At Jack's Solar Garden in Longmont, Colorado, rows of solar panels stand over the crops, casting swaths of shade that benefit plants and farmworkers alike. Credit: Talitha Neesham-McTiernan
A bundle of overlooked, but crucial, benefits
Shade keeps drinking water cool too, the workers noted - a crucial benefit, given water's role in mitigating heat stress. "They can pop their bottles under the panels and they stay cool all day," Neesham-McTiernan said, "rather than it being, as one of the farmworkers described it, like drinking tea."
Another worker said these benefits helped them feel less exhausted by day's end, leaving more energy for social life and allowing a faster recovery for the next day's work. Others said simply knowing shade was nearby reduced their mental stress.
To tell the full story of heat stress, gather stories and numbers alike
The researchers also recorded air temperature, wind speed, humidity and solar radiation to quantify heat stress metrics such as wet bulb globe temperature, which is commonly used to identify dangerous outdoor work conditions. Compared to open-field farms, they found, agrivoltaics reduced wet bulb globe temperature by up to 5.5 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Fahrenheit) - the difference, Neesham-McTiernan estimates, between stop-work conditions and simply requiring a break every hour. "When that builds up over a day, over a season, over a lifetime of harvesting, that's really significant."
That's not to say the measurements always matched farmworkers' testimonies: for instance, they occasionally disagreed over which parts of the farm were hottest at which times of day. But fully understanding the experience of heat stress, Neesham-McTiernan said, requires both personal and measured evidence.
"Every farmworker said one benefit was being able to lean against the beams that hold up the panels, just to take the weight off a bit," she noted. "If I just had my sensors in the field, I wouldn't know that, but it clearly makes such a difference in their day-to-day comfort."
Neesham-McTiernan said she's working to expand the research into other regions to see whether the benefits apply in different environments. She also hopes to eventually collect more rigorous physiological and health data to quantify the impacts of agrivoltaics on workers' bodies.
"[Agrivoltaics] isn't a one-size-fits-all solution," she said. "It can't be used everywhere. But with the threat of heat, we need a catalog of ways we can protect farmworkers. Without them, we can't feed ourselves. Protecting them and their bodies should be paramount to everyone."
Abstract information:
Farmworker experiences reveal heat mitigation advantages of agrivoltaics
Monday, 15 December, 10:40 - 10:50 CST
Room 278-279 (Convention Center)
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