A significant number of crops can handle up to 30% shading and farms can install solar on frames above the crops. A few plants even do better with some shade (due to heat stress)
Not to mention as temperatures continue to climb, more will benefit from the shade because 30% shade will be closer to what the plants consider “normal/ideal”
some years ago an article here in Australia interviewing a sheep grazier who had solar a large solar farm, one of the things he said he’d not considered was in times of drought, the many acres of panels had water droplets in the morning condense on the panels and made drip lines of grass for the sheep, apparently enough extra growth it got him through a recent dry spell, that and shade for the sheep
A significant number of crops can handle up to 30% shading and farms can install solar on frames above the crops. A few plants even do better with some shade (due to heat stress)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13593-022-00783-7
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00121-w
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/03/made-shade-growing-crops-solar-farms-yields-efficiency
Not to mention as temperatures continue to climb, more will benefit from the shade because 30% shade will be closer to what the plants consider “normal/ideal”
some years ago an article here in Australia interviewing a sheep grazier who had solar a large solar farm, one of the things he said he’d not considered was in times of drought, the many acres of panels had water droplets in the morning condense on the panels and made drip lines of grass for the sheep, apparently enough extra growth it got him through a recent dry spell, that and shade for the sheep
That’s a great point as well… I wish I had enough to make that big of a difference.