Farmers make stunning revelation while testing solar panels on cropland — here’s how it could change the way we grow food

Agrisolar — a practice which essentially marries agriculture and solar photovoltaic energy — is beginning to catch on around the globe, and researchers recently set out to quantify its benefits in a study.

Newly published research in the journal Nature Sustainability outlined the study’s focus, pinpointing the “consequences of converting agricultural fields to solar photovoltaic installations,” also called “agrisolar co-location.”

You don’t have to be a credentialed researcher to identify some on-the-surface benefits. The installation of solar panels on farmland — land parcels typically poised for unobstructed sunlight — allows farmers to maximize their acreage while reaping the often shocking financial perks of solar photovoltaic energy.

But agrisolar doesn’t exist in a vacuum, either. Canary Media recently looked at the new study, which focused on the impacts of solar energy on farms in California’s Central Valley.

Researchers indicated California’s Central Valley was an area of “high solar breakthrough,” presumably referring to atypically high levels of sunshine to power the panels.

As the outlet noted, however, that area is “also extremely water-stressed as California whiplashes between years of significant rainfall and drought,” and farmers “can’t make their crops less thirsty.”

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Intermittent drought conditions have posed significant difficulties for farmers in the area, but the new research suggests a solar-inclusive approach is a massive boon under the circumstances, beneficial to both the land and a farm’s bottom line.

Researchers pointed out that the practice necessarily involves some initial out-of-pocket expense, citing “early losses from installation expenditure” concerning commercial solar arrays on farmland.

Nevertheless, they came to a stunning conclusion about the financial benefits of agrisolar installations, finding that “adjacent agrisolar co-location is more profitable than the baseline agriculture-only scenario, regardless of how landowners are compensated.”

The study put those profits into plain terms, noting that overall profitability was “dominated by [net energy metering, or NEM], offset electricity costs,” and surplus energy sold back to the grid. In all, they calculated “a net positive economic footprint” amounting to $124,000 per hectare, per year — a sum 25 times higher than that of the same land if used solely to grow food.

Farmers in Nigeria have recently reported similar outcomes when switching to solar energy for irrigation, and one said that the practice made farming “easier and cheaper.”

Ultimately, researchers found an array of benefits associated with agrisolar, maximizing the productivity of acreage with definitively high returns. Michigan State University renewable energy landscape scientist and lead author Jacob Stid summarized the findings, highlighting the staggering financial security afforded to farmers by adjacent agrisolar co-location.

“If a farmer owns 10 acres of land, and they choose to convert one or two acres to a solar array, that could produce enough income for them to feel security for their whole operation,” Stid explained.

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