California farmers identify a hot new cash crop: Solar power | Hacker News Reader

California farmers identify a hot new cash crop: Solar power

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29 pointsPaulHoule13 comments

Solar energy has become a significant topic in my rural Virginia county, where I serve on the Board of Supervisors. During our discussions, the issue of food production has come up a lot. While I understand people’s concerns about maintaining a resilient food supply, they often overlook the amount of farmland that is abandoned and rendered unusable for crop production.

I see it happen all too often, farmer dies, kids don’t want to do anything with the land so it sits growing up becoming unusable. The rate at which farmers are either retiring or passing away far exceeds the rate at which agricultural land is being converted to solar farms. For many farmers, this transition has become a valuable secondary source of income and allowed them to continue or expand their operations.

  … kids don’t want to do anything with the land so it sits growing up becoming unusable

I keep hearing how we are depleting the quality of farmland from over exploitation. Sitting fallow/wild probably regenerates the land.

Wild land does regenerate, but also trees grow, and they have a cost to remove them when they get bigger, especially the roots. Plowing is not possible with tree roots everywhere, though perhaps non-monoculture non-mass-produced crops are possible to grow there and eventually the roots may decay. It can take 20-30 years for roots to decay though, or longer.

Yes and no. Unfortunately it isn't a simple and easy topic which is what makes it so complicated to deal with.

Real thick top soil isn't really the natural state of land in most places, a large bulk of it was grown by the people farming it who spent multiple generations fertilizing it, maintaining it, and putting as much organic waste as they could back into it. It is its own ecosystem that was grown just as the crops above it are grown in higher than natural abundance. In most places it takes 80+ years to build up a significant top soil layer, and in the short term letting the land sit fallow for a bit of time will let some nutrients build up in the soil and will provide larger yields in following years. But if you let it go truly wild, the wild stuff starts growing and is also going to start consuming those nutrients until some sort of balance is achieved between top soil and plants above it. And the natural balance in most places only going to be a few inches of good top soil, not the 1-2 foot of topsoil that maximizes crop yields.

As to over utilizing it, you can both maintain that top soil and get higher yields from it, but if you are willing to push the land a little further and add a little more crop density or not fallow or fertilize the land quite as often, you can push the yields a little higher still. Like pulling a bit of the capital out of your investment account along with the interest payments. You can do that for 10 years, and have more to spend/yield for it, but each time you are spending capital/top soil and reducing yield for following years. Then 10 years in, your interest/yield expectations are lower than ever, so if you want to maintain even the old non-exploitive yield numbers you have to take out even more of it. 10 years again and now you are back to a shitty few inches of top soil. Oh sure, you can try growing it again, but just like capital the less you have to start with the longer it will take to grow, and it took others over an entire lifetime to grow what you spend in just 20 years.

Family farmers didn't usually do that because it would just be fucking over your own kids. But in this modern age, how many farms are actually being passed on to kids? How many people give a shit if the land is dead in 20 years if their plan was to sell out of it at that point? Or if they killed off other local farms by out competing with unsustainable practices that the others refused to emulate, why not buy their good land and run the scam over again? By time any of the shortsightedness of those actions culminates they will either be old and rich with investments into other industries, or dead, and the people who will ultimately suffer for it will just be poor strangers they never cared about and the cause of their plights easily deflected onto other sources.

I feel guilty because the house I grew up in and the house I currently live in were both formerly farmland (cherry orchards and grain fields respectively). I wonder why are we paving over prime farmland while simultaneously dedicating 5% of all US territory to growing field corn. Sorghum, field corn, and cotton are grown around here, depending on market conditions.

>>I see it happen all too often, farmer dies, kids don’t want to do anything with the land

Often they've moved away to The Big City and don't have any connection or the skills, and often too there just isn't a meaningful return in the crop to justify the lifestyle change or added responsibilities of management.

>>For many farmers, this transition has become a valuable secondary source of income and allowed them to continue or expand their operations.

I think every American should read the book The Crazies by Amy Gamerman that was just published, that talks about this issue. Illustrates a lot of what's really going on in our country.

Building solar on farmland is genuinely psychotic. Why isn't the play to first cover all urban/suburban and let nature regenerate. If you are going to cover something, cover the deserts in Arizona.

Significantly more challenging to install solar onto already developed land.

California is also largely desert itself. Such farming is only possible through unsustainable levels of irrigation.

SoCal (not just SD) really need to get to work on industrial-scale desal, storage, and aqueduct infrastructure to potentially augment ordinarily and sustain the Southwest in times of drought. It's going to happen, they won't be prepared, and it's going to be really, really bad. (This is partially why I moved to around the 100th meridian west.)

California is not a desert, it's semi arid and its not obvious to me that the existing irrigation is unsustainable given that we empty billions of gallons into the bay.

Oooooh, you're one of today's 10,000, and I get to be the person who tells you about Agrivoltaics - combining farming/ranching and solar panels.

You don't completely cover the land in solar panels - you work with the idea that the sun (and resulting shadows from the panels) moves throughout the day, so space them out a bit, and mount them high enough to stay out of the way of the agricultural activity.

I first saw this going on in southern Germany. The cattle were all in the shaded areas, eating the grass that was growing better than in neighboring uncovered fields - this year was really dry here until a few weeks ago.

To lift that up from anecdata and to provide a link for the GP that you might enjoy:

Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels (2022) https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...

Confirmed multiple times since in several parts of rural Australia.

How did you know that I'm a spinner?! This is definitely something I enjoyed.

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