I believe that, while a cool technological innovation, the cost of installing and maintaining these panels will be significantly higher than doing the same on open land.

The article’s biggest claim is that devoting one percent of US farmland to agrivoltaics could cover 20 percent of the country’s electricity, pointing at the Texas to Nebraska to California corridor, which is exactly where big mechanized farms are most common.

They run large equipment (combines, sprayer booms, center pivot irrigation systems[1], etc). To keep that working under panels you need tall posts, wide spans, and a layout that matches the equipment paths, which would push structural cost significantly above a ground installation. All maintenance would require a boom truck, not just a ground crew. And center pivots in particular (very common) need an entire circle cleared for the system to pivot, meaning a multi-acre span with no posts for the pivot to hit, which is simply infeasible.

That’s before accounting for pesticide spray and dust on the PVs, or the logistical burden of running PV crews through a working farm.

It’s also worth noting that the study itself was broccoli, which is hand harvested and about the best case crop for this. Even so, the broccoli took 25 extra days to mature. On a farm running multiple rotations a season that lost time has a real cost, separate from the structural costs.

This innovation has a lot more promise on smaller plots. Co-ops, market gardens, specialty crops, and the like that don’t rely on large equipment. I’d be surprised to ever see it on a large farm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation

You can farm and do industrial scale solar on the same land. It works extremely well for lamb herds, shade tolerant crops like strawberries, and greenhouses. I'm extremely interested in this area and actually starting some personal projects where I live, around agri-solar that is actually farming.

> this isn’t an either-or question. a farm owner may want to add some revenue with electricity generation.

Also: Many plants don't want/need full sun. In fact, they adapt by varying production of a chemical called zeaxanthin throughout the day to manage the amount of energy they take in.

Partially shading crops with bifacial panels (which are semi-translucent) can be beneficial to the crops as well as producing energy.

https://www.science.org/content/article/too-much-good-thing

Optimization for land area in agriculture is already a catch-22 type affair: We subsidize the planting of corn to produce ethanol -- one of the most inefficient forms of solar energy 'harvesting' possible. So going directly to electrical harvesting while retaining the ability to grow high-value crops is certainly still advantageous...

To put some numbers: ~40% of the corn grown in the US (approx. 5.4 billion bushels out of roughly 14.9 billion bushels total production) goes toward ethanol production

Initial reaction is how do you harvest? Is the farm well connected to the grid? Is the cost of making this practical just much higher than land. Land is cheap in the scheme of things here.

https://farmbuy.com/1595-florina-road-katherine-nt-0850-4368...

1% of panel cost according to Gemini.

Sure, but given that a 100 acre corn farm in Ohio would make about $80k in revenue and if you're lucky about $40k in profit

A 100 acre solar plant in Ohio would make well about $1m-$1.5m in revenue

Why would you increase the cost and complexity to try to increase your revenue from $1-1.5m to a massive $1-1.5m?

Or you could just lease the land to a solar operator for about $100k a year, with no expenses

It's a solution looking for a problem.