Researchers at Michigan State University are working to create an outdoor lab that monitors the effects of solar arrays on farms and their crops. The goal of the project is to use solar energy to improve agricultural production.
Anthony Kendall, an Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Michigan State University, is one of the project’s principal researchers. He hopes their scientific findings will help farmers find more efficient, renewable ways to put their land to use.
The solar panels could be strategically installed in less productive areas of farm fields. “We’re asking the question of what are different practices that can be used to help these arrays produce more benefits in areas around it,” Kendall said. These benefits might be an increased amount of water that gets into the ground or improved soil quality.
Kendall said they have funding to install a small array of 30 solar panels in an outdoor lab set for MSU’s W.K Kellogg Biological Station. The array will be placed near corn and soybean fields to study its effects on the crops. Kendall hopes this experimental lab will become the nucleus to a much larger facility.
“This is a community engaged project. And it’s a really broad interdisciplinary investigation,” Kendall continued. The team will use the information they obtain from solar arrays’ effect on agricultural ecosystems to build computer models that can be used to predict future impacts. “We hope to generate data layers that say, for a certain type of solar installation in a certain type of land, this is what you should expect.”
Kendall hopes the project, through open science and community feedback, will help spread awareness about how solar energy can be maximized to better Michigan communities.
Kendall said he is working with a broad array of professors, researchers, university outreach programs, and other institutions on this project in order to get a variety of perspectives.
He added that they have been in contact with the Michigan Farm Bureau and farmers already involved in other MSU research projects. “We hope to talk to farmers not just in the state, but in the region as well,” Kendall said.
“The reality is that we need more energy. And one of the places it’s going to come from is solar arrays,” Kendall said. “And when people look around at the land and say where can we install them, there’s a lot of open farmland out there.”
The project is funded by a $3.6 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation.
