I can tell you are no farmer. No tractor is needed in a field maintained by grazing. If tbe panels are mounted high enough sunlight will be cast on the ground for a period each day.
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.