Category: Science

Reprint: California Farms Solar Power

personby Deborah J. Ross
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This article is reprinted from The Conversation.

California farmers identify a hot new cash crop: Solar power

This dairy farm in California’s Central Valley has installed solar panels on a portion of its land.
George Rose/Getty Images

Jacob Stid, Michigan State University; Annick Anctil, Michigan State University, and Anthony Kendall, Michigan State University

Imagine that you own a small, 20-acre farm in California’s Central Valley. You and your family have cultivated this land for decades, but drought, increasing costs and decreasing water availability are making each year more difficult.

Now imagine that a solar-electricity developer approaches you and presents three options:

  • You can lease the developer 10 acres of otherwise productive cropland, on which the developer will build an array of solar panels and sell electricity to the local power company.
  • You can select 1 or 2 acres of your land on which to build and operate your own solar array, using some electricity for your farm and selling the rest to the utility.
  • Or you can keep going as you have been, hoping your farm can somehow survive.

Thousands of farmers across the country, including in the Central Valley, are choosing one of the first two options. A 2022 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that roughly 117,000 U.S. farm operations have some type of solar device. Our own work has identified over 6,500 solar arrays currently located on U.S. farmland.

Our study of nearly 1,000 solar arrays built on 10,000 acres of the Central Valley over the past two decades found that solar power and farming are complementing each other in farmers’ business operations. As a result, farmers are making and saving more money while using less water – helping them keep their land and livelihood.

A hotter, drier and more built-up future

Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. is farmland more valuable or more productive than California’s Central Valley. The region grows a vast array of crops, including nearly all of the nation’s production of almonds, olives and sweet rice. Using less than 1% of all farmland in the country, the Central Valley supplies a quarter of the nation’s food, including 40% of its fruits, nuts and other fresh foods.

The food, fuel and fiber that these farms produce are a bedrock of the nation’s economy, food system and way of life.

But decades of intense cultivation, urban development and climate change are squeezing farmers. Water is limited, and getting more so: A state law passed in 2014 requires farmers to further reduce their water usage by the mid-2040s.

Workers on farmland with mountains in the background.
California’s Central Valley is some of the most productive cropland in the country.
Citizen of the Planet/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The trade-offs of installing solar on agricultural land

When the solar arrays we studied were installed, California state solar energy policy and incentives gave farm landowners new ways to diversify their income by either leasing their land for solar arrays or building their own.

There was an obvious trade-off: Turning land used for crops to land used for solar usually means losing agricultural production. We estimated that over the 25-year life of the solar arrays, this land would have produced enough food to feed 86,000 people a year, assuming they eat 2,000 calories a day.

There was an obvious benefit, too, of clean energy: These arrays produced enough renewable electricity to power 470,000 U.S. households every year.

But the result we were hoping to identify and measure was the economic effect of shifting that land from agricultural farming to solar farming. We found that farmers who installed solar were dramatically better off than those who did not.

They were better off in two ways, the first being financially. All the farmers, whether they owned their own arrays or leased their land to others, saved money on seeds, fertilizer and other costs associated with growing and harvesting crops. They also earned money from leasing the land, offsetting farm energy bills, and selling their excess electricity.

Farmers who owned their own arrays had to pay for the panels, equipment and installation, and maintenance. But even after covering those costs, their savings and earnings added up to US$50,000 per acre of profits every year, 25 times the amount they would have earned by planting that acre.

Farmers who leased their land made much less money but still avoided costs for irrigation water and operations on that part of their farm, gaining $1,100 per acre per year – with no up-front costs.

The farmers also conserved water, which in turn supported compliance with the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act water use reduction requirements. Most of the solar arrays were installed on land that had previously been irrigated. We calculated that turning off irrigation on this land saved enough water every year to supply about 27 million people with drinking water or irrigate 7,500 acres of orchards. Following solar array installation, some farmers also fallowed surrounding land, perhaps enabled by the new stable income stream, which further reduced water use.

A view of farmland with irrigation sprinklers spraying widely.
Irrigation is key to cropland productivity in California’s Central Valley. Covering some land with solar panels eliminates the need for irrigation of that area, saving water for other uses elsewhere.
Citizen of the Planet/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Changes to food and energy production

Farmers in the Central Valley and elsewhere are now cultivating both food and energy. This shift can offer long-term security for farmland owners, particularly for those who install and run their own arrays.

Recent estimates suggest that converting between 1.1% and 2.4% of the country’s farmland to solar arrays would, along with other clean energy sources, generate enough electricity to eliminate the nation’s need for fossil fuel power plants.

Though many crops are part of a global market that can adjust to changes in supply, losing this farmland could affect the availability of some crops. Fortunately, farmers and landowners are finding new ways to protect farmland and food security while supporting clean energy.

One such approach is agrivoltaics, where farmers install solar designed for grazing livestock or growing crops beneath the panels. Solar can also be sited on less productive farmland or on farmland that is used for biofuels rather than food production.

Even in these areas, arrays can be designed and managed to benefit local agriculture and natural ecosystems. With thoughtful design, siting and management, solar can give back to the land and the ecosystems it touches.

Farms are much more than the land they occupy and the goods they produce. Farms are run by people with families, whose well-being depends on essential and variable resources such as water, fertilizer, fuel, electricity and crop sales. Farmers often borrow money during the planting season in hopes of making enough at harvest time to pay off the debt and keep a little profit.

Installing solar on their land can give farmers a diversified income, help them save water, and reduce the risk of bad years. That can make solar an asset to farming, not a threat to the food supply.The Conversation

Jacob Stid, Ph.D. student in Hydrogeology, Michigan State University; Annick Anctil, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Michigan State University, and Anthony Kendall, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: California Farms Solar Power”…

The Latest Texas Floods

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Even though I was born in Houston and grew up in a small town near there, my Texas heart is in the Hill Country, so the recent flash flood disaster hit close to home.

I have family in New Braunfels, which is a little southeast of the disaster in Hunt, but also on the Guadalupe River. A year ago, we rented a place near Hunt to see the eclipse and spent much of our time downhill from that place floating in tubes on the river. It was a peaceful time and we enjoyed hanging out with relatives for several days.

I assume that the place where we stayed survived the damage (it was across a road and uphill from the river) but I’m sure the steps down to the river and the facilities there are gone. The worst loss there would be a bathroom and some tubes for floating. Fortunately, no one built homes too close to the river at that location.

Flash floods are a fact of life in that part of the world. In fact, the saying “turn around, don’t drown” was started by Hector Guerrero, a warning meteorologist for the National Weather Service in San Angelo, Texas, which is about 150 miles northwest of Hunt and also experienced flash floods in the latest storm.

While the Guadalupe River and other rivers in the Hill Country flood regularly, this event was particularly bad given the extreme amount of rain that fell quickly — about 15 inches in a few hours, which is about half the yearly average rainfall.

I listened to weather expert Daniel Swain’s discussion of the disaster on Monday morning and learned that one of the reasons the Hill Country is at great risk for erratic rainfalls like this one is because the Gulf of Mexico is so warm.

I knew the Gulf was warm, since I spent so much of my childhood at the beach playing in that water and was surprised when I moved to the East Coast and discovered that the Atlantic is not as warm, even in summer. (Much less the Pacific.) And of course, with climate change, the Gulf is getting warmer, which is why there is now greater risk from hurricanes.

But I didn’t realize how much affect such warm water has. In fact, the warmth of the Gulf and the winds and storms that it produces also are a cause of tornado weather all the way north to Canada. Different weather patterns crashing into each other – and that’s not the scientific explanation, just my grasp of it – cause a lot of problems.

Some of the flooding was also related to a tropical storm in the Gulf that hit Mexico and moved north, just as an example.

I was not surprised by the flash floods, because I know the area. I used to drive my father around the area west of New Braunfels since he liked to look at the wildlife. We would stop as we crossed every creek, to see if there was any water in it. Many of the creeks and even some of the rivers are mostly dry or close to it, except when it rains. Continue reading “The Latest Texas Floods”…

No Going Back to Normal

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’m reading a collection of essays called The New Possible in which the authors discuss their visions of what the future should look like and how we can get there. It was published at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, and the first piece, by Jeremy Lent, talks about the kind of balanced civilization we need to develop.

Early in the piece, he asks:

Does it seem like, as soon as one crisis passes, another one rears its head before you can even settle back to some semblance of normal?

And then, discussing not just Covid but the Black Lives Matter protests from 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, he points out:

Ultimately, there is no going back to normal because normal no longer exists.

It’s an argument based on the deep flaws in neoliberalism. I don’t disagree with either his thesis or his goals, but I think I’d put the bit about normal differently:

We shouldn’t go back to normal because normal sucked.

Now these days, what with the Stupid Coup (a term Rebecca Solnit came up with that fits my perception of things), many of us, including me, would take the old normal. After all, they’re destroying parts of the government that worked well – like the Weather Service and NOAA – and making those that needed some changes, such as the understaffed Social Security offices and Veteran’s care, worse.

That’s not the mention the blatant racism of the “anti DEI” campaign, one that wants to eliminate Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman from our history. (It was disgusting that the baseball team that brought Robinson into the majors went to the White House despite the grifter’s efforts to erase him.)

All the flaws that exist in what passed for normal are still there and being made worse – bombing and union busting and mistreatment of immigrants – while people who shouldn’t be in charge are destroying the good stuff.

A couple of months of this and most of us – me included – would really love a return to normal. Except, like I said, normal sucked. Continue reading “No Going Back to Normal”…

Real Problems and the Stupid Coup

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I finished reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World this week. It is a brilliant explanation of the myriad of senses of the animals on this planet. He has talked to so many great scientists doing deep work, and made what they’re doing clear to the rest of us.

But it left me with — once again — the understanding that we have real problems to address on this planet and instead we’re forced to deal with what Rebecca Solnit has taken to calling the “Stupid Coup,” a name that becomes more apt with each day.

In the last pages of the book, Yong talks about the problems posed by light pollution — which affects the senses of many insects, birds, and bats, not to mention human beings. But he also mentions such things as ships crossing the ocean affecting whales, the damage to the Great Coral Reef, and how such things create a cascade of damage.

About ten years ago, my partner and I backpacked in the Ventana Wilderness, in the northern part of the Los Padres National Forest here in California. I tell many stories about that trip — how we waded the Carmel River 25 times (not an exaggeration), how bad the trail was in spots — but one of the real glories of it was that, with the exception of a airplane or two overhead, we didn’t hear any human noises for three days except the ones we made.

And we could see the stars (through the trees and clouds, at least) because we were surrounded by enough mountains and trees to block light from the nearby cities. One of those nights — the one where we collapsed into our sleeping bags, completely exhausted — we heard frogs and crickets for hours. Nothing else.

Do you know how rare that is?

I doubt that humans, who have only been living in this overlit and noisy state for about a hundred years – somewhat longer for noise – have adapted, even though we know what’s going on. You can be damn sure that the other creatures on the planet have not.

Fortunately, a whole lot of scientists have ideas on what to do about that for the benefit of both people and all the other creatures.

Unfortunately, what they recommend will not even get discussed these days because of the Stupid Coup. People who aren’t willing to consider the effects of air pollution on human beings (“drill, baby, drill”) are certainly not going to worry about light pollution reducing the insect population. Continue reading “Real Problems and the Stupid Coup”…

Breathe, but Safely

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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During the pandemic I figured out that Covid and many other diseases spread through the air and could be minimized and contained with good indoor air quality methods. While I was far from alone in this understanding – I learned about it from some very smart people – those with the clout to make sure we improved air in every place from schools to public buildings to offices and other workplaces ignored or minimized the problem.

As a result, many of us still find it necessary to wear masks in a lot of indoor spaces, something that is not only annoying, but actually under attacks. Far too little has been done to improve indoor air quality despite the fact that the benefits go much farther than avoiding contagious diseases and include improved cognitive functioning and avoidance of health problems caused by chemicals trapped in poorly ventilated spaces.

So when I stumbled on Carl Zimmer’s book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe while browsing in a bookstore, I was intrigued. I knew Zimmer was a science writer for The New York Times, and the book seemed to have thorough reporting.

What convinced me to buy this thick book in hardback rather than wait until it was available in the library was the blurb from Ed Yong, who called Zimmer “one of the very best science writers” and noted that the book would leave readers “agog at the incredible world that floats unseen around us and outraged at the forces that stopped us from appreciating that world until, for many people, it was too late.”

I almost never buy books based on blurbs, but since Yong is a brilliant science writer and a man of fierce integrity when it comes to his profession, I had no doubt that he was giving his honest opinion.

And he was right. Air-Borne is a superb book that shows deep research into the history of the things that float in our air – much more than viruses – and of the people who have struggled to show us that we need to pay attention to what we’re breathing.

I was already outraged before I read it, but looking at the history increased my fervor. So many scientists came up with valuable clues to how viruses, bacteria, and fungi spread through the air only to be pushed aside or overlooked.

The book starts with a 2023 concert by the Skagit Valley Chorale, the choir in Washington state that experienced a super-spreader event that left two people dead after they met to rehearse during the early days of the pandemic. The number of people infected at that rehearsal was one of the things that made people realize this virus was air-borne.

Zimmer was at that concert with a CO2 meter in his pocket, trying to gauge if he needed a mask. As someone who often travels with a CO2 meter, since the amount of CO2 in the air gives you a good idea of the ventilation in a space, I recognized a kindred spirit. Continue reading “Breathe, but Safely”…

A Reading Practice

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’ve been working on adding some new practices to my daily schedule. A key thing I added in December – even before the Solstice, much less the official New Year – was to spend about 15 or 20 minutes reading every morning.

The original purpose was to give myself a reason to sit quietly for a few minutes before checking my blood pressure – which I’m keeping a close eye on – but it quickly evolved into something I really wanted to do. And that was probably because of the book I started with: Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time.

I stumbled on that book in a used bookstore in Sebastopol (the one in California, not Crimea) last summer and bought it on impulse. When I started doing the reading back in December, I pulled it out with a couple of other books on much the same impulse, and quickly fell into it.

Rovelli is a physicist, and the book is about the understanding of time by physicists, and yet that doesn’t begin to completely describe it, not to mention that it doesn’t tell anyone what a joy it is to read.

Rovelli is a lyrical writer and a gentle one. He can make statements that might be controversial without issuing a challenge. While I’m reading the English translation of this book (it was translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell), I am quite sure the beautiful and gentle writing is all Rovelli and was there in the Italian original. Rovelli does speak English (and likely several other languages, given the different scientists with whom he has worked), so I imagine he has some idea of what his words should look like when translated.

In doing this reading, I began to keep something of a commonplace book in which I wrote down quotations from the book or, occasionally, my own reaction.

Here are some of quotes that struck me:

Nothing is valid always and everywhere.

[T]he world is nothing but change.

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.

We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread.

We are more complex than our mental faculties are capable of grasping.

I could go on, but perhaps that is enough to entice others to read this book. Continue reading “A Reading Practice”…

Summer and Eggs

personby Gillian Polack
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My little bit of Australia has a heat wave. This is not unexpected, given it’s summer. It does, however, mean my brain is fried. It didn’t reach 100 degrees (using US temperatures) today, so, in the measurements of my childhood, it was hot enough to fry an egg on a car bonnet, but not hot enough for the pavement to melt. In my childhood, I would have said that this is a day when I can’t go running, but I can still play and read. Alas, I am no longer a child. Also, alas, this week is full of work that has unchangeable deadlines. If I had the energy, I would sing you (badly), “Too darn hot.” I do not. Also I have 3,000 words of deathless academic prose to write before I can sleep tonight.

I had better start writing.

Maybe next week will be cooler. Maybe the week after. We’re in our last month of summer. Schools have gone back, and universities will begin again soon and life will pick up pace. Maybe then I’ll have the inner-oomph to write those answers to the serious and interesting questions my readers sent me. I hope so. Then I can complain about storms and blowsy autumn leaves. I’ll have more energy for complaint and far less interest in dreaming of frying eggs on car bonnets.

One last note to leave you with: if it were ten degrees hotter, then I could fry an egg on the pavement. I tested this when I was a child. My parents did not let me eat the egg, alas, which is why the car bonnet is now my theoretical place of choice. It’s still only theoretical because none of my friends are willing to let me destroy their car enamel. Which is just as well, because my US friends have egg problems and if I had wasted eggs in testing the heat outdoors it would be rather rude.

The Future We Want

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’ve been putting myself to sleep at night by envisioning the kind of future world I’d like to see. Being a science fiction writer as well as someone who has spent much of my life doing work toward social change, I’m always thinking about better systems.

But the combination of the polycrises we face (I’m deliberately using the plural of crisis here because we not only have multiple crises that affect each other – thus the poly – but each crisis has its own set of multiple components) with the forthcoming grifter/broligarch/religious and right wing extremist government has urged me more in that direction.

Given that the government will not only not be addressing the polycrises but will in fact be doing things that make them much, much worse, I cannot be satisfied by resistance. And given that the status quo was already shaky – very little being done about climate change, inequality, and the cost of housing, not to mention protecting the country from insurrectionists – I’m not feeling pumped up about trying to get back to that.

Yeah, we need the rule of law and the Constitution here in the United States, but both those things have some big flaws that should have been addressed a long time ago. Most of the resistance will be focused on keeping political things from getting too much worse, but it won’t be fixing any of the underlying problems.

So I am trying to envision what we could have. I recently read an essay Donella Meadows wrote in 1994, “Envisioning a Sustainable World,” and it inspired me to do more imagining of what kind of world we could have.

Meadows was one of the authors of the 1972 work Limits to Growth, which provided a guide to the problems we’re facing right now. You can find out more about her work here and download a free copy of Limits to Growth here:

Of course, I’ve been working on envisioning futures all along.  Lately, I’ve been reading some futurist thinking to help expand my ability to do that. You have to be careful with futurists, since many of them are tied in with tech bro thinking, but there are some very useful skills in that area that help you get past the “there’s no way that could happen” point.

You have to get past the “there’s no way that could happen” point before you can open your mind to anything new.

Continue reading “The Future We Want”…

The Complexity of the Future

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I have started a new practice – ahead of New Year’s Resolutions – of reading a book for a short time in the morning and again in the evening. The morning practice started as a way of calming myself after doing my morning exercises before I check my blood pressure, but it is growing into something more, a way of setting up my day.

The evening practice is intended to give my mind something to chew on while falling asleep so that it’s engaged with something besides worry. (Worry is not helpful for falling asleep.)

At the moment I’m reading Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time in the morning and Ilya Prigogine’s The End of Certainty at night. This was partly chance – Rovelli’s work is in short chapters, perfect for ten minutes of reading at a time and the Prigogine book is from the library and will have to be returned and is also a book that is best read slowly, in short periods.

Both of them are about time and physics – Prigogine won the Nobel for chemistry, but his work was in thermodynamics – and they do fit together well.

I should point out that I am not a physicist nor have I ever wanted to be that or a scientist of any kind. What interests me about both these books is not the science, but the way the science underlies philosophy and the way our world actually works.

Essentially, I am searching – I am always searching – for different ways to get at deep truth.

One of the things I learned in my many years in Aikido is that it is good to take classes from different people because then you get a glimpse of truth from more than one point of view. That is likewise true of reading a variety of people on a variety of subjects.

Part of what I’m looking for these days is how to deal with the polycrisis – or maybe polycrises – we face these days with the right wing extremists getting in the way of addressing climate change, wealth inequality, misogyny, racism, and other deep problems as well as creating new problems by their very existence.

I no longer think ordinary politics is a useful path. I will leave that to the people who still believe that it might work. I will vote and such, but I will not count on anything done through the U.S. political system to solve any of the real problems or to even get the extremists out of our lives.

So then the question becomes, what can we do? Continue reading “The Complexity of the Future”…

[science] Dark Oxygen, Quark Matter, and Terraforming Mars

personby Deborah J. Ross
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So much exciting astronomical news! Click through for all the juicy details.

Mars Could be Terraformed Using Resources that are Already There

A team of engineers and geophysicists led by the University of Chicago proposed a new method for terraforming Mars with nanoparticles. This method would take advantage of resources already present on the Martian surface and, according to their feasibility study, would be enough to start the terraforming process.

Neutron Star Mergers Could Be Producing Quark Matter

 
When neutron stars dance together, the grand smash finale they experience might create the densest known form of matter known in the Universe. It’s called “quark matter, ” a highly weird combo of liberated quarks and gluons. It’s unclear if the stuff existed in their cores before the end of their dance. However, in the wild aftermath a neutron-star merger, the strange conditions could free quarks and gluons from protons and neutrons. That lets them move around freely in the aftermath. So, researchers want to know how freely they move and what conditions might impede their motion (or flow).
 

Recently, two researchers looked at what would happen if a ship with warp drive tried to get into a black hole. The result is an interesting thought experiment. It might not lead to starship-sized warp drives but might allow scientists to create smaller versions someday. Continue reading “[science] Dark Oxygen, Quark Matter, and Terraforming Mars”…