By: Gavin Schweiger, Follow South Jersey Community Journalist
UPPER DEERFIELD TWP., N.J. – The Rutgers Agricultural Research and Extension Center (RAREC) held a tour of its agrivoltaics farm for the national “day of action” called Sun Day on Sunday, Sept. 21.
Sun Day was founded by climate activist Bill McKibbon and first Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes. During the day, 450 events took place across the United States, and some even overseas.
One of these events was at RAREC in Bridgeton, where a group of people from New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania got together to learn about Rutgers’s research of agrivoltaics.
Agrivoltaics is “the use of land for both agriculture and solar photovoltaic energy generation,” according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
In short, using the same land for farming crops and solar panels. Under certain circumstances, both the crops and solar panels can benefit from being in the same location.
RAREC is one of three sites where Rutgers teams study the effects of agrivoltaics farming and the potential impacts of using the method.
“It’s a big project that we’re doing here at Rutgers to investigate this concept of having photovoltaic solar energy generation and agricultural production on the same land at the same time,” said Daniel Ward, RAREC’s director and tour leader. “There’s a tremendous interest in this renewable energy, especially in New Jersey [which] has a very ambitious clean energy program.”
Ward led the tour with colleague Andy Wyenandt, RAREC’s Extension Specialist in Vegetable Pathology.
At the site, Ward spoke on the technical details of the farming practices over the occasional whirr of panels preprogrammed to follow the sun with an algorithm.
Based on 2024 data from RAREC’s first year in operation, effects of growing crops under the solar panels vary depending on the crop and proximity to the solar panels.
Soybeans showed a significant yield increase under the solar panels compared to open-sky, while the “specialty crops” like tomatoes and eggplants saw reduced yields correlating with the amount of shade they got. Since RAREC has been in operation for two years, the research is still in progress and solid conclusions haven’t been met.
“Agricultural research is subject to so much environmental variation that in order to have any confidence in the reproducibility of the results, you got to do it for more than one growing season if you’re doing it in a field study,” Ward said. “And the scientific literature generally requires two or three years of field work on something if you’re really trying to evaluate performance in the field.”
Another challenge for RAREC is financial. The experiments are funded partly through Rutgers, as well as with state and federal grants, which are not always dependable year by year.
RAREC lost a $1.8 million grant this year, and Rutgers gave some money “to make up for losses that happened due to the withdrawal of the federal funding,” according to Ward.
While the state of New Jersey is also funding the experiments to research for the Dual Use Pilot Program, that money is also not guaranteed through the next gubernatorial administration.
“I said, some years ago, we’re two elections away from this really being hard to support,” Ward said.
For now, Ward, Weyandt and RAREC’s volunteers keep the farm and research running. They plan to “pick these crops until the first frost,” which will be donated to local food banks and churches, according to Weyandt.
The event drew curious visitors that asked a lot of questions about the technical and practical side of agrivoltaics, as well as excitement for its future potential.
“I think it was really interesting, and I think Rutgers is actually a pioneer in the nation, in the world doing this,” said Carolyn White Bartoo, an eventgoer from Newark, Delaware. “So this is unbelievably groundbreaking work that they’re doing, this science, especially now with all of the direct and unavoidable climate change impacts that we’re experiencing now. This is a great option.”
Ward is also excited about the potential impacts of agrivoltaics to benefit farmers and rural communities, given enough research and understanding.
“I think in the future we will have the technology – we do have much of it now – but the technology at prices that will be attractive for people in rural areas around the world to have better electricity availability and less environmental impact from electricity generation and transport,” Ward said. “And systems that are robust to things like coastal storms and stuff like that by being distributed.”
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