love the move away from just seeing the choice for land use as solar or agriculture when it can be both, using the infrastructure of power generation to help protect growing plants could really help increase productivity for a small-holding especially when things like watering systems are tied into the PV infrastructure and we finally get round to taking advantage of roof space on things like barns.

I’ve seen some cool pictures of farms in arid regions using solar panels above irrigation to reduce evaporation too, i think solar mixed into where it’s other properties are useful or where it’s a good fit looks and works so much better than the neat rows of solar farms.

  • schmorp
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    9 months ago

    Monoculturally used land just has to disappear, it doesn’t scale to life. Cleaning the weeds around 1000 ha of solar panels is probably stupidly expensive and destructive, cleaning them because you happen to grow crops under the panels makes so much more sense. Also, trees and other cultures mixed, where trees provide shade for plants.

    I hope that we will one day shake our heads about the stupidity of our ancestors trying to grow exclusively one thing at a time in huge areas, just so we could play with bigger machines and spend idiotic amounts of resources in trying to keep those frankenplants alive.