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It'll be interesting to know the level of impact of turning arable land over to solar farms.
Installing solar over fields increases their yield.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
https://news.westernu.ca/2023/04/expert-insight-shading-crops-with-solar-panels-can-improve-farming-lower-food-costs-and-reduce-emissions/
Can
An important missed word.
Issue is it depends on building them correctly with production of crops being the priority over production of power.
Issue is UK farmers have been penalised due to loss of government funding. So profiting from crops has been bloody hard for a few years now.
This means the few solar plants being built in the UK on arable land,are generally renting fields farmers have stopped using for crops.
There's only 1,336 operational solar farms as of Sep 2024... So would be marginal at best. Certainly generating a lot less CO2 than if the land was developed into anything else.
Also how many of those are on actual arable land. I’ve seen animal fields add solar not sure how many actually usable fields are being converted.
Most of the fields that solar is put in are not land that is massively productive in other ways. You would not want to replace economically productive land with something else when you have a perfectly good unproductive field sitting right by it. The thing about the sun is that it's pretty much equal everywhere.
There's a farm near me that has solar panels and the only thing I've ever seen in those fields is grass. Checking back on Google Earth I'm looking at photos from as far back as 2003, I can't see any crops ever been in there. The only animals I've ever seen in there are sheep which tend to be perfectly happy on just grass but pretty much all other cattle require higher quality soils.