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Posts Tagged ‘agribusiness’

Can Cows Coexist with Solar Power?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 28, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Silicon Ranch.
Cattle have been marked for an animal behavior study, showing each cow’s interaction with the solar equipment on Silicon Ranch’s Christiana Solar Farm.

If the cows in the picture above look a little strange, it’s because they are part of a study to see if they can coexist with solar panels, as sheep have already done successfully.

Dan Gearino writes at Inside Climate News, “It is unusual to have a utility-scale solar array in Kentucky, and even more unusual that the grounds crew here is a live-in flock of more than a thousand sheep. …

“The property is a farm and a power plant, and the developer, Silicon Ranch, is using this site to test how to maximize the income from both businesses. The work is part of an effort by solar companies and farmers searching for ways to efficiently utilize the hundreds of millions of acres in the United States used for livestock grazing..

“Nick de Vries, Silicon Ranch’s chief technology officer, walked along a row of panels, explaining that his company and others have largely figured out how to integrate sheep farming and solar. The next step is to replicate the process with cattle, he said. …

“The combination of solar and cattle could transform the renewable energy landscape, opening up vast stretches of land for solar development, contributing to a transition away from climate-warming fossil fuels.

“It also would address concerns about solar encroaching on food production and agribusiness, de Vries said. That’s an important factor in Kentucky, which ranks in the bottom 10 in the country in utility-scale solar installed capacity. …

“Inside Climate News visited this farm to discuss [Silicon Ranch’s] CattleTracker and check on the progress of agrivoltaics — the integration of solar and agriculture — at a time when the [federal] administration is eliminating renewable energy subsidies and cutting budgets for research grants.

“Developing solar with cattle presents a major opportunity to expand solar energy, given the vast size of the U.S. beef industry, but it also poses some significant challenges.

“ ‘They’re very large animals,’ de Vries said. ‘They scrape on things. They like to rub.’ …

“He views the challenges with cattle as surmountable. He stepped to a nearby row of panels and pointed out which parts can withstand contact with a cow, and which are vulnerable.

“The main idea behind CattleTracker is that panels are vulnerable when turned at close to vertical angles because they are then low enough for cows to bump into them. The solution is to adjust the tracker system — the machines that tilt the panels throughout the day to capture the sun — so that the panels stay at close to a horizontal angle when cows are present.

“In a typical ranch, workers move the herd to a different part of a property every few days so the animals can have fresh grass and avoid manure pileup. Solar panels can operate with normal tracking most of the time when cows are away, and with limited tracking when cows are present. The system has controls to set the mode. …

“An inevitable part of the conversation is that animal agriculture and Americans’ meat-heavy diets are major contributors to climate change. Solar grazing is an attempt to marry a climate solution to a climate problem, with the expectation that the result is a net positive. …

“Silicon Ranch’s work on CattleTracker includes determining how to manage biodiversity and increase the land’s capacity to store carbon. …

“Solar grazing started with sheep, with some of the earliest U.S. examples coming online in the early 2010s. It’s a natural fit. Sheep are small enough that they’re unlikely to come into contact with panels. The panels provide shade and the animals eat grass, reducing the need for mowing.

“ ‘I just can’t even stress how awesome this opportunity is,’ said Daniel Bell, the farmer whose sheep live at the Silicon Ranch solar array in Lancaster. …

“In at least one way, the timing of Cattletracker’s rollout is not ideal. [The] administration is phasing out and cancelling many of the programs and grants that helped to subsidize renewable energy. …

“Silicon Ranch has benefitted from help in the form of government-funded research at universities and national labs to better understand the effects of solar grazing on soil and other environmental and animal health factors. But de Vries downplayed the harm of having less government support.

“ ‘I don’t think that there should be agrivoltaic subsidies,’ he said. ‘You should strive for a good business solution, and then find what’s going to make it replicable, not limited to grants.’ “

More at Inside Climate News, here.

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In Sierra Leone, a Voice for the People

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 17, 2023| 4 Comments »

Photo: Nick Roll via CSM.
Washing in polluted water. Under new laws, “firms wishing to mine or establish industrial agriculture operations must henceforth strike deals with the ordinary Sierra Leoneans who depend on the land for their survival,” says the Monitor.

I don’t know about you, but I always feel hopeful when ordinary people stick up for themselves. The powerful and selfish don’t always have to win. Capitalism has gotten out of hand and now resembles nothing so much as the monarchies of old.

Meanwhile, in Sierra Leone, folks suffering from the excesses of mining giants and agribusiness are not going to take it anymore.

Nick Roll has the story at the Christian Science Monitor.

“Solomon K. Russell walks down a narrow dirt path, surrounded by teak trees that block out the sunlight and cool the afternoon air. He leaps over a column of fat black ants running across the trail, and the forest suddenly, unnaturally, ends. A denuded strip of beige earth stretches over an area the size of several football fields, pockmarked by pits full of wastewater. 

“Machinery belonging to the Afro-Asia Mining Corp., a Chinese firm, rumbles in the distance. The remnant of a stream, polluted and diverted by the industrial operations, idles underneath a small wooden bridge. 

“ ‘This river really sustained the life of the people,’ says Mr. Russell, who remembers, as a boy, jumping off the bridge into the water just a few feet below. Now, it’s barely ankle-deep. …

“Mr. Russell and his fellow villagers had no say in Afro-Asia’s arrival, nor in its operations. The company signed its lease with the local ‘paramount chief’ who was empowered by a century-old colonial law.

“But a sweeping package of land-rights bills, which went into effect in September, is set to change all that, giving local people who own and live off the land the authority to decide how it is used.

“ ‘Those laws will help,’ says Mary Tommy, a farmer living in this 500-strong farming community made up of brightly painted concrete houses and mud brick homes with traditional high-pitched thatch roofs. ‘For us, the destruction has already been caused, but for other areas that have not witnessed this kind of destruction, I think it will be good.’

“Many parts of Sierra Leone have been ravaged by foreign mining firms seeking gold, diamonds, and bauxite, among other minerals, and by palm oil plantations. Such natural resources accounted for over 75% of Sierra Leone’s exports in 2020, reaping around $400 million in income, according to official figures.

“Yet the wealth has been slow to trickle down. The latest figures on poverty in the country, from 2018, showed that 60% of the rural population was living on less than $1.90 a day.

“People say ‘our land is our bank, our land is our future,’ ” says Eleanor Thompson, deputy director of programs at the Freetown office of Namati, a legal advocacy and land-rights organization. …

“Until last month, only local chiefs and the national government could strike land use and leasing deals with foreign investors. The people whose land was taken could do little about it, and often had to accept rents amounting to only $5 an acre.

“Mr. Russell, for example, says his rent is ‘too meager’ to be able to buy from the market the fish he can no longer catch in the village stream.

“But under the new laws, firms wishing to mine or establish industrial agriculture operations must henceforth strike deals with the ordinary Sierra Leoneans who depend on the land for their survival – and who, for the first time, will have the right to negotiate, or reject, their proposals.

“September’s Customary Land Rights Act and the National Land Commission Act transfer the power to make decisions about land to those actually owning or using it. Companies seeking a lease must win the consent of 60% of a family’s male and female adults.

“Where land is communally held, firms must persuade 60% of the adults in the community to agree to a lease. In the newly created land committees that are supposed to help negotiate those leases, made of local community members, 30% of members are to be women.

“The new laws are not popular with foreign investors, many of whom are especially wary of a provision setting aside shares in international projects for Sierra Leoneans.

‘Nobody will invest in Sierra Leone anymore,’ says Gerben Haringsma, country director for the Luxembourg-based palm oil company Socfin. …

“Ms. Thompson, the land rights activist, says the laws might, however, help investors more than they realize. ‘It’s in the investors’ interest to have the consent of people,’ she says. …

“Acts of sabotage and deadly protests against agribusiness and mining companies have erupted in the past.

“ ‘If people had a say in negotiations they would sell their land for a … value that will enrich them and change their lives, maybe,’ says Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai, executive director of the Freetown-based Society for Democratic Initiatives.

“In Largo, villagers say that Afro-Asia promised to build them a health clinic, a school, and paved roads. Four years after mining operations started, none of that has come to pass, and the locals who have found jobs at the mine earn little more than $50 a month.

“Afro-Asia did not respond to a request for comment. But the company’s lease in Largo is in its final year. To keep operating, it will have to renegotiate – this time with the local community under the new laws.”

More at the Monitor, here. No firewall.

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