It’s called Agrovoltaics and it works pretty damn good,if you do it right.
The pairing can also offer some synergies. Solar panels can help moderate ground temperatures, provide shelter for livestock and help plants retain moisture.[6] For farmers the ability to produce electricity can help diversify their income stream.
Solar panels block light, which means that dual use systems involve trade-offs between crop yield, crop quality, and energy production.[7] Some crops/livestock benefit from the increased shade, obviating the trade-off,[8] such as green leafy vegetables, and spices such as turmeric and ginger, whereas staple crops such as wheat, rice, soybeans or pulses require more sun.[9] Agrivoltaics has also been used at scale in arid and semi-arid regions to stabilize soils, reduce dust storm intensity, increase vegetation cover, provide forage for livestock, and curb desertification, notably in northern China.[10][11]
The picture in the op doesn’t look like agrivoltaics though. Compared to the agrivoltaics examples of the wiki article, the panels in the op are more densely placed, placed flatter, and placed closer to the ground. Nothing is getting harvested there, the most they could do is keep rabbits under them. From what I’ve seen in person, the non agri kind with panels over monoculture grass fields is much more common than agrivoltaics with cultivated fields.
In the US it makes sense. Much of our corn is grown for ethanol so ot can be used for fuel. Replace that with solar and we reduce our reliance on a monocrop and end up with far far more power.
They also use lots of irrigation from aquifers in the Great Plains, so they’ll need less irrigation and the shading will help a tiny bit with replenishing the aquifer.
In northern Europe these solar fields make no sense at all to me though. When I see something like the fields below in my temperate marine climate, then I can’t help but think of the forest that could have been there.
Turning it back into a forest will never happen when the land owner needs to pay taxes on the land and thus need to make income of the land. These solar fields are usually on private property. Not public land. Either they put windmills and solar on the fields or they raise cattle or grow crops. Which one is better for the environment overall?
If you destroy existing forest to make a farm, maybe. But if it’s an empty field and you want to do something with it, making it into a forest makes little sense. It’s complicated, very expensive, and doesn’t do much. Just let natural forests do their things, allow them to expand if you want more forests, don’t make one from scratch.
Making wild forests in a temperate climate is not complicated at all. Stamp a bunch of seeds into the ground, fence it off to keep grazers away, wait a few years, and boom there’s a new forest. Once it gets started, nature knows just fine how to grow forests, they’ve been around far longer than our meddling after all. The problem is humans, who need capital and incentives to let nature do it’s thing. Making the forest is cheap, buying the land is expensive. And a wild forest has little earning potential, so for private landholders it makes no financial sense.
But if there were incentives, then these solar panels could have been put above existing hardened surfaces (roads, parkings), and the unhardened land could have been returned to nature. We’d have both the solar panel fields and the forest. It requires a much larger up front investment, which is why it’s not going to happen without government incentives, and to get those, political will is needed, which is why it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
And we should absolutely be making more forests from scratch, Europe has a massive deforestation problem. Reforestation is already an official policy goal in the EU and in most (I assume) EU countries, and this could be one of the ways of achieving those goals.
I’m not an expert by any stretch, but through no fault of my own, I know my way around agriculture, and I know my way around planting and removing trees. Making a forest, a proper forest, is probably the furthest thing from “stamping a bunch of seeds into the ground” you can imagine. You can’t even grow trees from seeds manually, that just doesn’t work on any scale. You plant saplings that you spend years caring for, and then they die on you and you start it all over. The way you described is the way to get a wild meadow, but the one dominated by some weed monocrop, and exclusively the one you don’t want. You will have a country-wide infestation of poisonous hogweed that kills all life around it before you’ll get one tree the way you want it to be.
Forest requires very specific amount of biodiversity, soil characteristics, layers of biomass influencing each other, specific insects and animals, it needs tens, and in specific cases, hundreds of kilometers of space, it needs seasonal changes, in some cases cycles of burning, and most importantly, it needs time. Generations of trees need to grow and die and grow and die again in order for a forest to be sustainable and not fragile. Forest isn’t a bunch of trees haphazardly put in an empty parking lot, it’s a life long project that is not guaranteed to succeed by any stretch.
Europe has the deforestation problem because forests are biomes with their own complicated rules, not a bunch of seeds thrown in an area half a kilometer wide between a road and a waste treatment facility.
I’ve seen forest sprout up in abandoned dead areas without any human assistance. It takes about 2 decades of being left alone to get enough young growth to start being called a forest, but not really more than that. And it would take generations more to be called an old “real” forest, but it has to start somewhere. To rehabilitate long dead soil it might take what you describe, but turning an old meadow into a wild area that will eventually turn into a forest, does not need human intervention. It just requires to be left alone. In my climate that is. Claiming that forests can’t grow without human assistance is absolute nonsense, forests grew just fine before humans came along.
A bunch of twigs does not a forest make.
In a pre-industrial Europe, sure, forests are everywhere and foresting alone like crazy. But we’re in a post-industrial one. Most land in Europe is altered in some ways, was farmed on at some point, or had something else going on. Everything is littered with plants that we selectively bred or mutated, a wild very aggressive weed are everywhere and will be everywhere. Soil composition is wild and weird. The air is unfit to breathe the food is unfit to eat I am mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore, you get the point.
It’s not that it can’t grow without human assistance, the human assistance is needed to keep it from human interference, because we changed the land and continue doing so.
But obviously, sometimes a forest just grows, when it wants to. But you can’t guarantee this process, that was my point.
It’s called Agrovoltaics and it works pretty damn good,if you do it right.
The picture in the op doesn’t look like agrivoltaics though. Compared to the agrivoltaics examples of the wiki article, the panels in the op are more densely placed, placed flatter, and placed closer to the ground. Nothing is getting harvested there, the most they could do is keep rabbits under them. From what I’ve seen in person, the non agri kind with panels over monoculture grass fields is much more common than agrivoltaics with cultivated fields.
In the US it makes sense. Much of our corn is grown for ethanol so ot can be used for fuel. Replace that with solar and we reduce our reliance on a monocrop and end up with far far more power.
They also use lots of irrigation from aquifers in the Great Plains, so they’ll need less irrigation and the shading will help a tiny bit with replenishing the aquifer.
In northern Europe these solar fields make no sense at all to me though. When I see something like the fields below in my temperate marine climate, then I can’t help but think of the forest that could have been there.
Turning it back into a forest will never happen when the land owner needs to pay taxes on the land and thus need to make income of the land. These solar fields are usually on private property. Not public land. Either they put windmills and solar on the fields or they raise cattle or grow crops. Which one is better for the environment overall?
If you destroy existing forest to make a farm, maybe. But if it’s an empty field and you want to do something with it, making it into a forest makes little sense. It’s complicated, very expensive, and doesn’t do much. Just let natural forests do their things, allow them to expand if you want more forests, don’t make one from scratch.
Making wild forests in a temperate climate is not complicated at all. Stamp a bunch of seeds into the ground, fence it off to keep grazers away, wait a few years, and boom there’s a new forest. Once it gets started, nature knows just fine how to grow forests, they’ve been around far longer than our meddling after all. The problem is humans, who need capital and incentives to let nature do it’s thing. Making the forest is cheap, buying the land is expensive. And a wild forest has little earning potential, so for private landholders it makes no financial sense.
But if there were incentives, then these solar panels could have been put above existing hardened surfaces (roads, parkings), and the unhardened land could have been returned to nature. We’d have both the solar panel fields and the forest. It requires a much larger up front investment, which is why it’s not going to happen without government incentives, and to get those, political will is needed, which is why it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
And we should absolutely be making more forests from scratch, Europe has a massive deforestation problem. Reforestation is already an official policy goal in the EU and in most (I assume) EU countries, and this could be one of the ways of achieving those goals.
I’m not an expert by any stretch, but through no fault of my own, I know my way around agriculture, and I know my way around planting and removing trees. Making a forest, a proper forest, is probably the furthest thing from “stamping a bunch of seeds into the ground” you can imagine. You can’t even grow trees from seeds manually, that just doesn’t work on any scale. You plant saplings that you spend years caring for, and then they die on you and you start it all over. The way you described is the way to get a wild meadow, but the one dominated by some weed monocrop, and exclusively the one you don’t want. You will have a country-wide infestation of poisonous hogweed that kills all life around it before you’ll get one tree the way you want it to be.
Forest requires very specific amount of biodiversity, soil characteristics, layers of biomass influencing each other, specific insects and animals, it needs tens, and in specific cases, hundreds of kilometers of space, it needs seasonal changes, in some cases cycles of burning, and most importantly, it needs time. Generations of trees need to grow and die and grow and die again in order for a forest to be sustainable and not fragile. Forest isn’t a bunch of trees haphazardly put in an empty parking lot, it’s a life long project that is not guaranteed to succeed by any stretch.
Europe has the deforestation problem because forests are biomes with their own complicated rules, not a bunch of seeds thrown in an area half a kilometer wide between a road and a waste treatment facility.
I’ve seen forest sprout up in abandoned dead areas without any human assistance. It takes about 2 decades of being left alone to get enough young growth to start being called a forest, but not really more than that. And it would take generations more to be called an old “real” forest, but it has to start somewhere. To rehabilitate long dead soil it might take what you describe, but turning an old meadow into a wild area that will eventually turn into a forest, does not need human intervention. It just requires to be left alone. In my climate that is. Claiming that forests can’t grow without human assistance is absolute nonsense, forests grew just fine before humans came along.
And as further proof that I don’t live in fantasialand with my belief that forests can grow without human intervention, here’s 2 links with examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_rewilding https://www.rewildingmag.com/passive-rewilding-natural-reforestation/
A bunch of twigs does not a forest make.
In a pre-industrial Europe, sure, forests are everywhere and foresting alone like crazy. But we’re in a post-industrial one. Most land in Europe is altered in some ways, was farmed on at some point, or had something else going on. Everything is littered with plants that we selectively bred or mutated, a wild very aggressive weed are everywhere and will be everywhere. Soil composition is wild and weird. The air
is unfit to breathe the food is unfit to eat I am mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore, you get the point.It’s not that it can’t grow without human assistance, the human assistance is needed to keep it from human interference, because we changed the land and continue doing so.
But obviously, sometimes a forest just grows, when it wants to. But you can’t guarantee this process, that was my point.