Perfecto example of solar + arable crop + livestock farming

[Mr Gus]

Lads, THIS, works it is installation heavy but my goodness is a balance of not scuppering land use for regular farming.. experiment in france just look at the combine for scale.

2.5 Megawatts via 5000 ish panels.

https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/10/ ... t-the-same

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haute-Sa%C3%B4ne (wikipedia regional detail)

[Oldgreybeard]

Nice idea, but a complete and total nightmare for farming. Bad enough having to sow and harvest around one or two power poles in a field. Not many farmers are going to want to try and work around dozens of poles in a field. Farmers will often pay to get poles moved to the edges of arable fields, just because of the problems of trying to work around them. Unless the poles are spaced at an exact multiple of the cutter bar width then there will be a lot of wasted runs dealing with the left over strips in each row. Given that the cutter bar width varies from one machine to another, this could be a challenge. Probably better suited to crops that are harvested with narrower machines, like root crops and brassicas.

[nowty]

Mabe it will work in France though, I was amazed as I saw different types of specialised machinery driving up and down very narrow rows of vines in vineyards there. They may be more used to it than over here.

[Mr Gus]

The weather is rarely perfect for farmers, nor the land, you work around the problem, this is one of those work-arounds, not a one size fits all,but a massive improvement on the solar farm land gobble, ..it can remain multi use, we used to borrow kit, things to be factored in with new kit purchases that several revenue streams may well allow.

Would like to see this in terms of land change & less heat stress for cattle in Australia.

[Oldgreybeard]

Mabe it will work in France though, I was amazed as I saw different types of machinery driving up and down very narrow rows of vines in vineyards there. They may be more used to it than over here.

I believe the disparity has a lot to do with the way the CAP and other subsidies were administered. In the UK it encouraged the creation of large fields for efficiency, in France they seem to have opted to support much smaller scale farms, as much for cultural reasons as anything else, I believe.

I remember thinking that our 10 acre barley field (on a 400 acre mixed farm) was large back in the 1960s, nowadays a 10 acre arable field here would be seen as being almost uneconomically small, the average is somewhere around 20 to 30 acres around here, maybe 40 acres or more in somewhere like East Anglia.

[Bugtownboy]

Nice idea, but a complete and total nightmare for farming.

But aren’t ‘we’ going to have to make difficult decisions - we need both locally produced crops and RE. The installation looks interesting with the ability to move the attitude of the panels.

Ultimately, I suppose, if the farmer makes more money from having the RE on his land than just using the land for agriculture, it’s going to work.

It isn’t destroying the land or would be a difficult clean up once we get to fusion or something.

[Oldgreybeard]

Nice idea, but a complete and total nightmare for farming.

But aren’t ‘we’ going to have to make difficult decisions - we need both locally produced crops and RE. The installation looks interesting with the ability to move the attitude of the panels.

Ultimately, I suppose, if the farmer makes more money from having the RE on his land than just using the land for agriculture, it’s going to work.

It isn’t destroying the land or would be a difficult clean up once we get to fusion or something.

I was really responding to the image promoting the idea, showing a fairly small combine harvesting soy, this one:

Combine.jpg (163.21 KiB) Viewed 1026 times

For this to work here in the UK would need a switch back to using smaller machines and paying more for fuel and labour for a given area of land. The question is whether the reduction in emissions and cost of the energy generated by the panels outweighs the increased cost and emissions from farming the land. I just don't know the answer to that, but do know that upscaling the size of farm machinery has dramatically reduced time and cost (and probably emissions too).

[Swwils]

Isn't the capacity factor a bit rubbish in that area of Europe? A yearly production of 3000 MWh is pretty bad for the resources needed to create 5000 panels.

[Countrypaul]

Will they be using unmanned BECH (Battery Electric Cobine Harvesters) in future?

[Petertc]

I saw the picture, just thinking how that would stand up with high winds as they would act like a wing and supported on wires as well. I have seen vertical panels as well at bigger spacing ground mount. But you get less total generation.
But more in winter months, maybe they will have to pay more for winter solar to try and move the economics.
Unless there is some sort of support economics will be the driver.
Can't blame the landowner they get a guaranteed income form the lease of the land. They don't have any running costs for it.
UK farmers are being asked to complete in a global market where welfare standards are lower than the UK. So unless we can sell a premium product. We don't stand a chance being able to complete.
Don't quote New Zealand as an example. Their animal welfare standards are lower than ours. It's economics, if it's cheaper to shoot the animal than look after it they will. Same with the dairy industry they block calve to make the best use of the grass, cows are induced to calve, and you have a hammer ready to smack the calf between the eyes. As it premature . Also as they have lots of clover to reduce nitrogen fertilizer usage, they get lots of issues with cows dieing of bloat.
For the record I am an ex UK Dairy farmer the farmers in New Zealand do it this way to survive and make a living.
Lots of people say farming is a way of life, but as my late father said it is not any good if it's not away of making a living