In this webinar, AgriSolar Clearinghouse team members Carl Berntsen and Allen Puckett discuss their new publication, “AgriSolar Ownership: A Guide for Farmers, Ranchers, Communities, and Landowners to Co-locate Agricultural Production and Solar Generation.”
The publication is available on the AgriSolar Clearinghouse website at AGRISOLARCLEARINGHOUSE.ORG.
In this webinar, Heidi Kolbeck-Urlacher from the the Center for Rural Affairs, Alexis Pascaris from Agrisolar Consulting, and Allison Jackson from the Colorado Agrivoltaic Learning Center discuss policy approaches for dual-use and agrisolar practices.
Join the AgriSolar Clearinghouse team for our webinar series with this round-table discussion featuring innovative solar designers Helical Solar, Sun Agri, Hyperion, Sandbox Solar, Solargik, RUTE Agrivoltaics, Soliculture, Stracker Solar, Taka Solar, and Sunstall!
Minnesota energy companies, solar developers, farmers, and chefs are partnering in innovative ways to grow food, renewable energy, and pollinator habitat all within the same piece of land. The National Center for Appropriate Technology’s (NCAT) AgriSolar Clearinghouse today released its short film “Dive into the Prairie,” which takes viewers on a short tour of Minnesota’s agrivoltaic success stories.
AgriSolar or agrivoltaic partnerships are growing across solar-appropriate farmland in the U.S., providing a new revenue source for farmers, clean energy for surrounding communities, and myriad benefits to crops, livestock, and pollinators.
Chef Mateo Mackbee uses solar-grown foods at his St. Joseph, Minn., restaurant. Everything from salad greens grown under or around solar panels, to the honey that sweetens his salad dressing.
“Agrivoltaics is a big thing for me to see what can be grown, grazed, or raised in and around solar arrays,” said Chef Mackbee. “AgriSolar is the future, for sure.”
Mackbee sources solar-grown honey from Bare Honey, which partners with energy companies and solar developers to place his commercial beekeeping boxes on the same land as the solar panels and pollinator habitat.
“Pollination is a huge part of what commercial beekeeping is,” said Bare Honey founder Dustin Vanasse. “We have our co-located honeybees and those, combined with the native pollinators on these sites, will provide pollination to the farms that are around the site.”
NCAT’s AgriSolar Clearinghouse is connecting businesses, land managers, and researchers with trusted resources to support the growth of co-located solar and sustainable agriculture.
“The partnerships blossoming in Minnesota show a real-world example of how it can work for several industries that share common goals,” said NCAT Energy Director Stacie Peterson, PhD. “Land is finite, and AgriSolar partnerships mean we can maximize our resources for the benefit of communities, the environment, and businesses.”
In February of 2023, the AgriSolar Clearinghouse held an AgriSolar “Farm to Table” event at Biosphere 2 in Tucson, Arizona, in conjunction with the GreenBiz23 conference.
Similar to the AgriSolar Clearinghouse “Follow the Sun” field trips, the AgriSolar “Farm to Table” events bring members of the agrisolar community together to see, touch, taste, and celebrate the delicious foods grown and grazed at solar farms around the country.
The AgriSolar Clearinghouse — along with sponsor Enel North America and partners from Biosphere 2, NREL, InSPIRE, Jack’s Solar Garden, and Columbia University — networked with attendees while they enjoyed lunch and refreshments prepared by Chefs Erin, Mateo, and Janos. The menu highlighted foods grown and grazed under solar arrays, including honey, beans, lamb, salad greens, potatoes, and saffron.
This video is produced by the National Center for Appropriate Technology through the AgriSolar Clearinghouse program. AGRISOLARCLEARINGHOUSE.ORG
The National Center for Appropriate Technology’s (NCAT) AgriSolar Clearinghouse today premiered its short film “The Solar Shepherd” during the 2023 Solar Farm Summit in Chicago.
The film showcases a family-owned farm in central Massachusetts that’s raising sheep and solar energy on the same piece of land. AgriSolar or agrivoltaic partnerships are growing across solar-appropriate farmland in the U.S., providing a new revenue source for farmers, clean energy for surrounding communities, and myriad benefits to crops, livestock, and pollinators.
“It’s been a wonderful friendship between the two businesses,” says Solar Shepherd LLC founder Dan Finnegan. “We can’t access enough land to keep our farm sustainable, without this partnership with solar, we wouldn’t have a successful farm, we simply don’t have enough acres to graze.”
Finnegan partnered with SWEB Development Inc. on the 15-acre solar array which provides enough clean energy to power 1,100 homes and has so-far raised 45 lambs to maturity.
“You can have this partnership in a one-acre field, a 15-acre field up to a couple hundred acres,” says Joe Mendelsohn, project developer with SWEB Development Inc.
NCAT’s AgriSolar Clearinghouse is connecting businesses, land managers, and researchers with trusted resources to support the growth of co-located solar and sustainable agriculture.
“Tremendous potential exists in partnerships between farmers and solar developers,” says NCAT Energy Director Stacie Peterson, PhD. “As the demand for solar energy grows, it’s up to us to be good stewards of the finite land resources we have and maximize the benefit to farmers, communities, and the environment.”
In this webinar, Lee Walston and Heidi Hartmann from Argonne National Laboratory discuss the ecosystem services of solar-pollinator habitats.
In this AgriSolar Clearinghouse webinar, Dr. Greg Barron-Gafford discusses the effects of growing crops under solar panels.
The AgriSolar webinar series continues in March. Sign up for these free webinars, here.
In this first episode of the AgriSolar Clearinghouse webinar series, NREL’s Jordan Macknick, James McCall, and Haley Paterson join us to discuss the context and costs of agrivoltaics in the United States.
For this November teatime, we were excited to have Tyler Swanson and Jessica Guarino from the University of Illinois join us to discuss the latest on agrivoltaic regulations (check out their discussion of zoning, for example), solar grazing contracts, the economic considerations around grazing, and best practices from the targeted grazing industry that solar graziers can use for insight when developing contractual agreements. Much of the discussion revolved around issues concerning farmland becoming solar sites and the local conflicts that can create.
We had a very interesting discussion during the Q&A, where graziers dug into issues surrounding scaling up solar grazing, expanding agrivoltaics into crop production, and optimizing land-use for grazing at solar sites.
This Teatime was hosted by Kevin Richardson of the American Solar Grazing Association and Dr. Stacie Peterson of the AgriSolar Clearinghouse.
