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Comment by fiftyfifty | Hacker News Reader

In the US there has been significant cutbacks in USDA programs like the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) that paid farmers to keep certain pieces of land fallow and to plant native plants and grasses to provide food and habitat for wildlife. These programs were popular with small farmers and ranchers as it gave them some guaranteed income each year, and allowed them to follow good practices like rotating crops etc. Many of these programs were created after the dust bowl to provided incentives for better land management practices. We've been seeing reduced investments in these kinds of programs over the last couple of decades with the most recent farm bill in 2023 being one of the worse cuts yet:

https://www.eenews.net/articles/conservation-cuts-sink-in-as...

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Does utility scale solar drive out native species (I am not a biologist or ecologist)? If not, tying up ag land with 20-30 year solar PPAs while preserving habitat (assuming a favorable layout of equipment) seems like a funding source. 43 million acres of US farmland is used for ethanol production, for example.

It's not quite a conservation easement, but agrivoltaics might be a possible path to conserving this land versus development or factory cash crop production. Farmers get the income they need, the impact to the land is minimal (panels, racking, and wires can be stripped at anytime), etc.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/03/10/solarfood-in-ethanol-...

"Of the ~92 million acres of corn planted in the US each year, roughly 40 million acres (1.6% of the nation’s land) are primarily used to feed cars and raise the octane of gasoline. If this land were repurposed with solar power, it could provide around three and a half times the electricity needs of the United States, equivalent to nearly eight times the energy that would be needed to power all of the nation’s passenger vehicles were they electrified.

However, if we were to transition this 40 million acres are of fuel to solar+food (agrivoltaics) – we could still meet 100% of our electricity needs, and power a nationwide fleet of electric vehicles."

https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/northeast/topic/agrivo...

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/potential-agrivol...

https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/agrivolt...

https://www.planning.org/blog/9253223/visual-guide-to-agrivo...

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2022.9320...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0364-5

The impact on land is not small, you need quite a lot of concrete to anchor panels supports to the ground.

Also I wonder how the soil will evolve under solar panels, with less light hitting it. Probably better than when farmed, but worse than leaving it alone.

> Also I wonder how the soil will evolve under solar panels, with less light hitting it.

It depends on the native ecosystem, but not as bad as you might fear. In places with dense grasses (some prairie grasses?) or heavy forests, the topsoil doesn’t get much light.

(Deforestation has encouraged the development of algal blooms and other fungal/microbial growth in streams that were previously sheltered from light, contributing to ecosystem failure and other environmental issues.)

But in dense grasslands and heavy forests the soil benefits from the sun, in that as the grasses and trees go through their lifecycles they reintroduce nutrients to the soil in the form of falling leaves/needles and death and decomposition. Grasslands and dense forests are also teaming with life, big and small, that nurture the environment. Is there really any doubt that if we cover massive swaths of land in solar panels the soil will become useless? I have not seen more than a few firsthand, but the earth under the large solar complexes I have seen is mud or dust.

Very fair rebuttal; I concede the point!

> Is there really any doubt that if we cover massive swaths of land in solar panels the soil will become useless?

To me it is obvious that the soil under solar panels will be extremely healthy and useful, which is evidenced by the abundance of growth underneath all the solar farms in Minnesota fields. But perhaps you think the answer is the other way? Where have you seen only mud under solar panels? How did they build them such that nothing grows? And mud is far far better than current monocrop farming.

Oregon and Washington.

Concrete is rarely used nowadays (at least in Germany).

Usually the metal profiles are just rammed into the ground, if the ground is too loose they are screwed in and gabions are used if they just need some weight. If none of those are possible then concrete is used.

This is also the case in the US.

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