Editor’s note: Miles Braxton’s company is Okovate Sustainable Energy. A previous version of this post misspelled the company’s name.
Agrivoltaics — co-locating solar arrays with farming operations — is generating enthusiasm among both farmers and clean energy advocates as a way to promote sustainability in agriculture.
When implemented correctly, agrivoltaics provides a vital dual income stream for farmers — in solar energy generation, but also as a means of providing an optimal growing environment for compatible crops and herds. The added revenue may allow more farmers to retain their land for themselves and future generations.
While pilot projects around the country are identifying best practices, not all have been successful, and practitioners say that advancing the technology will require an equitable approach that centers farmers’ needs first.
A discussion during the recent Solar Farm Summit in Rosemont, Illinois, directly addressed the issue, featuring a majority-Black panel of practitioners and service providers. Three major themes emerged during the discussion: maximizing compatibility of solar arrays with existing land use, demonstrating the financial benefits of agrivoltaics, and addressing how solar power can help BIPOC farmers hold on to their land.
“I think one thing that, through our work in this technical assistance, has become very, very clear [is] that people don’t just want to build an agrivoltaics project for the sake of building an agrivoltaics project,” said Jordan Macknick of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), who also served as moderator for the discussion. “How does agrivoltaics enable you to take that next step and focus on things like succession planning or farmer training?”
Benefits for farmers
Miles Braxton started his company, Okovate Sustainable Energy, to work exclusively on “farmer-focused” solar development.
Braxton said after several years of developing community solar projects, he “really saw the inefficiencies” of taking farmland out of production for solar projects. “That’s a problem that is just going to keep piling on top of itself until it gets to the point where we can’t develop anything.
“We target crop farmers who are growing a very specific suite of crops that we know works well with our design,” Braxton said.
Cetta Barnhart, owner of Seed Time Harvest Farms in Florida, also cultivates her own plot of fruits and vegetables, and cited her background in food and wellness in promoting the compatibility of solar and agriculture to benefit the bottom line for farmers.
“This is more hands-on of what a farmer can really do in their current practices. If they’re raising cattle, there’s a way that they implement solar with that. If they are having bare land, the pollinator is another way that they can benefit from that,” she said. “So how these solar projects are developed and created for real farmers is still a big conversation to be had.“
Ena Jones, owner of Roots & Vine Produce and Café, and president of Community Partners for Black Farmers, cited her dual role as a working farmer and an advocate as an advantage in promoting the potential compatibility of agrivoltaics and cultivation — especially for Black farmers.
“We advocate and we also lobby for farmers at the state level for the state of Illinois and the state of Georgia. And I’m here to kind of segue to help farmers understand … how different solar opportunities can help them with production on their farms, and be an asset to the production on their farms. And also, to help solar developers understand farm[ing],” Jones said.
Noting that solar projects can help cut energy costs, Jones said “Energy use is one of the farmer’s [major] expenses outside of diesel, and of course seed. So, if they can reduce that cost dramatically, even by a third, that would impact their bottom line in revenue extensively. It is very important, especially for BIPOC farmers, to be ushered into this technology so that they won’t be left behind in the process.”
Making connections
Agrivoltaics can be a valuable tool to reduce overall costs, expand potential revenue – or both – as a means of promoting optimal use of farmland. A both-and approach can work to address what is often an inherent tension between the best use of large, flat plots of land for large solar arrays – parcels that also frequently comprise some of the richest soil for cultivation.
For example, the 180 MW Madison Fields project in Ohio represents a test ground for large-scale agrivoltaics – farming on 1,900 acres between the rows of a utility-scale solar array. One of the project’s focuses is determining which crops and herds are the best prospects to coexist with large-scale solar developments.
“People have a lot of questions with regard to energy development going forward in this state … Finding a balance where you can do a number of things on the same ground — in this case energy production as well as agricultural production — is obviously huge,” Dale Arnold, director of energy policy for the Ohio Farm Bureau told the Energy News Network in July.
Macknick highlighted another project where NREL and Clean Energy to Communities (C2C), along with the Black Farmers Collaborative, worked on a proof of concept project which incorporated solar panels on a demonstration farm cultivated by Barnhart that features citrus trees, leafy greens, and other produce.
“I had already looked into doing solar on my property and was just looking at it to have solar as the backup,” Barnhart said. “But when we started talking as a team and then we found out about the agrivoltaics portion [and] how that can be incorporated into farming, it really brought forth a bigger and better opportunity to not just benefit by having it but also sharing that with other farmers,” Barnhart told NREL in 2023.
Mike DellaGala of Solar Collective said taking a farmer-centered approach can also be beneficial to product and service providers.
“I think a lot of the conversation … has been the difference between farmers and developers, and how we are or [are] not communicating and getting projects over the finish line or not. And I think… if you’re farmer-first or farmer-centric, I think that’s the way to success for everybody… allowing [farmers] to dictate a lot of the project details has been really successful for us. And it makes our job easier, frankly,” DellaGala said.
A farmer-centric and collaborative approach is especially vital in ensuring equitable access to the benefits of agrivoltaics for BIPOC farmers, Barnhart said.
“I stand in the gap somewhat between having conversations with [BIPOC] farmers and having conversations with project developers because you need someone in the middle. I’m a community advocate. I hope there are more of us in the room than not. They have to be in place in order to bridge the conversation as to how this really works well in real-life time,” Barnhart said.
Braxton cited the need to rein in the power of utilities, which he says frequently raise roadblocks to community-level projects to protect their own interests.
“Utilities have too much power. They have too much money to lobby. They don’t want you to sell power back to your community because [of the impact to] their own rates that they can control. So that’s a risk. The root of those problems is that here in the U.S. … we have 50 little countries [states] that make up their own policies and do their own thing… I think there needs to be a policy to incentivize solar to be developed innovatively. I don’t think policy makers at the state level understand the importance of that,” Braxton said.
Jones noted that policy change will likely be driven by farmer demand, which by extension benefits the larger community.
“In my opinion, once the farmers understand [how solar can] help them on their farms, I can’t say this enough, they will force politicians to comply. The money will be there; the funding will be there. But the engagement needs to happen. It desperately needs to happen,” she said.
Land retention for BIPOC farmers
Loss of land –through racism and other factors, has long been a contentious topic among BIPOC farmers – and Black farmers in particular. According to a 2022 study, discriminatory federal policies contributed to Black farmers losing roughly $326 billion worth of acreage during the 20th century. In July, the Biden-Harris administration announced a distribution of $2 billion to thousands of Black and other minority farmers, created through the Inflation Reduction Act as a means to begin to address this inequity.
Agrivoltaics may not intuitively track as a relevant strategy for land retention; but Barnhart touted its value, especially for Black farmers.
“[Black farmers] have lost a lot of land because we just couldn’t afford to keep it… We didn’t just lose land because it was confiscated… What solar does is add an income stream or a reduction in your expenses so that there’s more you can do on your farm and create an opportunity for the next generation.
“It gives us a reason to keep the land going, and it gives us, in our community, resiliency we are experiencing through our climate change storms. For the families that can have that piece of land, that builds a resiliency to protect them in their neighborhoods, protect their own backyard, and protect the future generations, give the future generations something they can look forward to that makes sense to them. Then we build into something that takes care of our wealth building opportunities, our succession planning, and our look into the future to make a change,” Barnhart said.