[Torture]

Originally Posted by TheIronMaiden

The thing I hate about the valuable farm land rhetoric, is that you don't see the same complaints when people take up good land to build acreages or sprawl out suburbs.

Not to mention the fact that farm land is also covered in ice for half the year.

Anyways, just because there's solar panels on the land doesn't mean that it's useless. Doesn't seem like we're doing much or any of this in Alberta yet, but there's been success mixing grazing and solar farms because you need to keep the weeds down for solar panels to have a clear view of the sun anyways.

What makes a good spot for livestock and a good spot for solar farms often overlaps. They’re both large, quite flat, and get a good amount of sun, being free from tall vegetation. As such, solar producers are increasingly leasing farm land for their operations.

The increase in solar production has environmental benefits, but it can come at the price of diminished agriculture production. That’s why there’s a growing interest in finding ways of combining ag and solar production in one place. For Todd Schmit, an associate professor of agribusiness at Cornell University, this means bringing out the sheep.

The sheep get fed, the farmers get paid, and the solar producers have their vegetation managed without using mowers and weed whackers—which can sometimes struggle to reach beneath the panels and use fossil fuels—or herbicides. This industry has been expanding in New York state since 2017, according to a report by the American Solar Grazing Association (ASGA). The report notes that the Empire State currently has 900 acres of solar energy-producing land being grazed. But there’s still plenty of room to grow.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021...-solar-panels/


Actually, turns out they're starting to do this in Alberta already

University of Arizona bio-geographer Greg Barron-Gafford has been studying agri-voltaics, the integration of agricultural and solar farming, for years. He found that the shade provided by the solar panels prevents the crops or grassland below from becoming hot and dry during summer months, while also providing extensive shade for livestock.


At a solar farm east of Calgary, Capital Power Corp. is planning to pay a local ranch to provide sheep grazing on its solar farm for grass control. Barron-Gafford has also demonstrated effective livestock grazing on solar farms in addition to successfully growing crops like tomatoes under the shade of solar panels.

One of the important concepts of regenerative farming is to improve soil health by using cover crops and not disturbing the soil. The payoff is richer biodiversity in the soil and a deeper soil sponge that retains more water. By growing native grasses underneath solar panels, a large area of soil can be regenerated and this will provide benefits to surrounding land.

As Alberta’s Takota Coen discovered, improving the hydrological properties of his land resulted in benefits to neighbouring properties. In his case, by restoring natural water features and native plants the surrounding farms benefited from a greater resilience to drought and flooding.

https://www.producer.com/opinion/sol...work-together/