I criss crossed Michigan last week to talk to more farmers, in this case about the advantage of having solar energy on part of their land.
In White River township, near Lake Michigan, Mike Cockerill, above, a 4th generation farmer, told me he wanted to keep his farm in the family, and solar would help him do that.
Plenty of greedy developers eyeing that valuable land near the lake – that’s something a lot of the “antis” don’t get. Keeping farmland as is forever is not an option. Farmers can’t maintain the status quo economically and are being gradually forced to sell out just to keep their taxes paid.
There are *always* Real estate developers in the anti clean energy groups, egging things on, in the hope of driving more farmers out of business and snapping up the valuable land, to cover in strip malls, subdivisions, gas stations, and concrete.
200 miles to the south, Deb Comstock, former Planning Commission Chair and Editor of a much-needed rural newspaper, the Lenawee (County) Voice, had more to add, gleaned from her own research in working on a solar ordinance that cowardly Township board members later gutted.
Yale Center for Business and the Environment:
Our analysis reveals that pollinator-friendly solar may generate private benefits to solar developers that justify its adoption without policy intervention. These benefits largely flow from higher energy output, from panel efficiency gains attributed to the cooler microclimate created by perennial plantings. A small added benefit accrues from the lower operations and maintenance (O&M) costs over the project lifetime thanks to the reduced frequency of mowings for native plants as compared to turfgrass. However, we hypothesize that information and behavioral failures are currently preventing developers from adopting the practice. Thus, there may be a role for policy to spur the incorporation of pollinator-friendly practices in future solar development.
That role becomes clearer when we evaluate the social benefits associated with these projects. As with conventional solar, a large social benefit of pollinator-friendly solar stems from the carbon emissions that solar energy production avoids. Pollinator-friendly solar also results in more groundwater recharge and a greater reduction in soil erosion than either conventional solar or farming — two additional ecosystem benefits. Lastly, pollinator-friendly solar contributes another sizable social benefit in the form of increased crop yields when projects are sited near pollinator-dependent farmland. In our model, improved crop yields result from projects co-located with farmland producing soy, but not corn, which is not pollinator-dependent. That benefit could be even greater if the adjacent crop were highly pollinator-dependent, as is the case for most specialty crops.
Argonne National Laboratory:
The two studied solar sites were planted with native grasses and flowering plants in early 2018. From August 2018 through August 2022, the researchers conducted 358 observational surveys for flowering vegetation and insect communities. They evaluated changes in plant and insect abundance and diversity with each visit.
By the end of the field campaign, the team observed increases for all habitat and biodiversity metrics. There was an increase in native plant species diversity and flower abundance. In addition, the team observed increases in the abundance and diversity of native insect pollinators and agriculturally beneficial insects, which included honeybees, native bees, wasps, hornets, hoverflies, other flies, moths, butterflies and beetles. Flowers and flowering plant species increased as well. Total insect abundance tripled, while native bees showed a 20-fold increase in numbers. The most numerous insect groups observed were beetles, flies and moths.
In an added benefit, the researchers found that pollinators from the solar sites also visited soybean flowers in adjacent crop fields, providing additional pollination services.