Putting solar panels in grazing fields is good for sheep

Do you mean irrigate?

Decently common on somewhat marginal land.

Usually it’s more common to provide hay and similar supplemental feed though.

Also common is post-harvest grazing.

I'm assuming you mean irrigate land.

Before WW2 in the UK, the countryside was covered with loads and loads of ponds and lakes for livestock to drink from and to keep the water table up. Fields were typically smaller with more hedgerows for wildlife to live in.

Droughts were less of a problem back then.

It was claimed the Germans Luftwaffe could fly by night on the full moon navigating by the reflection of these bodies of water, so the British govt issued orders to fill in these ponds and lakes to make it harder to fly by night.

Consequently the water table on farmland fell causing more drought problems and after WW2 these bodies of water have never been re-established by govt orders.

The history of the wild apple is also interesting. The Soviet Union paid people to conserve these, but the breakup of the USSR meant these were no longer looked after. They also displayed a symbiotic relationship with other plants just like livestock has displayed a symbiotic relationship with the land.

"Prickly shrubs, such as eglantine and barberry exhibiting symbiotic relationships with wild apples by shielding them from predators were also cut"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malus_sieversii#Conservation

If there were no wild animals, like deer that can feed on the leaves, then the bottom of trees would reach to the floor.

The main problem has been trying to feed a growing human population whilst keeping them under control, so ideas sometimes dominate which shouldn't, like we see here with solar cells providing shelter for livestock like sheep.

In NZ it's massively common in areas that were once only suitable for sheep. But sheep products in the current environment are not worth anything, wool especially so. However, dairy has excellent value globally, So now these farms have converted to diary, but that means they need to improve the grass growth to be suitable for cattle which means irrigation. The last 10 years has seen massive swathes of land unsuitable for cattle converted to land suitable via irrigation in my country. This has led to destructive processes and pollution of rivers and water ways though irrigation and fertilisation. It's our dirty little secret.

A lot of people use the year alone as evidence that some process is outdated.

Template:

It's ${CurrentYear} and we're still doing ${OldProcess}?! We don't need to do that because of ${NewProcess}!

Well, if you don't pass on knowledge this happens.

If all of your life's lessons are left in your brain instead of properly written down, and with reasoning ("we do this because this", not just "we do this because we did this") attached to it, no wonder next generation needs to re-learn that

Chesterton's fence fixes this

When I read that I thought, fragility ~= efficiency

But then I thought of nature, which is pretty amazing.

I think maybe:

  fragility = efficiency / testing-time

so yeah, old-timers.

Osage oranges were planted all over as hedge fences, for example in Kansas. Probably in some places the trees were left on the boundaries but I think in many places specific trees were planted because they were good at creating boundaries. thttps://dyckarboretum.org/osage-orange-a-historical-living-f...

I can tell you from personal experience my family farmed very sandy soil. They did strip farming. Very few do this anymore.

If you want efficiency, the common method is very wide, large areas of the same crop so you can use several very large machines to do all the work.

Have you never stood under a row of 10 or 20 metre pine or macrocarpa trees? There will be a strip of a metre or so of no growth and it slowly increases in density from there out until 3 to 5 metres out.

If healthier animals are better in terms of economics why don't McDonald's source their meat from free range farms where cows feed on grass and can physically move more than three steps?

Irrigation is done by pivot irrigation which can't exactly go over or around large trees. Fences usually have systems to allow the irrigation to roll over them https://www.hydro-eng.com/irrigation/wp-content/uploads/site...

Here's a poor example of a shelter belt that you might see in my region https://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/02/85/43/2854357_a22a5d...

I never said they weren't healthy, you can still be uncomfortable whilst being healthy. I see the effects of animals in extreme heat and cool directly as I live amongst it. You can bet your bottom dollar stock make use it it when it's present. Pretty sure there's a reason for that.

My Grandpa joked about this same thing a decade or so ago & predicted it would happen to this farmer who bought land next to him. Farmer bought land next to his & wanted a giant field of corn so he could use his very large machines for more efficient work. That farmer lost his crop & all the fences became small hills as they caught the dirt that flew around.

It can be enjoyable to watch history repeat itself so precisely as predicted in such a short time.

you either go up (expensive) or wide (less economical, lower energy yield)

Buy appropriately sized tractors. Typically farmers are upgrading these things all the time, should be pretty straightforward to swap out this single factor of production to the right sort of thing.

Our vehicles and machinery have this tendency to occupy prime mental real estate, as unchangeable monoliths around which everything must be planned. In reality, they are the most changable thing, and we must change our machinery to serve us, rather than the other way around.

There are also lots of crops that are not serviced by large tractors, but individual human hands. In fact most of the fruit and vegetables we eat are like that, and many of those crops do very well with a bit less than full Sun.

I think it's more that there's likely better land to put it on. In the UK for example there's arable land growing corn or cows or whatever, and there's scrub moorland which is closed from the public and used to shoot grouse once a year.

If you have 100 acres of solar to put on land, better to put it on the grouse moor.

Actually, given the high investment costs for dual-use of solar and crops, it is economically better to just do each separately and commit the area fully to one or the other. That was the essence at least I got from an article about agrivoltaics in Germany.

While goats will eat just about anything, I think they were referencing their compulsive need to climb everything in their pen.

You know they're going to eat the PVC pipe.