Modeling the Agrivoltaic Potential for Land-Intensive Commodity Crops

Corn and soybean farming use about two-thirds of the agricultural land in the US. To accelerate the large-scale adoption of agrivoltaics, best practices that are compatible with traditional farming operations for corn and soybeans need to be developed. In this presentation, we present the development of a modeling framework to explore the benefits and trade-offs between crop growth and photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation for common commodity crops at the county level. Our model couples a crop growth model, a soil water balance model, and a PV model in one integrated scheme. As an example, we consider corn growth in Renville County, MN. The model suggests that there is a ~0.55% loss in crop yield upon 1% shading because the crop-diminishing effect of reduced radiation is partially offset by increased water retention in the ground.