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AgriSolar Policy Guide

Written for the AgriSolar Clearinghouse by Alexis Pascaris (Agrisolar Consulting) and Allison Jackson (Colorado Agrivoltaic Learning Center)

The Agrisolar Policy Guide was designed to facilitate policy learning and innovation in the United States. By collating existing initiatives and key provisions, this guide serves as a resource for regulators, land use planners, decision makers, and others who are interested in state-of-the-art agrisolar policy. The AgriSolar Clearinghouse is impartial towards policy; the intention of this guide is not to advocate for certain initiatives, but to provide a central platform for education and engagement. The goal of this guide is to support policy innovation for better co-location.

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Agrisolar Ownership: A Guide for Farmers, Ranchers, Communities, and Landowners to Co-locate Agricultural Production and Solar Generation 

This guide serves as an introduction to the solar industry, relative to agrisolar development in the United States, community programs, and solar ownership or lease opportunities for homes, farms, and ranches. It covers ownership options for small-scale, single-user solar installations, community solar installations that distribute power throughout a community, and utility-scale installations that sell power to the utility, as well as common utility-scale land-lease components for landowners looking to allow a developer to construct and operate a solar installation on a portion of their land.

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Agrisolar Policy Guide

The AgriSolar Policy Guide was designed to facilitate policy learning and innovation in the United States. The intention of this guide is not to advocate for certain initiatives, but to provide a central platform for education and engagement and to support policy innovation for better co-location.

Read more
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Policy Approaches for Dual-Use and Agrisolar Practices

Written for the AgriSolar Clearinghouse by Heidi Kolbeck-Urlacher, Center for Rural Affairs

This report provides decision makers and others an overview of policy approaches to combining solar with agriculture and offers considerations on how regulations can facilitate dual-use.

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The Science of Solar-Pollinator Habitat: Fact Sheet

How current and future research can help us understand the role of pollinator-friendly solar in biodiversity conservation.

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A Preliminary Investigation of the Effect of Solar Panels, Rotation Frequency on the Grazing Behavior of Sheep

Emma W. Kampherbeek, Laura E. Webb, Beth J. Reynolds, Seeta A. Sistla,
Marc R. Horney, Raimon Ripoll-Bosch, Jason P. Dubowsky, Zachary D. McFarlane

A study led by Emma Kampherbeek (Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands)  highlights multiple benefits of coupling solar energy production to sheep grazing in rangeland systems. This project investigated how sheep use solar arrays as a forage site and the impacts of solar array presence on forage quality in a California Central Coast site with a Mediterranean climate. Sheep with access to solar panels graze more than when they are on nearby native rangeland without an array.  This increased foraging behavior is likely driven by a combination of the protection that the array provides the sheep from weather conditions, which increases grazing time, as well as increased protein content and digestibility of forage with the array footprint.

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Fact Sheet: Making the Case for Solar Beekeeping

Written for the AgriSolar Clearinghouse by Center for Rural Affairs

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