By Rebekah Pierce
Can you give a basic definition of agri-energy?
The simplest definition is that it is any system that combines agriculture and renewable energy. While the terms “dual-use,” “agrivoltaics,” “agri-PV” and “solar grazing” are commonly used for agriculture occurring on solar installations, I wanted a term that applied more broadly to other energy and agricultural systems (for example, farming under wind, or even things like on-farm energy generation and biomass).
Big hurdles exist for both renewable energy and sustainable farming. What challenges top the list and how can these seemingly disparate activities benefit each other?
We’re at a tipping point both for renewable energy and agriculture at large. The average age of the American farmer is 58; very few young Americans are pursuing farming as a career path because land is exorbitantly expensive and sustainable farming, in particular, is not something that’s popularly viewed as being either scalable or profitable. Our farms are being rapidly consolidated—we have a third of the farms we did 100 years ago—and while small farms are disappearing, large ones are getting larger. Our food systems have become more consolidated. Food production is becoming more outsourced, something that doesn’t bode well for our land, our people or our economy, especially when you think about long-term sustainability of any of those three.
A similar problem exists in the renewable energy world. We’re running out of land and other resources, and we need to get smarter about how we’re using the land we do have. We need to make sure that communities are given the opportunity to produce power locally, in a way that directly benefits local energy independence, in the same way that we need to foster a greater sense of local food independence. This is why I’m so excited about agri-energy: by combining food and energy production in one space, and allowing local farmers and communities to benefit, we can strengthen the resilience of both industries as well as that of individual neighborhoods and towns.
Why is there opposition to agri-energy projects? Do you think these concerns are legitimate?
Generally, the opposition I see to agri-energy has to do with a) a lack of understanding about how these systems work and the full breadth of opportunities available to us and b) worries about long-term impacts and a desire to see more research before moving forward.
A big piece of pushback I hear is that these systems work well only with sheep, and that sheep aren’t a panacea to saving American farmers. I agree with the latter; a healthy agricultural economy needs to be diverse. However, in the short decade or so since agri-energy practices really started to scale up in the United States, we’ve seen remarkable innovation. When I first started writing this book two years ago, cattle on solar were very much viewed as a “eh, maybe, but it will be risky, and it will be expensive, and it probably can’t be done at scale.” Now, it’s growing rapidly and there’s even a name for it: cattlevoltaics. In the book, I profile growers and developers who are successfully (and at scale) growing just about any crop or species you can think of, including pork, poultry, rabbits, honey, wheat, hay, barley, cranberries, tomatoes, brassicas, garlic, vanilla…the list goes on and it’s expanding by the day.
It’s true that sheep are considered “the plug and play” for solar, as they work well on the vast majority of existing solar sites in the United States. Other systems, like cattle, do take more forethought and may incur more expense. The same applies to the issue of yields: you may see a slightly reduced yield of, say, your hay crop if you’re farming it on solar. But we don’t have a food production problem in this country; we have a food distribution problem.
We’re already growing more food than we need (there’s also a significant argument about a large percentage of our farmland being used for non-food export crops, such as ethanol corn, but that’s another can of worms). We need to focus on how to make farming more profitable and the food more accessible and affordable for consumers, and that’s what agri-energy offers. Who cares if your yield of one crop is reduced if you’re able to receive three times as much income per acre, with half the expense, by farming around or under renewables?
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