Sharing the land: agrivoltaics and the dual-use solar farm

Walk into almost any community meeting about a proposed solar farm and you'll hear the same worry, in some form: that's good land — why are you covering it in panels instead of farming it? It's a fair question, and for a long time the honest answer was that a solar site mostly stopped being farmland. But that's no longer the trade-off. A fast-growing body of practice and research shows that solar and agriculture can share the same acres — and that doing so can make both better off. The field has a name: agrivoltaics, the dual use of land for solar generation and farming at once.

This isn't a thought experiment or a pilot curiosity. It's happening at scale across the United States today, and the data behind it is increasingly hard to argue with. For a developer that plans to be a community's neighbor for thirty years, agrivoltaics reframes the entire relationship with the land and the people who work it — from "we're taking this field" to "we're sharing it." This paper lays out how it works and why we build with it in mind.

01What agrivoltaics actually is

Agrivoltaics covers a spectrum of ways to keep land productive under and around solar arrays. At the simplest and most proven end is solar grazing — running sheep (and sometimes cattle or goats) through the array to manage vegetation, replacing mowers and herbicides with livestock that turn the grass between and beneath panels into meat and wool. Further along the spectrum are crop-based systems, where panels are raised higher or spaced wider so vegetables, berries, or forage can grow between the rows, and pollinator habitat, where the ground beneath the array is seeded with native flowering plants that support bees and the surrounding farms that depend on them.

The common thread is that the land does two jobs at once. The same acre generates electricity and produces food, forage, or habitat — rather than being given over entirely to one or the other. That's a meaningfully different proposition from the old picture of a solar farm as a fenced-off field of glass.

Agrivoltaics changes the question from "solar or farming?" to "solar and farming?" On the right site, the land doesn't have to choose.

02The evidence so far

The most authoritative U.S. picture comes from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's InSPIRE project, the country's largest agrivoltaics research network, which now tracks performance data from more than 40 sites across 18 states. Its findings have moved agrivoltaics from anecdote to evidence. As of late 2023, more than 4,000 MW of U.S. solar capacity already had sheep grazing beneath it — a real, operating industry, not a demonstration. NREL's research finds that co-locating solar with agriculture can boost land-use efficiency by 60 to 200 percent versus using the land for only one purpose, and can cut crop water demand by 20 to 50 percent in arid climates, where the panels' partial shade slows evaporation.

The livestock data is just as encouraging. Studies have found that the lower forage production within an array doesn't necessarily reduce liveweight gain — sheep grazed in solar arrays have performed comparably to those on open pasture — while producing meaningfully lower greenhouse-gas emissions per animal than conventional grazing. The market has noticed: the global agrivoltaics sector surpassed $5.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to exceed $9.3 billion by 2030. Dual-use solar is scaling, not theorizing.

03Why panels and plants help each other

What makes agrivoltaics more than a space-sharing compromise is that the two uses can genuinely benefit each other. The relationship runs both ways. Panels help the plants: in hot, dry climates, partial shade from the array reduces heat stress and evaporation, so some crops actually yield better under panels than in full exposure, and pasture stays greener later into a dry season. And the plants help the panels: vegetation under and around an array cools the local microclimate, and solar panels run slightly more efficiently when they're cooler, so a planted site can modestly outproduce a bare, gravel-and-dust one.

Grazing adds a third loop. Sheep keep vegetation down — essential, because overgrown grass shades panels and creates fire risk — without the diesel, labor, and emissions of mechanical mowing. The livestock do the maintenance the plant would otherwise pay for, and the grazier gets forage for their flock. It's a rare arrangement where the engineering and the agriculture are aligned rather than in tension.

The panels shade the crops; the plants cool the panels; the sheep mow the field. Done right, agrivoltaics is less a compromise than a small, working ecosystem.

Forms of agrivoltaics

Approach	What happens on the land	Who benefits
Solar grazing	Sheep graze vegetation beneath panels	Graziers get forage; the plant skips mowing
Crop agrivoltaics	Vegetables/forage grown between rows	Farmers keep producing; some crops yield better in shade
Pollinator habitat	Native flowering ground cover under array	Bees, soil health, and neighboring farms

04Keeping land — and communities — whole

The deepest benefit of agrivoltaics is social, not agronomic. A conventional solar lease can feel, to a farming community, like land leaving agriculture — even if the landowner is glad for the steady income. Agrivoltaics changes that story. The land stays in production. A rancher can keep grazing a flock on acres that now also host a power plant. A farmer earns stable lease income from the panels and keeps farming between them. Local graziers and seed suppliers gain new customers in the solar operator. The project becomes something the agricultural community participates in rather than something that displaces it.

That matters for the practical reality of building anything, too. Solar projects increasingly live or die on local acceptance, and "we're taking your farmland" is the argument that sinks them. "We're keeping this land in agriculture while it also produces clean power, and your flock can graze it" is a fundamentally different conversation — one that lets a project earn a community's support rather than merely its tolerance.

05How we think about it

We don't treat agrivoltaics as a marketing garnish to sprinkle on a finished design. Where a site and its community support it, dual use is something to plan for from the start — row spacing, panel height, fencing, and ground cover chosen so the land can keep grazing or growing, not just generating. It won't fit every site, and we won't pretend otherwise; some land, some climates, and some community priorities point a different way. But where it fits, sharing the land is simply a better deal for everyone — more food and forage, cleaner power, healthier soil, and a community that keeps what it values while gaining something new.

That's the kind of neighbor we want our projects to be: not a fenced-off island of glass, but a working part of the landscape that produces power without taking the land out of the lives it already supports.