Linda Hezel starts clipping herbs, vegetables and produce from the vines on her farm in Kearney, Missouri, early each morning.
The ground-mounted solar array that powers Hezel’s home also provides shade as she harvests produce in the extreme heat that hits Missouri each summer.
“It's really bad. I have to get up at first light because by 10 o'clock, stuff wilts the moment you cut it,” she said.
The bounty that eventually lands on plates at restaurants in Kansas City is grown in raised beds and shaded by 18 solar panels hoisted more than 8 feet off the ground.
This is Hezel’s first growing season experimenting with an emerging farming system called agrivoltaics. The word is a combination of the terms “agriculture” and “photovoltaic” — and it means farming and producing energy on the same piece of land.
The potential for solar energy infrastructure to offer a respite from heat for farmers and the food they harvest has been studied and tested at various universities and research farms across the country in the last few years.
Hezel self-funded the construction of her array and planted a variety of produce under the panels. From previous experience, she knew at least some of her products could grow in the shade.
After a poor harvest season during a 2012 drought, Hezel began experimenting with growing herbs, tomatoes and beans under a pine tree.
“I have observed over the 30 years here, the heating of this landscape is making it more difficult for some plants to thrive and even survive,” she said.
As farmers deal with increasingly severe weather caused by climate change, Hezel said agrivoltaics has helped her beat the heat.
A place to grow food
Elsewhere across the Midwest, agrivoltaic pioneers are asking whether the dual-use strategy can solve another one of the agriculture industry’s problems: access to land.
Increasingly, small-scale farmers struggle to access what Hezel has — a stable place to grow food near population centers where their customers are.
It’s something KaZoua Berry thinks about a lot. Berry, a first-generation immigrant has planted, cared for and harvested food for herself and her family in every season of her life — at her family’s rented community garden space as a kid, on apartment patios as a young adult establishing her career, and now as the farm director for Minnesota-based nonprofit The Food Group.
“Every time I see land space, I'm like, food!” she said.
Berry’s farmers undergo training to learn how to grow organic foods sustainably and sell it locally. The organization supports emerging farmers, including immigrants new to farming in the Midwest and other historically underserved groups.
But over the years, Berry has seen farmers ready to start their businesses, only to be stymied by the same challenge — securing an affordable, local, consistent place to grow food.
Undeveloped land around the Twin Cities can be prohibitively expensive for beginning farmers, Berry said, and cultivating food on rented land leaves them susceptible to changing prices, lease terms and restrictions.
So Berry has taken to brainstorming — or daydreaming — about creative ways to find land for her farmer students.
“My kids make fun of me because they're like, ‘Mommy's probably just thinking about how many tomatoes or how many watermelons can we grow?’ And I'm like, yes, you know me so well,” she said.
Recently, she's been finding those crops can be grown between solar panels. Berry and The Food Group have partnered with US Solar, a Minnesota-based solar company, to pilot long-term farming leases for the land inside a solar array. US Solar specializes in community solar projects — arrays that can produce 1 to 5 megawatts of power and cover 8 to 50 acres of land.
The project’s emerging farmers get to grow their food crops under the solar panels and in the 20 feet between rows for free.
Since the land is being farmed, the solar company doesn’t have to pay to mow what is often grass beneath the panels. With farmers coming to the site regularly, US Solar has extra eyes on its infrastructure. Berry said the nonprofit’s farmers have notified the company when the panels aren’t rotating as they should and when weather has caused damage.
Peter Schmitt is US Solar’s director of project development and said the company has been experimenting with other types of agrivoltaics for years. All but one of the company’s solar fields have native prairie and pollinator habitats under the rows of panels or are used by local shepherds as pasture for flocks of sheep.
“Whether it's pollinators, whether it's grazing, whether it's crop production, something has to happen to that land. We're not going to leave it fallow,” Schmitt said.
The pilot at The Food Group is the company's first agrivoltaics experiment with crop production. Schmitt said that all the “soft cost” work that went into figuring out how to set up this project will pay off as they expand agrivoltaics in their solar arrays across the country — and it could improve the relationship between solar companies and rural towns.
“As solar becomes more common in agricultural communities that doesn't necessarily mean welcome in every community,” Schmitt said. “They might have folks that are saying, ‘Hey, we don't want to see farmland taken out of production.’ Well, our response could be: neither do we.”
US Solar and leaders at The Food Group spent two years preparing the site — ensuring farmers have access to water and electricity, appropriate insurance for their new circumstances, and allocating plots to five different farmers who now grow food there.
‘We’re going somewhere with this.’
In a national survey, about three of every five of farmers 40 years of age or younger said finding affordable land was very or extremely challenging.
David Howard is the policy development director for National Young Farmers Coalition, a grassroots organization that conducted the survey and advocates for national policies to support people starting a career in agriculture. He said the issue of long-term land access is the north star of his work.
“One of the things that our national survey reports keep telling us is that young farmers predominantly do not come from farming families,” he said. The organization’s survey shows more than three-quarters of young farmers identify as first generation.
Without long-term access to farmland, producers are less likely to plant perennials or to be able to make conservation investments that take years to come to fruition.
Howard applauds the farmers and agriculture organizations experimenting with agrivoltaics as a way to secure land for farmers — which he believes is essential to the sustainability of land and the food supply.
“The longer that we can give farmers certainty out into the future that they will be farming on that land and making management decisions on that land, the better,” Howard said.
As renewable energy development expands, conversations about how to account for the land around it are likely to continue.
“These solar companies have created hundreds of thousands of acres that need to be managed across the country. And they need land management and vegetation management, and solar grazers are perfect for that,” said Stacie Peterson, executive director of the American Solar Grazing Association, an organization working to connect solar developers with shepherds.
Over the past few years, Peterson said flocks of sheep grazing under solar arrays have become an agrivoltaics success story.
“This is a pathway to farm viability, and this is bringing access to land to farmers,” she said. “A lot of folks can't afford to go buy hundreds of acres, but they can have access to these lands as grazing lands.”
When livestock graze native grasses, the entire ecosystem can benefit. Sheep get fed and the animals fertilize the fields naturally as they go, improving soil health.
Peterson and her more than 1,200 member organization have set a goal to expand agrivoltaic grazing to one million acres of land. The American Solar Grazing Association recently published educational materials called “What to Expect When You're Expecting Sheep” to prepare solar developers to embark on agrivoltaic projects.
In addition to the environmental benefits of integrating livestock onto solar arrays, Peterson said shade from agrivoltaics projects could curb the negative health effects that come with farming.
“The number one cause of death of farm workers is heat stress,” she said.
Like Hezel in Missouri, Berry and her cohort of emerging farmers are still new to growing and harvesting food under solar panels in Minnesota. She hopes to get an honest assessment from them about how it went at the end of the year to determine if farming inside a power plant is a feasible, long-term solution.
Thus far, results are positive. Whereas in previous years farmers faced challenges growing crops like radishes, lettuce or herbs in the middle of the summer due to the heat, this year those plants flourished in a shaded environment.
“That was a really cool moment of like, OK, we're going somewhere with this,” Berry said.
Many of those participating in The Food Group’s programs are new to farming in Minnesota’s climate and don’t currently have access to land. Many are immigrant farmers like her parents once were.
“It should be a human right to be able to grow food,” Berry said. “They just need the resources.”
