Extreme Climate Survey
Science News is collecting reader questions about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate.
What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events?
McCall: Argivoltaics is a term for the colocation of solar and agricultural activities, such as grazing, crop production and also ecological restoration.
Sujith: Argivoltaics has multiple benefits, both for the farmers and for the solar developers.
McCall: If the solar developers can show they are using the land to the highest benefit, they can then access more land to develop more solar. And then the other big one is the farmer and the landowner themselves.
Sujith: Even if you lease out your land for solar development, you can still have an income generating activity like growing crops or sheep grazing.
McCall: There’s also the local communities that stand to benefit from that. It could potentially kind of create a pollinator habitat or prairie restoration.
Seok-Choi: Common practice used to be that people would leave the ground bare for solar construction, but that’s not how it’s done anymore.
Sujith: Covering the land with vegetation, they can avoid erosion and use it as an opportunity for soil carbon restoration.
McCall: Currently in the United States, there are roughly 530 (as of July 2024) argivoltaic sites. It’s a roughly fifty–fifty breakdown between pollinator habitats and solar grazing.
Seok-Choi: Right now, there’s a huge focus on letting sheep graze under solar panels, because they don’t jump on the panels, they don’t like to chew on wires or anything.
Sujith: Integrating the sheep grazing can also improve soil nutrients. So we just completed a five year study in the midwestern U.S. A lot of these areas have high carbon depletion because of intense agriculture. And we actually found that managed sheep grazing can actually improve old carbon and soil nutrients.
McCall: And so…
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