large solar arrays, with farmers and residents worried about putting land out of production and concerned that solar arrays can be unattractive. AFT and developers like Marley are trying to negotiate a complex mix of policies and attitudes to find the best solutions.

“You have an increasing wave of moratoria and an opposition to projects, [with] even relatively small community solar projects being fiercely opposed in certain areas,” Winter says. “Our job at AFT is to support farmers and farm viability. And so if we can … have farmers telling farmers, ‘Here’s how to do it, here’s how not to do it, here’s what I’ve learned.’ Then you’re on a path, and it’s not that dissimilar from our decades’ work on regenerative agricultural practices, where you start with early adopters, and those early adopters build out learning cohorts, and eventually that becomes something that is accepted.”

Marley has seen this backlash firsthand. “Pushback that we’re receiving on local individual projects,” he says, “it’s a lot of hearsay, conspiracy theories online that the panels, the steel, are poisoning the soil.” AFT went so far as to study sites that Marley and Hyperion installed over a decade ago to test the soils for absorbed metals and found nothing.

But Marley sees the opposition to solar development, and specifically to agrivoltaics, as generally simpler.

“It’s an aesthetic change,” he says. “My experience is, people don’t want that. And the people who don’t want that are not farmers. What I’ve heard from other farms, the farmers that were working on the farms adjacent to those [solar] projects … if it’s good for the farm, it’s good. It’s folks that aren’t farming in the farm communities that are the most vocal. And they’ll throw up any [objection]. I mean, it’s a kitchen-sink approach.”

Marley notes that resistance to agrivoltaics on aesthetic grounds can backfire, as unprofitable farms are usually developed into single-family housing developments.

Wins for Farmers and the Planet

Both Winter and Marley emphasize that agrivoltaics, when done right, works for both the farmer and the solar project, helping farm communities stay vibrant while producing clean power. AFT’s Smart Solar program has four pillars: helping farmers directly with solar projects, doing research to find out what methods work best in agrivoltaics, helping create good agrivoltaics policy, and communicating about the successes of solar on farms and fighting misinformation.

“Ultimately,” Winter says, AFT is “creating a pathway for solar to be much more acceptable and accepted in rural communities because it’s not displacing agriculture, it’s enabling it. This is a very promising path, and when we get depressed, we look to other countries, and we see this is happening in Japan, happening at a very significant scale in China. India is really coming on as an interesting country for agrivoltaics. So we’re not making this up. The question is, how do we Americanize it, basically?”

Agrivoltaics can work in a variety of types of farm and ranch operations. For example, Winter notes, hay growers in New York and sheep farms in the South can use the shade of solar panels to ensure their crops and animals don’t overheat. 

Marley, for one, is up for the challenge posed by a variety of agricultural environments. “We’re working with varied farms across Massachusetts: pasture, range, cattle, sheep, a lot of fruits and vegetables, as well,” he says. “We’re trying to design systems that work for farmers with their current operation. No two farmers are the same. So having to think about solar design in a way that is compatible — fitting solar into their farm and not the other way around.”

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. 

“Massachusetts … it’s an expensive state to be a farmer,” Marley says, noting the high labor and energy prices. Agrivoltaics “is a way to diversify revenue streams and make them more viable as a business.”

“Keeps the land in production, that’s something that is first and foremost, needs to be recognized,” he adds. “The land is in agricultural production and strengthening family farms. 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.”

Five Takeaways

• Utility-scale solar is the cheapest and fastest-growing source of electricity.
• While utility-scale solar takes up a lot of space, places like farms can be an excellent fit for solar.
• Some communities push back against agrivoltaics either because they believe misinformation, or they object to the aesthetics of solar panels.
• The American Farmland Trust, which protects farmers and farmland, is helping encourage agrivoltaics.
• Agrivoltaics can generate revenue for struggling farmers, helping keep farms and farm communities vibrant.

What You Can Do

Support policies and politicians that support solar in general, and agrivoltaics in particular. Support the American Farmland Trust, which fights for farm viability and Smart Solar. Support and patronize farmers in your community that have or want to have solar arrays on their farms. Join organizations that fight for solar energy, like Vote Solar. And always talk to people in your community who may be misinformed about solar and green energy.