Birds, bees and sheep are finding homes underneath solar panels as people find ways to continue using farmland that hosts solar arrays.

The Piedmont Environmental Council has taken that idea a step further by building the first solar installation in Virginia that was designed to also grow food. Their first harvest was on Oct. 17. The organization hopes to smooth out the relationship between the solar industry and agricultural community as the distaste for large solar projects grows in rural Virginia.

“We’re really just trying to have people out here have the conversation around ‘agrivoltaics’ … and show that clean energy production can happen alongside vegetable production and doesn’t have to just be one or the other,” said Teddy Pitsiokos, community farm manager for the Piedmont Environmental Council.

The site takes up a quarter acre of the council’s Roundabout Meadows community farm in Loudoun County.

The push for solar energy in Virginia comes largely from the state’s Clean Economy Act, which requires Dominion Energy to provide 16,100 megawatts of onshore wind and solar energy by 2035. According to the Virginia Department of Energy, solar panels would have to cover an area four times the size of the District of Columbia to meet that demand. The state Department of Environmental Quality estimates that about 350,000 acres could be devoted to solar panels by 2045.

Solar installations have crept onto farmland and forestland in rural parts of the state, but counties and municipalities are increasingly rejecting the projects. Opposition to solar installations often centers around concerns about property values, preservation of rural vistas and forest conservation.

Placing solar panels on rooftops, parking lots and environmentally compromised sites is more generally accepted. When panels are placed on farmland, some sites use the space underneath and between the panels to grow pollinator plants or cover crops or to provide vegetation for sheep grazing.

Lee Daniels, a professor at Virginia Tech, said he has seen about a dozen utility-scale solar sites adding sheep to the operation for grazing. But, while combining crops and solar panels is a large industry overseas, the council’s solar farm is the first he has seen in Virginia.

“All power to them,” Daniels said. “Any time that areas that have solar … can have some added use or alternate use to them — that’s really good.”

The Piedmont Environmental Council began working on the project in 2024 when it received technical assistance from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The site has 42 solar panels in three rows — 12.5 feet apart for sunlight to reach the vegetables between them. The panels are mounted high enough to offer headroom for tending the crops, which are in raised beds and in the ground. The site has a generating capacity of 17 kilowatts of energy, which is stored in an on-site battery. It fully powers the farm’s produce cooler, greenhouse and well pumps.

Pitsiokos finished his last round of plantings in September. He’s cultivating cabbage, lettuce, green onions and other cool-weather crops that should grow well under the panels’ shade. The site has a control group of vegetables not in the shade: a row of vegetables in 18 raised beds between the panels and another row in the ground between the panels.

Many people, including environmentalists, are concerned about the stormwater runoff and erosion that can plague solar sites. Depending on the site, developers may have to remove the topsoil and grade the ground so that the solar panels stay level. This leads to the soil being so compacted that it can’t absorb water. Instead, it runs off and triggers erosion.

This site avoids those problems by building on a slight slope. The council didn’t need to remove the topsoil or level the land. Pitsiokos left grass under the panels to soak up stormwater and kept trees between the growing area and waterways to filter any runoff.

Ashish Kapoor, project lead, said the quarter-acre site could be replicated for urban farming, parking lots, breweries or wineries to save on electricity. Farmers could customize it depending on whether their cattle need shade or they want to grow special crops.

“A lot of times that’s been missing on the larger scale [installations], where you kind of bring in the agricultural aspect after the solar development,” Kapoor said. “Farmers need to be part of the conversation from the beginning.”

The obstacles preventing farmers from adopting solar are that the panels need to be high and widely spaced enough for tractors to operate among them, but it’s expensive. “Tracking” panels that follow the sun are more effective at capturing solar energy but may dip too low toward the crops, and widely spaced panels require even more of the farmland. And there are safety concerns as well — the potential need in tight spaces to “de-energize” the panels to safely work underneath them.

Also, if topsoil has been removed to level the ground, farmers lose precious nutrients and must compensate for high acidity in the subsoil. Additional lime and fertilizer to boost the subsoil is oftentimes not nearly enough, according to Virginia Tech’s Daniels.

“I think it’s doable,” he said. “[You] could take farmland, put in solar and farm it. But I don’t think the current approach and the current technologies and structures that are being built today at scale are compatible with our row crop systems.”

Pitsiokos said the crops at the Loudoun County site are growing at a rate consistent with what he’s seen at similar operations in other states. The vegetables, along with the rest of the produce from the Roundabout Meadows community farm, will go to local food banks. But he said it will take a few more growing seasons to know whether the crops and panels are truly getting along.