Photo: andreas160578 | Pixabay
Farmers in the organic farm community of Heggelbach are part of a radical experiment: growing potatoes, celery, trefoil grass and wheat under Germanys biggest solar installation. The panels were installed in 2016 at a cost of 660,000 euros ($700,000 USD) to see if pairing innovative solar technology and regenerative farming could simultaneously help struggling farmers and energy-hungry societies. The electricity runs the farm, cheesery, and milking machines. Any surplus is fed back into the grid. Farmer Florian Reyer follows agrophotovoltaic technology, noting that South Korea, Japan, and China subsidize hundreds of thousands of AVPs. A farmer in Colorado is growing 40 different crops under elevated solar panels, in the largest commercially active agrovoltaics system in the US. As the climate warms, farmers and experts see AVPs as a solution for the future but that more research is needed on how different crops respond to different weather events under the panels long-term.
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