[HN Gopher] Putting solar panels in grazing fields is good for s...
___________________________________________________________________
Putting solar panels in grazing fields is good for sheep
Author : montalbano
Score : 124 points
Date : 2023-02-14 15:37 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newscientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newscientist.com)
| eyear wrote:
| This is already practiced in some parts in China.
|
| https://youtu.be/Azj3OrEtkP4
| Fiahil wrote:
| Let's try that with goats :)
| epistasis wrote:
| > While sheep are considered the gold star for solar because
| they don't jump on panels, goats have long been used for
| utility and pipeline maintenance and perimeter maintenance (or
| maintaining vegetation around the borders of a site) in
| countries like France.
|
| From a 2020 article on the topic. Sorry goats, you are not the
| "gold standard" here.
|
| https://www.utilitydive.com/news/sheep-ag-and-sun-agrivoltai...
| coding123 wrote:
| Put the wiring in PVC pipe, and make sure the panel's junction
| box wires are secured tightly inside the inner folds (or use
| products that secure them).
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| You know they're going to eat the PVC pipe.
| ortusdux wrote:
| While goats will eat just about anything, I think they were
| referencing their compulsive need to climb everything in
| their pen.
| dhosek wrote:
| I read something somewhere (the curse of wide reading) that
| it's a myth that goats will eat anything which came as a
| shock to me because as a child in the 70s I learned (from
| adults or books or cartoons or who knows what?) that a goat
| would eat a tin can given the opportunity.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Goats nibble everything, but thats just like us feeling
| things with our hands.
|
| they've only got teeth on the lower jaw in front; they
| can tear stuff up with their back teeth but they have to
| get it in their mouths.
|
| They tend to have this thing about strings and string-
| like things, they start swallowing and do not want to
| stop. instinct tells them vines _must_ have good stuff
| just a little further along. loose wires are _bad_ for
| goats and vice versa
| seydor wrote:
| I mean it's free cleaning
| martin_a wrote:
| > 'Cause baby, there ain't no mountain high enough
|
| > Ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river wide enough
|
| > To keep me from getting to you, baby
|
| -- Goats
| sbradford26 wrote:
| I lived out in the country and our neighbor down the road
| got several goats. Every day I would drive past and he
| would have 3 goats on top of his Subaru outback. He built a
| new barn to park the car in because he got tired of the
| dents.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| Shelter is good for all stock. The old timers new this and grew
| trees down fence lines so animals could have shelter in extremes.
| When driving past properties with the shelter belts stock are
| always using them during extremes.
|
| Today, farmers are removing the shelter belts all in the name of
| efficiency because the shelter belts reduce grass growth under
| them and make it harder to irrigate.
|
| But damn the animals, at least they have maximised and and can
| now fully capitalize.
| ars wrote:
| > Today, farmers are removing the shelter belts all in the name
| of efficiency because the shelter belts reduce grass growth
| under them and make it harder to irrigate.
|
| Do you have a source for that? Because I googled a bit, and
| found nothing.
|
| The photos I found of animals in hot weather with no tree cover
| are for places where trees don't grow.
|
| > Today, farmers are removing the shelter belts all in the name
| of efficiency because the shelter belts reduce grass growth
| under them and make it harder to irrigate.
|
| This explanation makes no sense. Why would it be harder to
| irrigate? And who cares about the small amount of grass under a
| row of trees? It's not like you have trees every 20 feet.
|
| > But damn the animals, at least they have maximised and and
| can now fully capitalize.
|
| This also makes no sense - healthier animals are more
| productive, even if the only motivation you acknowledge is
| money.
| mattferderer wrote:
| I can tell you from personal experience my family farmed very
| sandy soil. They did strip farming. Very few do this anymore.
|
| If you want efficiency, the common method is very wide, large
| areas of the same crop so you can use several very large
| machines to do all the work.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| If healthier animals are better in terms of economics why
| don't McDonald's source their meat from free range farms
| where cows feed on grass and can physically move more than
| three steps?
| pleb_nz wrote:
| Have you never stood under a row of 10 or 20 metre pine or
| macrocarpa trees? There will be a strip of a metre or so of
| no growth and it slowly increases in density from there out
| until 3 to 5 metres out.
| dylan604 wrote:
| They're also used as wind breaks. Lots of benefits to the
| things the old timers did that new stock just tosses out from
| lack of understanding and lots of over confidence that they
| know better.
|
| It applies to dev work as well, with all of these new fangled
| fancy ways of doing things because people think they know
| better. Can things be improved, surely, but there's a lot of
| things we've "improved" just to recreate the same traps we've
| already been through. It is tiresome
| ilyt wrote:
| Well, if you don't pass on knowledge this happens.
|
| If all of your life's lessons are left in your brain instead
| of properly written down, and with reasoning ("we do this
| because this", not just "we do this because we did this")
| attached to it, no wonder next generation needs to re-learn
| that
| rhacker wrote:
| A lot of people use the year alone as evidence that some
| process is outdated.
|
| Template:
|
| It's ${CurrentYear} and we're still doing ${OldProcess}?! We
| don't need to do that because of ${NewProcess}!
| colechristensen wrote:
| Does anyone irritate grazing land? Is that common at all?
| pleb_nz wrote:
| In NZ it's massively common in areas that were once only
| suitable for sheep. But sheep products in the current
| environment are not worth anything, wool especially so.
| However, dairy has excellent value globally, So now these
| farms have converted to diary, but that means they need to
| improve the grass growth to be suitable for cattle which
| means irrigation. The last 10 years has seen massive swathes
| of land unsuitable for cattle converted to land suitable via
| irrigation in my country. This has led to destructive
| processes and pollution of rivers and water ways though
| irrigation and fertilisation. It's our dirty little secret.
| antod wrote:
| Yup, sigh. NZ was a big sheep based economy when I was
| young. Now sheep are only for land unsuitable for cows or
| farmers that are stubborn holdouts. It costs more to shear
| the sheep than the wool is worth now - I really hope that
| can be turned around somehow so demand for wool can replace
| that for synthetic materials and those stubborn holdouts
| get rewarded for it.
| lazide wrote:
| Decently common on somewhat marginal land.
|
| Usually it's more common to provide hay and similar
| supplemental feed though.
|
| Also common is post-harvest grazing.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Do you mean irrigate?
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yes. I suffer from my iPhone picking the correct word and
| then changing it after i enter the next one.
| moremetadata wrote:
| I'm assuming you mean irrigate land.
|
| Before WW2 in the UK, the countryside was covered with loads
| and loads of ponds and lakes for livestock to drink from and
| to keep the water table up. Fields were typically smaller
| with more hedgerows for wildlife to live in.
|
| Droughts were less of a problem back then.
|
| It was claimed the Germans Luftwaffe could fly by night on
| the full moon navigating by the reflection of these bodies of
| water, so the British govt issued orders to fill in these
| ponds and lakes to make it harder to fly by night.
|
| Consequently the water table on farmland fell causing more
| drought problems and after WW2 these bodies of water have
| never been re-established by govt orders.
|
| The history of the wild apple is also interesting. The Soviet
| Union paid people to conserve these, but the breakup of the
| USSR meant these were no longer looked after. They also
| displayed a symbiotic relationship with other plants just
| like livestock has displayed a symbiotic relationship with
| the land.
|
| "Prickly shrubs, such as eglantine and barberry exhibiting
| symbiotic relationships with wild apples by shielding them
| from predators were also cut"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malus_sieversii#Conservation
|
| If there were no wild animals, like deer that can feed on the
| leaves, then the bottom of trees would reach to the floor.
|
| The main problem has been trying to feed a growing human
| population whilst keeping them under control, so ideas
| sometimes dominate which shouldn't, like we see here with
| solar cells providing shelter for livestock like sheep.
| antod wrote:
| _> It was claimed the Germans Luftwaffe could fly by night
| on the full moon navigating by the reflection of these
| bodies of water, so the British govt issued orders to fill
| in these ponds and lakes to make it harder to fly by
| night._
|
| Wondering what percentage of nights in the UK have a full
| moon AND no cloud? And that if all the countryside was
| covered in small ponds, would they even be useful for
| navigation?
| biorach wrote:
| > It was claimed the Germans Luftwaffe could fly by night
| on the full moon navigating by the reflection of these
| bodies of water, so the British govt issued orders to fill
| in these ponds and lakes to make it harder to fly by night.
|
| > Consequently the water table on farmland fell causing
| more drought problems and after WW2 these bodies of water
| have never been re-established by govt orders.
|
| Citation?
| crakenzak wrote:
| According to chatGPT:
|
| There is no evidence to support the claim that the
| British government ordered the filling in of ponds and
| lakes during World War II to prevent the German Luftwaffe
| from navigating by the reflection of the moon on the
| water.
|
| While it is true that the full moon could provide some
| illumination for nighttime flights, especially with the
| use of specialized equipment like the Lichtenstein radar,
| the idea that the Luftwaffe relied solely on the
| reflection of water for navigation is a myth. The
| Luftwaffe had other means of navigation, such as radio
| beacons, compasses, and celestial navigation.
|
| Additionally, there is no record of any official British
| government policy to fill in ponds and lakes for this
| purpose. It is possible that individual landowners or
| local authorities may have taken such action, but there
| is no evidence of a widespread or coordinated effort by
| the British government to do so.
|
| Overall, this claim is false and lacks factual basis.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| We need to do a better job of measuring and demonstrating the
| correlation between efficiency and fragility.
| m463 wrote:
| When I read that I thought, fragility ~= efficiency
|
| But then I thought of nature, which is pretty amazing.
|
| I think maybe: fragility = efficiency /
| testing-time
|
| so yeah, old-timers.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| interesting.
|
| I had always thought that the farmers _left_ the trees on the
| property line because they 're just so dang much trouble to cut
| down with nothing but manual labor and they make a good
| property line.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| Osage oranges were planted all over as hedge fences, for
| example in Kansas. Probably in some places the trees were
| left on the boundaries but I think in many places specific
| trees were planted because they were good at creating
| boundaries. thttps://dyckarboretum.org/osage-orange-a-
| historical-living-f...
| justajot wrote:
| I was just recently reading an article about the osage
| orange! While its most popular use was definitely as that
| of a hedgerow, the wood of the osage orange tree is
| "unusually hard, durable, and resistant to rot." Native
| Americans used it to make bows because the wood was durable
| and flexible, allowing it "to bend and absorb shock without
| breaking."
|
| [The Quirky History of the Osage Orange, Texas's Ugliest
| Fruit](https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/osage-
| orange-histor...)
| desperate wrote:
| [dead]
| toss1 wrote:
| Removing the shelter belts is also making the same mistakes as
| they made in the 1920s that lead to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
| The lack of wind-breaks created the conditions for massive dust
| storms that destroyed both current crops and insane amounts of
| topsoil that got blown away.
|
| But no one cares about history. And so everyone becomes the
| ignorant herd condemned to repeat history.
| mattferderer wrote:
| My Grandpa joked about this same thing a decade or so ago &
| predicted it would happen to this farmer who bought land next
| to him. Farmer bought land next to his & wanted a giant field
| of corn so he could use his very large machines for more
| efficient work. That farmer lost his crop & all the fences
| became small hills as they caught the dirt that flew around.
|
| It can be enjoyable to watch history repeat itself so
| precisely as predicted in such a short time.
| toss1 wrote:
| Wow, karma came back _real_ fast!
|
| Hilarious if it weren't so serious.
|
| At least _maybe_ he 'll learn the lesson and replant bigger
| and soon...?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
| beembeem wrote:
| Love this! Is there a non-paywall link?
| rripken wrote:
| https://archive.ph/YwBBB
| bilsbie wrote:
| This is great example of having your cake and eating it too.
| dcuthbertson wrote:
| Ah, to dream of electric sheep.
| del82 wrote:
| (I can't read the full article due to the paywall, but) another
| framing of this is: farmers can supplement their income by
| renting out their sheep to help solar farms manage the vegetation
| around the panels:
|
| https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2020/07/solar-grazing-livesto...
| JauntyHatAngle wrote:
| Also it lets the sheep charge their phones.
| exq wrote:
| Do you think those sheep would dream of electric androids?
| krupan wrote:
| Aren't grazing animals like sheep bad for the environment though?
| I've been told I need to go vegan to fight climate change,
| haven't I?
| Findecanor wrote:
| Sheep, like cows, are ruminants and ruminants burp methane,
| which is a greenhouse gas. Per unit of lamb or beef, about two-
| three times[1] as much of _greenhouse_ _units_ ( "CO2 -
| equivalents") is produced than for pork. Chicken has an even
| lower carbon footprint.
|
| I think it is evident that many in the Western world eat more
| meat than they need to to stay healthy. The best for your
| health and the environment is probably to eat an as varied diet
| as possible, with lots of vegetables to complement your
| meat/protein intake.
|
| [1] numbers differ depending on who you ask, and on which farms
| were measured.
| ragebol wrote:
| Shade is good for a sheep. Not getting eaten is even better for
| a sheep.
|
| Raising millions if not billions of sheep, that's bad for the
| environment.
|
| But you knew this already...
| myself248 wrote:
| Wool > Polyester.
| abraae wrote:
| Going vegan is one end of a spectrum.
|
| You might also change your meat choice. Chicken is far better
| than pork, which is far better than beef. No need to instantly
| go cold turkey on meat if it doesn't suit you.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| It's complicated. Some places in the world, livestock is grown
| quite sustainably and are basically neutral climate-wise. Other
| places, it is an unmitigated ecological disaster (clearing rain
| forest, for example). Because we produce so much around the
| world, on average, it is pretty bad.
|
| Generally, livestock takes more land than grain crops in order
| to produce the same calories. However, there is more to
| nutrition than simple calories, so optimising for calories per
| hectare is probably not the right answer either. I once saw a
| report suggesting that you can feed more people with less total
| impact if you include livestock in the mix because livestock
| can graze on more marginal land than you can farm crops on. I
| am not qualified to comment on the veracity of that report.
|
| I think, in the end, going vegan for climate change reasons is
| an extreme and unjustified position. On the other hand, almost
| everyone can stand to eat less meat than they currently do and
| would probably be healthier for it (myself, included). If we
| reduce overall meat consumption, it would definitely be a net
| win for climate and ecology reasons as we could concentrate on
| producing more sustainably on average than we currently do.
| danans wrote:
| Production of animals for meat and dairy at large scale using
| crops grown with fossil fuel inputs is bad for climate change,
| not traditional grazing.
|
| Traditional grazing doesn't achieve the scale of industrial
| agriculture though, so the products are more expensive.
|
| You don't have to "go vegan" but reducing animal product
| consumption in general is an accessible way to minimize your
| climate change impact.
| cschneid wrote:
| Something that's interesting is that most of our agricultural
| crops are bred for full sun (ie, a big flat field). I wonder if
| there's room for new partial-shade versions of crops, so they
| work better alongside solar panels. I doubt they'd be as
| productive in an absolute sense (less light = less total energy),
| but adding on solar panels value to the output of that land would
| likely be better than single-use of either.
| gdubs wrote:
| Permaculture and agroforestry touch on this a lot. In
| permaculture designs usually photosynthesis per acre is
| maximized by planting guilds of crops that work well together -
| in this case, larger trees with shade-loving shrubs beneath
| them, and beneficial ground cover beneath them as well.
|
| Towards the more conventional end of agroforestry, rows of
| trees are separated with rows of crops, grains, etc. There's
| lots of benefits to this way of farming, though it's still
| 'new' to a lot of people.
| epistasis wrote:
| There are many studies examining the potential of agrivoltaics
| (it even has a Wikipedia page), and they find just as you
| suggest: the combined output of electricity + crops is better
| than doing either one alone, but the electric and crop is a bit
| less than devoting the field to either purpose solely, as it
| would need to be.
|
| Efficiency increases are often 30% or more.
|
| Some people get really, irrationally upset about solar being
| put on farm fields, but it really helps both the farmer and
| society to do that.
| universa1 wrote:
| Actually, given the high investment costs for dual-use of
| solar and crops, it is economically better to just do each
| separately and commit the area fully to one or the other.
| That was the essence at least I got from an article about
| agrivoltaics in Germany.
| epistasis wrote:
| I would like to see that article, as it runs contra the
| messaging I've heard from other studies over the past few
| years.
|
| It may depend a bit on the actual location. Germany has
| some of the very very worst solar conditions of anywhere in
| the world, worse than pretty much all of the US, and I've
| been primarily looking at studies with solar resources at
| US levels. I wouldn't be surprised if Germany has different
| solutions than most of the est of the world.
| lazide wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me too if some of the studies in the
| US were places like Arizona, where too much sun is an
| issue for many crops (sun spotting, burning of leaves,
| excess water consumption), and some shade during peak
| insolation is not only beneficial for crops, but if you
| can do something with the energy? Even better.
|
| One really beneficial coupling in a lot of cases seems to
| be HVAC + solar in hot western climates.
| iso1631 wrote:
| I think it's more that there's likely better land to put it
| on. In the UK for example there's arable land growing corn or
| cows or whatever, and there's scrub moorland which is closed
| from the public and used to shoot grouse once a year.
|
| If you have 100 acres of solar to put on land, better to put
| it on the grouse moor.
| epistasis wrote:
| But in what sense is it better to use grouse moor? That's
| habitat that is not currently touched much, and is a good
| reservoir for natural ecology, right? There's value in
| that.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| They put hundreds of birds into those fields every year
| so that hunters have something to shoot. I wouldn't call
| that untouched.
| hgomersall wrote:
| It really is touched a lot. The landscape is basically
| grouse farming.
| lazide wrote:
| Presumably because the solar infrastructure gets in the
| way of the corn, but is unlikely to matter much for some
| grouse?
| desas wrote:
| The grouse moor is basically a grouse farm. The moor is
| periodically burned to promote the right kinds of growth,
| 100s of grouse are released and nature like birds of prey
| somehow end up with a shorter lifespan.
| epistasis wrote:
| I thought they banned burns?
|
| In any case, I will cede the environmental case to local
| ecologists. But if it's already farming of grouse, that
| seems less intensive use than farming of sheep, as an
| outsider I would be interested in learning more as to why
| grouse moors are preferable to sheep land. It seems that
| grouse moors would be far more amenable to rewinding. But
| as I said, I only have my non-expert opinion!
| giarc wrote:
| Ginseng needs shade(1), farmers should install solar over
| ginseng crops. However, I suspect they need to drive equipment
| through at times. I wonder if there are solar installations
| where the panel can go perpendicular to the ground to allow
| tractors through?
|
| 1 - https://www.google.ca/search?q=ginseng+field
| danohuiginn wrote:
| The problem is, how do you navigate a tractor around the
| panels? Animals are a much better fit in that regard
| epistasis wrote:
| Buy appropriately sized tractors. Typically farmers are
| upgrading these things all the time, should be pretty
| straightforward to swap out this single factor of production
| to the right sort of thing.
|
| Our vehicles and machinery have this tendency to occupy prime
| mental real estate, as unchangeable monoliths around which
| everything must be planned. In reality, they are the most
| changable thing, and we must change our machinery to serve
| us, rather than the other way around.
|
| There are also lots of crops that are not serviced by large
| tractors, but individual human hands. In fact most of the
| fruit and vegetables we eat are like that, and many of those
| crops do very well with a bit less than full Sun.
| lstodd wrote:
| [flagged]
| beembeem wrote:
| you either go up (expensive) or wide (less economical, lower
| energy yield)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > most of our agricultural crops are bred for full sun
|
| Some crops need shade, most often berries. Shade in Spain and
| Shade in North Scotland are very different of course.
| chucksta wrote:
| I think the crop or the plants would have to change a lot.
| Currently it's pretty easy to see which areas get full sun and
| which don't when you drive by a corn field in growing season.
|
| Looks like its being tested though
| https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/food-and-farms/can-agri...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-14 23:01 UTC)