this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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How are you supposed to grow high quality, high protein pasture in the shade?
That's not how plants work.
Numbers vary btwn species and individuals, but plants can only use so much light at once. Many can even sunburn! Then the plant has to metabolize all that!
So grass growing at even 60% efficiency under a solar field running at even 60% efficiency isn't a terrible use of land, and given the diminishing returns for tightly packed shit, you're much more likely to get something like 100/80, which is an amazing use of land.
Not as good as growing berries or basil or something under solar panels, but still pretty good.
High quality pasture isn’t just grass. It’s a mixture of grasses and legumes such as clover and alfalfa. The pasture should be slow to bolt and mature at different times throughout the season, providing the cattle with a good forage regardless of the temperatures.
I’m aware of plants getting sunburn. I’ve seen it first hand as a gardener bringing seeds started indoors outside.
White cars dont heat up as much as black ones in the hot sun!
In many places, the amount that can grow is limited by available water, not sunlight. This means that adding solar panels above some, but not all, of the field lets you make significant use of that excess sunlight, increasing overall crop yield.
Not to mention that the added shade will help with moisture retention, which is another part of the reason why it is possible to increase crop yield when adding solar to a field.
Oh yeah that makes perfect sense. I’m thinking from my area’s perspective which is the opposite: barely any sunlight at all and tons of rain/snow.
Probably not a great spot for solar, and you'd do better with wind?
We have lots of wind turbines in the country near here. Sometimes it actually gets too windy for them (risking damage by pushing them above design speed limit)!
Some plants actually grow better in the shade under solar panels than in direct sunlight. Of course it will depend on local climate too.
Oh yeah, I’m an avid gardener. I grow stuff in the shade on purpose. It’s usually in the shade of a tree though. I would imagine a giant array of solar panels that always rotate to face the sun would cast much deeper, more solid shadows than trees do.
Most solar installations, like the one in the picture, don't rotate or only rotate on one axis.
There's some actual research into how different crops react when grow between rows of solar panels. Vertically mounted solar panels are especially suited to this because you can drive between them on a harvesting machine easily. Sadly I don't have any links to give off the top of my head.
Trees still let some light through. Lay flat under a tree and look straight up. It's brighter than you think. The panel is going to block 100%.
Not quite. Shit bounces around. You can till see in there, after all.
True! But try my "laying down" test. Found some moss in a super shady area, couldn't figure how enough light got through for even that. Laid down on a cloudy summer day, looked through the canopy, blinded.
Our eyes have little to tell us about how many lumens are hitting the ground, to say nothing of UV and spectrum.
tl;dr: Yes, a solid panel is going to block way more light than a tree canopy.
More not all.
Two-axis rotating panels are rare; it's usually most cost-effective to to zero or one axis of rotation, so it's a lot more like planting under a tree than you might think.