Why Farmers Are Shielding Their Crops With Solar Panels
November 15, 2025
Plants like sunlight, it helps them grow. So, it is understandable that many people think the more sunlight the better. Surprisingly, this is wrong. Each plant has an optimal amount of sunlight that depends on many factors, and it turns out that full sunlight is too much for many of them. This is why farmers are doing something just a little bit odd – purposefully covering their crops with solar panels as many crops, actually grow better when protected from the sun.
This practice has become so common – now it even has a name: agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics is the combination of agricultural production (which converts sunlight to food) with solar photovoltaic technology (which converts sunlight directly into electricity). The practice of agrivoltaic farming is booming in the U.S. and even in cold and cloudy Canada.
Such agrivoltaic farming can help meet all of our food and energy needs, while simultaneously making us more sustainable by cutting our reliance on antiquated fossil fuel technology along with the accompanied greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.
Where solar shade equals shields for food crops for farmers
Agrivoltaics projects are sprouting up all over the U.S. (see InSpire map).
Solar Sevices on the Farm
Agrivoltaics can provide up to 14 services:
- renewable electricity generation,
- decreased green-house gas emissions,
- reduced climate change,
- increased crop yield,
- plant protection from excess solar energy,
- plant protection from inclement weather such as hail,
- water conservation,
- agricultural employment,
- local food,
- improved health from pollution reduction increased revenue for farmers,
- a hedge against inflation,
- the potential to produce nitrogen fertilizer on farm,
- on farm production of renewable fuels like anhydrous ammonia or hydrogen,
- electricity for EV charging for on- or off-farm use.
With experiments from all over the world we now know agrivoltaics can benefit crop yields for broccoli, celery, corn, grapes, kale, lettuce, pasture grass, peppers, potatoes, strawberries, tomatoes and more.
The reason this works and farmers enjoy yield increases is because of the microclimate created underneath the solar panels. As you might suspect in the shade it is cooler, this helps conserve water and protects plants from excess sun, wind, hail and soil erosion. In the end farmers enjoy more food per acre. This means more economic stability for hard working farmers and maybe less sticker shock for us at the grocery store.
In the not-so-distant past, when agrivoltaics was just coming out, farmers couldn’t dream of being able to afford systems. Luckily, the costs of solar energy have fallen like a rock, now solar is the cheapest form of electricity and farmers across the world are installing agrivoltaic systems and a crazy clip. It is good for the environment, for food, and it provides a profitable way to offsetting the burning of fossil fuels by making our own home grown renewable energy.
Solar farming is growing as more and more farmers join forces with the solar industry
The mighty agricultural industries in Europe, Asia and the North America have been aggressively expanding their agrivoltaic farms with wide public support.
In Europe, countries like Germany, France and Italy now have complete agrivoltaic laws and solar panels are tested even on what might thought of as radical crops like fruit trees. Who would have though purposefully shading a tree would get you more fruit? Perhaps even more impressive in China, agrivoltaics is literally being used to erase deserts. It turns out you can shade wasteland, make a nice habitat for plants with solar panels then even the desert will retreat.
In the U.S., where everything it seems has become political it is nice to see widespread support for agrivoltaics despite politics as the photovoltaic industry, farmers and the general public are enthusiastically looking forward to the implementation of such projects.
Surveys of the rural ‘middle’ U.S., from Michigan in the north to Texas in the south, show a whopping 82% of Americans would be more likely to support solar development in their community if it integrated farming. The reasons are clear, people that live in rural areas, generally like the idea of maintaining farming jobs, increased revenue for farmers from the sale of energy and bumper crops from agrivoltaics. It is particularly, nice that the revenue from solar is stable year round and also provides buffer against inflation and ‘insurance’ against bad growing seasons.
Is shielding crops with solar really good for the environment?
Yes, There have been several environmental studies of agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics really does help the environment and can even boost biodiversity. The most straight forward is an environmental life cycle analysis of agrivoltaics, which looked at its environmental impact from its conception to use. The study found that these solar-shielded farms emit 69 % less carbon and demand 83 less fossil energy compared to separate food farms and solar farms-based production.
Although all farmers want to maintain sustainability on their farms, it is unlikely this is the driving force in the explosive growth of agrivoltaics. The improved farm economics of deriving some passive income year round from solar panel elecric production, coupled to the increase crop yeilds, mean farmers can make more money per acre. This is just a smart technology that also happens to benefit the environment in a big way and that is something pretty mch everyone can get behind.
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