Largest Farm to Grow Crops Under Solar Panels Proves To Be A Bumper Crop For Agrivoltaic Land Use

Sep 25, 2023

By Pam Knox

Agrivoltaics is the combined use of solar panels and agriculture under the panels that together use less energy and produce more crops. It can also provide shade for livestock. A recent article in Agritecture says this:

“In 2019, a study from the universities of Arizona and Maryland found great benefits in combining solar panels and crops. Up above, the solar panels were found to be kept 16°F cooler by evaporation from the crops below, enough to increase their energy generation by 2%.

Underneath, the few crops tested were 100% to 300% more productive depending on the species, and the shade provided by the solar panels reduced irrigation-water use by 15%, and reduced water consumption by a whopping 157 percent.

The crops are also protected from intense rain or hail from the overhead panels.” (Note that you might expect hail to damage the solar panels, but the size of hail needed to damage vegetables so they are not able to be sold is smaller than what would be expected to damage the panels, so this may be an explanation).

Source : uga.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids