Farmers household solar panels and photovoltaic panels

Farmers can benefit from solar energy in several ways—by leasing farmland for solar; installing a solar system on a house, barn, or other building; or through agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics is defined as agriculture, such as crop production, livestock grazing, and pollinator habitat, located underneath solar panels and/or between rows of solar panels.

Emerging data, he says, show that even as the solar panels go in overhead, farmers must protect the natural processes that help plants grow. “That can do a lot of good,” he says. “Otherwise, it's really hard to cheat nature.” Agrivoltaics merges agriculture with photovoltaic panels, which generate electricity from sunlight.

Jordan Macknick, an environmental researcher at NREL, plants crops near solar panels at an experimental agrivoltaic farm in Colorado. Joe DelNero/NREL Not every farm can support panels, Macknick points out. It's often not economically feasible. The trick, he says, is to identify those that can.

Jordan Macknick at the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Lab describes the benefits of bringing solar panels to farms. In many cases, the green crops may actually benefit from the panels' shade. Researchers are studying how all of these factors affect the health of crops.

Agrivoltaic projects can benefit farmers by giving them a second crop: electric power. Or, farmers can pick up some extra cash by leasing their land to power companies that will install their own solar panels on the site. Although the idea behind agrivoltaics has been around for decades, interest among farmers has picked up only recently.

There is significant opportunity to produce large amounts of solar energy on farmland. Agricultural land in the U.S. has the technical potential to provide 27 terawatts of solar energy capacity. This is a quarter of the total U.S. solar energy capacity of 115 TW. Only 0.3% of farmland is expected to be used for solar energy by 2035.