The reason I say "fiddly details" is because questions like "what's the best spacing between rows of panels" and "do I plant under the panels or just between rows" can be decided as people look into available equipment, land prices, crop variation and flexibility, etc.
It's absurd now but... imagine those crop-water-er things, with a central pivot (ed: "central-pivot-irrigation").
What if instead of just a line of watering, that rotated around, it was a vast overhead rotating circle? Like 80% by area solar panels overhanigng. But also, one radian with all the farm stuff: watering, tiller, planter, harvester? An polar-plotter of tools, with solar panels taking up most everywhere else.
Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
Note the room to drive between panel rows and for "boom mowers" to spread out behind a medium tractor and reach under the panels.
There are also many types of vehicles used in agriculture from two storey high broad acre heavy duty combine harvesting monsters to small narrow self propelled engines that run through tree trunks in orchard with various attachments to mow (sprung mowing rings), shake trees (to make fruit fall), spray leaves, trench (for irrigation, drainage, etc).
Also, see: "Agri-bots" - a revolution not yet complete in small driverless autonomous helpers to run 24/7 weeding, spraying, picking berries, using solar, etc.
Makes sense. I'm not sure the exact care instructions, but I'm pretty sure "store this garment outside unshielded in the baking sun and pouring rain for many months" isn't the official recommendation for wool.
If available, sheep (and other animals) will seek cover during heavy rains and periods of high heat stress. This protects both the sheep and the wool, and both factors improve quality.
I wouldn't be surprised if the diet improves as well, due to healthier grass, higher plant biodiversity, and higher abundance of (tasty and nutritious) insects.
Paradoxically, primary productivity will often increase with added shade, because photosynthesis shuts down at even mildly elevated leaf temperatures (~85 °F). Those vast impressive corn fields will often overheat and shut down around 10 AM, and don't start photosynthesizing again until 4 PM.
In ye olden days farmers would plant a widely-spaced grid of "farmer's trees."[0] These are a category of trees (eg black locust) which 1) provided shade and windbreak, 2) coexist with crops right up to their trunk, 3) have deep tap roots bringing up minerals and water, 4) drops fertilizing mulch, and 5) produces nutritious animal fodder (pods) which self-dry and store on the tree itself. Clever farmers!
For mechanized farms you can choose a planting pattern and varieties that permit machinery to drive right past the tree without losing much area on "gores." Typical density was about 20-30 trees per hectare, so it also stores a bit of carbon.
Personally I prefer trees, but ultimately we need both types of systems.
And also, the degradation that you see on sun-damaged clothing is mostly on the dye, not the underlying fabric itself.
Right, it's called lanolin.
It's also true that lanolin + shade and rain cover is better than lanolin alone. No protection is 100%.
> degradation that you see on sun-damaged clothing is mostly on the dye
"Mostly." We agree damage is done to the fiber. ;)
By design, modern dyes often act to protect fibers, soaking up energetic photons before they can damage the fibers themselves. In their absence, undyed fibers can be more susceptible to damage.
UV light will absolutely wreck most things, including fabric. Fabric left outdoors unprotected for a summer in Southwest US will be brittle and tear apart when handled. Plastic that isn't UV-protected will crack in about two summers. Hoses left in the sun will develop multiple leaks in 3-5 years, pretty much no matter how robust the marketing claimed they are.
As you can see here [1-4] paddocks have trees, dams, etc.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi4FvVqMnBk
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5RIqsac2Hs
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/01/24/vertical-pv-for-clean...
> "For conventional ground-mounted systems, the scientists considered a tilt angle of 20 degrees and an average estimated energy yield 1,020 Wh/W. For the bifacial vertical west-east oriented systems, they assumed a bifaciality factor of 90% and an annual energy yield of 999 Wh/W, while for vertical systems with a north-south orientation the annual energy yield was indicated at 926 Wh/W."
This[1] is one version of agrovoltaics. The solar panels act like window blinds. They can be configured to follow the sun but also can be configured to “provide optimal shade/cooling throughout the day”.
Erm, I can see a greenhouse. I think they are made to increase temperature for the plants and not to protect from extra sun. Strawberries like sun and would not benefit from shade, unless we are talking about very intense sunlight and not much water.
Most plants usually want as much sun as they can get, so long as the temperature stays in their desired range and enough water is avaiable. So in dry places with lots of sun, acrovoltaics can make some sense, or for plants that like indeed shade, like tomatoes. But it is really not a magic bullet for growing corn and harvesting electricity at the same time.
Sheeps grazing under solar panels seems like a working solution that does not need too much effort around it.
Greenhouses can tame the sunlight, and usually they are painted in white in regions of too much sun (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl6tMOU84tk). Also, greenhouses are hot but very humid, so the plants doesn't dehydrate as fast.
I could imagine an scheme that instead of watering (costs money) you shade the crops with panels (earns money) during the worst of the day.
What’s in OPs image is a greenhouse. The sides can be closed if low temperatures are coming in at night.
Thinking more about it, you wouldn’t even need 20’ spans. You’d have articulating struts coming off of a central point between the rows. Panels can be adjusted out of the way of equipment when it needs to pass through if it is interfering.
They also include energy crops, so you can go from producing no food on land with unprofitable crops that take subsidies to growing food on the land at a profit and producing energy.
The land taken up by energy crops exceeds the land needed by solar by over an order of magnitude.
That said, these threads always confirm in me a belief that we need to cut human population replacement to save the planet and our own species.
Even if this is just crops that are picked by hand (it mentions broccoli), they typically still have huge machines follow the laborers for them to deposit them in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKyxMKO2kyU
I can't see any good way to harvest a field with solar panels that isn't so inefficiently laid out that it would be better to have two separate fields.
>> I can't see any good way to harvest a field with solar panels that isn't so inefficiently laid out that it would be better to have two separate fields.
Would there be scope for smaller autonomous machines? Presumably, there should be some crop configurations that could benefit, but we don't yet have all the results of experiments currently running. Here in Japan, farms are typically much smaller, so there's perhaps greater scope for agrivoltaics than in industrial scale farms in USA.
Right, they grow food for animals, which walk around the field and graze on it autonomously. Hey, I wonder if that's why they're called that... :)
I'm not really sure what the point is in making this observation. Just a "farmer vs rancher" thing, or something deeper?
>I can't see any good way to harvest a field with solar panels
See above.
I can't for the life of me imagine how these operations are going to continue to produce at these levels without the fossil-fuel subsidy they depend on completely.