Farming meets solar power in new MSU project

Michigan State University scientists plan to build a first-of-its-kind outdoor lab to study how solar panels placed alongside crops could save water, improve soil health and support ecosystems, all while boosting farmers’ bottom line and preserving farm production.

The project, led by Earth and Environmental Sciences Assistant Professor Anthony Kendall, is made possible by a five-year $3.6 million National Science Foundation grant. He and an interdisciplinary team will study existing solar parks to find out how the panels affect the soil and ecosystems surrounding them. Then, they’ll install a small array of 30 solar panels near corn and soybean fields to teach farmers, scientists and other stakeholders how to repurpose underproducing portions of their fields for solar energy.

The initial lab, set for the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station, or KBS, will be small, but the group envisions eventually building a world-class 15-acre facility. Bringing this concept to life will help farmers visualize what this method could look like in their fields and how it could make farming more sustainable as costs rise.

“There’s really nothing else like this,” Kendall said. “The experiments and education opportunities are crucial as solar energy becomes more widely used worldwide. This lab will help us teach farmers how they can harness energy from the sun to stabilize their income and ensure that they can keep producing crops for generations to come.”

With a background in hydrology, Kendall is also interested in studying how groundwater is affected by solar panels and how that impacts the soil moisture. He’s brought together a team of MSU scientists with unique expertise to ensure a cross-disciplinary perspective to this research, including:

• Annick Anctil, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, who will create new metrics for quantifying the benefit of solar panels, incorporating not just the energy benefit but also savings in fertilizer, water and other effects on the ecosystem.
• Bruno Basso, Hannah Distinguished Professor of earth and environmental sciences and plant, soil and microbial sciences, who will use drones and remote sensing to help farmers pinpoint low productivity fields or large low-production areas within fields where they’re losing money due to high inputs and low commodity prices. Those areas could then be converted to solar sites surrounded by crops, increasing revenue for farmers and ecosystems services for the community.
• Nick Haddad, professor of integrative biology and core faculty member in MSU’s Ecology, Evolution and Behavior Program, or EEB, who will determine how the solar plots could benefit the balance of plants, animals and microbes that keep the ecosystem healthy. He’ll use techniques such as planting goldenrod, black-eyed Susans, switchgrass and other native plants around solar panels. These plants attract bees, butterflies and insects that pollinate plants and improve crop yields.
• Phoebe Zarnetske, professor of integrative biology and core faculty member in EEB, who is also a principal investigator of the Spatial and Community Ecology Lab and director of the Institute for Biodiversity, Ecology, Evolution and Macrosystems. She will measure how solar panels affect the plants and animals that call a field home.
• Adam Zwickle, associate professor and graduate program director of the Department of Community Sustainability, who will seek to understand farmer and community needs for agri-solar data and ways to incorporate personal and community values into the solar decision-making process.

The solar project comes as renewable energy surges worldwide. For the first time ever, solar, wind and other renewable energy sources generated more electricity than coal in the first six months of this year, according to an energy think tank report published this month.

As increasingly extreme weather has led to unreliable crop yields, more farmers are turning to solar energy as a steady source of income. While some convert entire fields to solar farms, research led by MSU research associate Jake Stid shows farmers can keep growing food by strategically placing solar arrays on unproductive patches of field.

This method not only funnels energy back into the power grid, but it also helps preserve groundwater and saves farmers money on fertilizer for the acres taken out of production. The team’s recently published open-access dataset of ground-mounted solar array locations and design provides the foundation for scaling this research to the contiguous United States.

Even as solar energy becomes more prominent, installing panels on farmland has stirred debate in many communities. Residents have raised questions about land use, aesthetics and threats to their agricultural heritage. Meanwhile, most solar research was fragmented and conducted in isolation. As a result, scientists don’t know the tradeoffs and benefits of solar panels and how they affect water, ecologies and communities.

That’s why the first 18 months of the five-year grant period will be spent studying local solar parks and developing new interdisciplinary methods and research questions. A goal is for MSU to provide a trusted source of science-based information to help property owners and communities make informed decisions about how best to use their land.

“MSU, as a land-grant institution, is perfectly suited to play this role,” Zwickle said. “Our mission is to be of use to the state, to work for the public good and be a trusted source of information.”

The agri-solar project also includes contributions from additional MSU senior research personnel, including Nameer Baker, ecology specialist at KBS; Doug Bessette, associate professor of community sustainability; Lissy Goralnik, assistant professor of community sustainability; M. Charles Gould, MSU Extension educator; Megan Halpern, associate professor at Lyman Briggs College; Elizabeth Schultheis, KBS education and outreach coordinator; and Gretel Van Wieren, professor of religious studies.

The grant includes collaborators from other institutions as well, including David Hyndman, Francis S. and Maurine G. Johnson Distinguished University Chair and dean of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Texas at Dallas; Bryan Pijanowski, professor of forestry and natural resources at Purdue University; Aaron Thompson, associate professor of horticulture and landscape architecture at Purdue University; and Jonathan Winter, associate professor of geography at Dartmouth College. Partnering organizations include the Nature Conservancy and American Farmland Trust.