State of Colorado has 66 million acres.

30 million acres of that is agriculture.

So just under half.

It' s a huge part of our state.

If you look at the number of farms, as well as the number of farmers, it' s been plummeting.

Farmers used to make up more than half the US population.

Bout a 150 years ago, and now it' s about 1% of the population.

At current projections, we' re going to lose tens of millions of acres more in the next few decades.

Since 1972, our lands had hay on it.

And it just isn' t as economical as it used to be.

It' s just been so hot it hasn' even got up to knee high yet.

It doesn' t make sense to keep doing it, especially in Boulder County where it' s pretty expensive.

The farmers in the area are generational.

In some cases, they' ve been her since this land was settled.

The problem is, is the hailstorms are getting bigger and the drought is becoming more frequent.

So how are we going to be able to manage that?

There used to be four other big sheep operations in this area.

Right near here.

Yeah, just right in this valley.

And they' re gone.

They' re all gone.

A lot of ranchers are facing that choice of do they sell or do they try to hold on and a lot of them are selling out.

Rural communities are on the front lines of climate change, both in terms of impacts as well as the economic changes as part of the energy transition.

We have seen a few farms replaced with the solar.

To take irrigated farmland away to put panels on isn' t the right thing to do.

Colorado has one of the fastest clean energy transitions of any state.

The land-use question is a really hard balance of how do we want to use that type of land as a society for energy generation or for agriculture?

And then, yes, small farms are struggling.

You know, it' s hard to to make it as a farmer.

The thought of selling or losing the ranch, it weighs pretty heavy on your heart.

The pressure is, is to maintain what you have and to take a risk, you gamble what you have.

If I do something and I lose the farm, I' ve lost everything that my father worked on for his life.

Everything my grandfather had worked on.

I think I can hold on for a while, but not forever without changing.

It' s cliche, you know, but they say the rate of change that we experience today is the slowest rate it' ll ever be for the rest of our lives.

If we don' t embrace new ideas, we will not survive.

You got kind of a [bleep] butt dont you?

Im Renee Deal.

I' m a fourth generation rancher from western Colorado.

We raised sheep, and uh yeah, we' re making it in the livestock business.

Kind of.

We' re considered a large commercial operation, but we' re on the small side of large.

We raise about 2000 breeding ewes.

We' re located in Delta and Gunnison counties, and Deltas where we winter because it' s a lot milder.

And that' s also where we lamb because we want to make sure that when we' re lambing that it' s milder for the sheep.

In the summertime, we graze up in far north Gunnison County, about 7600ft to about 11,000ft.

High mountain grazing.

My family' s been doing this for a pretty almost a hundred years.

So it' s a part of who you are when you think about the fact that your ancestors homesteaded and they worked through the depression incredibly tough, I mean, we think it' s difficult now.

I think, I keep, I always tell myself, can you imagine if you' re doing this in the 30s with, you know, no motorized equipment, all horses and in the middle of winter?

So this is a fun little thing.

This is a little bit of our history.

My grandfather would pay everybody 75 cents more an hour if they would learn to walk stilts.

You can' t see him in the bottom of this picture, but, all of our feet are about, four foot off the ground.

So we would do all the pruning throughout the winter, walking on stilts, which, by the way, we built ourselves.

About 1978 or so when this photo was taken.

My name' s Charlie Talbott.

Two of my three brothers and I run Talbott Farms Inc.

We are third generation in Talbott Farms, and we' re fifth generation and raising fruit in the Palisade area.

The soil likes diversity of crops, just like we like diversity of food.

We don' t want to eat the same thing all the time unless we' re like six years old and it' s chicken nuggets.

I' m Roy Pfaltzgraff.

I' m the third generation farmer My family has been active in agriculture in Colorado for over 140 years.

We' re really focused on soil health and doing things to build our soils back up after they' ve been degraded from a century of farming.

Let' s check these girls out.

Hi little babies.

That ones sitting like a frog.

Oh yeah.

Calves are looking good.

My name is, Brent Huwa, fourth generation farmer, my wife' s fourth generation, cattle ranching family.

Been doing it, you know, our whole lives and learned a lot from our our ancestors, our grandparents our our fathers mothers, those types of things so.

Ah you damn dog.

We' d have better egg production if the dog werent able to find them before I do.

My name is Mark Waltermire, and I run Thistle Whistle farm.

And some ways, my farm is the quintessential old traditional family farm.

I have dairy goats, chickens and ducks and other creatures.

I have 15 acres and I rotate my annual crops through those 15 acres.

And I also have the mix of educational activities that I host here.

It' s very difficult for me to hold this farm together, financially.

And it' s been a struggle and it' s becoming more of a struggle.

The trend lines are not good.

Small farms are disappearing, farm size is increasing, and large farms are taking up the slack.

I believe it' s well over 80% of small farms have disappeared over the past decades.

And it' s, you know, 2% or 3% a year because the economics don' t work out.

We' re losing farms to a number of pressures.

Some economic pressures, some being development pressures.

Something a rancher told me in western Colorado was, your farm until you grow houses and retire, because that' s their retirement plan.

Farmers are land rich and cash poor.

It feels kind of like the challenges are stacked against us.

Pressures from legislation.

Predators on the landscape.

Labor standards that we have to upkeep.

And then the drought has been a really big challenge for us in probably the last six years.

We don' t have places to put our sheep that we used to have with adequate feed.

It' s been pretty dramatic.

We lost one of our BLM permits due to drought.

We stopped going there probably 4 or 5 years ago, and we haven' t been able to go back on because it hasn' t regrown.

We' ve lost a lot of our winter grazing, and so we' ve had to do a lot more supplement feeding in the winter.

But the more that we' ve done, we have noticed we' ve had some more disease factors because they' re in a more confined area.

And then also, of course, the prices of supplemental feed are, if you don' t know, they' re pretty expensive.

Those have gone up probably 40% in the last two years.

That' s from the drought too.

I mean, the farmers, the farmers can' t put I mean are having trouble get growing enough hay so they have to charge more.

And so the drought is compounding.

We' ve seen, you know, some especially intense drought periods in 2002, 2012, 2018, 2020, all pretty intense droughts across Colorado.

And some of that is a result of the warming that we' ve seen globally and here in Colorado.

As the climate warms, when those droughts come along, they' re going to be a little bit worse.

And then when the wet periods come along, that water may not go quite as far as it used to.

All of western Colorado, just in this the space of trying to figure out how, you know, how do you how do you survive?

How do you be more resilient and adaptive to, you know, ever changing climate conditions and make it just harder and harder?

It' s really above and beyond drought now.

It' s the airdification of the West.

The valley I live in and that I represent is about 500,000 irrigated acres.

The water supply today doesn' t exist to support that.

We absolutely are taking productive agriculture out of production.

Voluntary and compensated.

But people that are just ready to to be part of the solution and give up part of their irrigated farm.

Climate change is water change.

That is a phrase that you will hear here in Colorado, and that' s only going to become a more important phrase as time goes on.

We just have this little gem that exists in three counties where fruit growing and wine grape growing is viable, and it' s so unique, and it has become something that is highly sought after.

Palisade peaches are the best peaches in the United States, no question.

Sorry, North Carolina, Georgia, that' s a fact.

But it' s also a high risk business.

Extreme weather events are make or break for us.

Our trees bloom once per year.

So if those trees make it through, we have a crop.

If we get frozen out, we don' t have a crop for the whole year.

Cold injury to buds to tissues is our number one limit.

So if that bud is killed, our next chance will be 365 days later.

We don' t get any do overs.

The impact to us is big.

It' s it' s no income for the year.

And yet we have to have outlay to maintain the trees.

We' re now raising essentially ornamental trees for a year.

They require spring irrigating, pruning.

It would be nice to be able to say, oh well, the climate' s warming and so you don' t have to worry about a freeze happening in in the middle of May anymore.

But the rough part of this is, is that the summers are going to going to get much, much warmer, but we' re still going to have the risk for these really extreme cold outbreaks to happen in the winter.

The plants are kind of accustomed to it being 90 degrees every day, and then you get a really sharp cold front early in the fall.

And for things like the wine grapes or the peaches in western Colorado, those are really bad swings to go from really hot to really cold in the matter of a couple of days.

I drove in yesterday morning and there was a huge fire going on a mile down the road here.

I think a vegetable farmer put out maybe peppers.

And they had all these fires going to keep the temperature in that plantation up.

I' ve never seen this and Ive been here 24 years.

I' ve never seen that happen, but also it' s like yesterday was a record frost.

We are not supposed to freeze that late in the season.

Other than frost weather risk comes in the form of hail.

And once it' s dinged, once it' s nicked, it takes it out of the fresh market category and puts it into the processor market category, diminishing its value, to a fraction of what it would be in the fresh market.

For those that can weather the storm, it can strengthen them.

But for a for many, it' s it' s the last straw.

Our biggest factor in production is the weather, which is totally beyond our control.

We have 2,000 acres of drylands so we don' t have any irrigation Everything is dependent upon rainfall or the lack thereof.

It' s a very arid region.

Average rainfall is about 14 inches a year.

Significant wind, significant heat and cold.

The biggest thing is just the extreme.

It seems as though the hailstorms are getting bigger and the drought is becoming more frequent.

So how are we going to be able to manage that?

And and what can we do?

One of the biggest weather challenges is any day of the year in northeast Colorado the wind can blow 30 to 40 miles an hour.

It doesn' t matter if it' s 20 below or 105.

Whatever little moisture you had, it just sucks it out of the crops, it' ll suck it out of the ground You know, a crop will will just be holding on, and you have a windy day and it kills it.

There had been people that have tried putting windbreaks out in fields to help slow things down.

I want to say like a quarter billion trees that were planted over maybe a 20 year period or so from the 1930s to late 1940s.

It would just be rows of trees every so far across the high plains.

The problem is, is those trees then take moisture.

So, you know, what' s the trade off?

You slow down the wind, but you lost some moisture because the trees.

For a lot of us, it' s the drought and weather.

The market is also a challenge.

But like in our area, we also, one of our challenges is urban sprawl.

Everybody' s coming this way.

So a lot of ranchers and farmers are facing that choice of do they sell or do they try to hold on?

And a lot of them are selling out.

What I found with running a small farm is that it is impossible or nearly impossible to generate the income to support it on its own.

I don' t know that it' s possible for a small farm in this valley to generate the income it needs to, to support itself.

The ways around that are to have an outside income, an outside job.

I haven' t figured it out yet.

In order to be profitable, I' m still working on it.

I mean, actually, this is one of my jobs, so, you know, I' m actually a contractor as well, so that supports my farming habit.

Kind of being isolated out here is one of the hardest things for us.

Western Colorado is a tough area.

I mean, we' re remote from our markets.

You know, all Delta County is less than 35,000 people.

Delta County is an impoverished county.

It' s not rich.

Cost of living, even in this valley, has increased substantially.

Labor is by far my biggest expense.

It is nearly impossible to raise my prices to the point where I can recoup those costs.

The increase in minimum wage in Colorado has been very difficult for me to manage.

I don' t think it' s a bad idea, but that $15 an hour now versus the $7.50, ten years ago, that' s a significant change.

When you' re raising tree fruits and wine grapes, labor is our number one cost, bar none.

We don' t have enough domestic workforce that wants to do this work.

We' re actually paying more for H-2A workers because we have to pay for transportation.

We have all the application fees.

We have all the hoops we have to jump through.

We have to provide housing, and we have to pay an adverse wage rate.

I mean, I' m not about underpaying people, but we' ve gotten to where I don' t we don' t even pay ourselves.

I mean, we pay our guys because we need them and we have to, but we' ve gotte to where we haven' t, I haven' t taken a paycheck in two years.

My debt is substantial, and, I' m uncomfortable with that.

And looking for ways of getting out from under the debt.

I think I can hold on for a while, but, not not forever, without changing how the income and expenses of the farm go.

It is a risk to try something new, and I don' t have much more to lose.

I mean, I' d rather not lose my farm if I can help it.

And I need to try something new to make it work better.

And that seems like, a risk worth taking.

It' s really hard to see a futur in animal agriculture.

Having to give that up and do something else is uh, it would be something that' d be really hard for me to do.

Do we just continue to beat our heads against the wall and maybe go out of business?

Or do we try to branch out and come up with new opportunities?

If you want to take pictures, it' s okay to take pictures of me.

But we have farmers out there just doing their job.

They don' t want their pictures taken.

For the most part.

I can pose, I can do whatever.

[laughter] But.

We won' t go too close to them.

They will attack.

So as I was mentioning, this is, my family' s farm.

We mainly been doing hay for 50 years on the land and doesn' t pay the bills anymore.

Decided we needed to figure something else out.

We worked with Boulder County to change their land use code so that we could build a solar array on our farmland.

So instead of using the sun for harvesting grasses, we now use the sun for harvesting electricity.

And then we can also use this space underneath it for growing different crops.

Agrivoltaics is simply agriculture mixed with photovoltaics being solar.

We built Jack' s Solar Garden in 2020, and now we provide power enough for about 300 homes into the community.

We work with a nonprofit farming organization, Sprout City Farms, that has been cultivating crops underneath our solar panels for years.

We wanted to keep our land in agriculture.

We were simply trying to figure out how to make ends meet, and having a solar array on the land was a way that we could make ends meet.

But agrivoltaics means that we can keep the heart of the farm going, while still also making the revenue stream that we need Makes us more money than, than haying ever did.

So.

Agrivoltaics is a huge opportunity for farmers as a way to benefit from the energy transition, because this is a way that they can diversify revenue and support the rest of their operation.

Sheep grazing is by far the most common type of agrivoltaics today because instead of paying somebody to go out there with mowers and spray weeds, you pay someone to go out there with sheep and they actually do a better job of getting up against the piles.

It' s been a huge blessing for us really financially and then also to have the vegetation for the sheep.

This would be our fifth year grazing under solar.

So without this, you know, we would have to lease land and to try to get those leases obtained is hard.

There' s plenty of panels out there.

So I think there' s definitely opportunities for people to get into it.

Why not?

I mean, it' s to the benefit of all of us.

We can do these things differently so that it helps to support even more people than simply the clean energy that' s being produced.

So why not?

We' ve been partnering with different research institutions.

We have the National Renewable Laboratory, Colorado State University and University of Arizona.

One of the items that we' re studying most closely is the performance of vegetation underneath and around solar panels.

One thing we' ve noticed in the West is that a lot of different types of vegetation perform better, and have higher yields when underneath the partial shade of the panels.

The shade is really important in hot and dry areas, like what we have here in the Front Range.

The panels as they' re tilting throughout the day, the sun and shade are cycling over the field, so nowhere gets full sun, nowhere gets full shade.

This is a benefit to crops, especially in the afternoon when the sun is really intense, the temperatures are much hotter Having more shade on the ground, keeps moisture in the ground longer, and it reduces thermal temperatures on your crops, on your livestock and your farm labor that' s out there.

The cooler conditions underneath the panels lead to less evaporation of water from the soil.

This means more water stays in the soil.

That allows us to reduce the amount of supplemental water we give for irrigation, which in some cases could be half as much water to achieve the same yields than in an open air environment.

Agriculture in the state of Colorado is just going to change.

Now, it can be an incremental change where we' re thoughtful and engaged, but if we' re not thoughtful and engaged, if you kind of just put your head in the sand and ignore it, you run the risk of fundamentally changing what agriculture looks like in Colorado.

Losing thousands or tens of thousands of irrigated acres.

Got exposed to Byron and Jack' s Solar Garden.

Its first of its kind anywhere in the United States.

And I' ve told Byron this is an amazing.

I got to figure out, how can I do this at scale?

I need to do it on 120 acres, and I need to do it a hundred times.

Climate change is going to pose new challenges for people in agricultural production.

No doubt about it.

Because there' s going to be increasing stresses on water.

They increase heat obviously may mean that things that that used to grow well in a in a cooler climate don' t grow as well anymore.

So we have to think about what we can do to make the same or more with less.

Less water will be effect.

Well, if agrivoltaics with the shading and cooling of the plant reduces plant water use, that also means we need less water to grow the same amount of produce, which increases water use efficiency.

I see agrivoltaics as not just helping to mitigate climate change.

It' s a process for us to adapt to it.

Seems like people are kind of oddly divided about it.

Like people think that it' s the, you know, the future of agriculture, and other people, you know, are naysayers and say it' ll it' ll never work.

Agrivoltaics is still pretty, pretty niche in the industry overall.

I would say absent kind of educational endeavors, it' s not something that comes up in a day to day conversation with landowners or of interest levels.

It' s very costly in comparison to other projects.

You need to use more steel because the projects have to be higher from the ground so that it can allow for grazing, and then for actual farming of the crops.

It takes additional research and development.

It' s not as incentivized in the federal or state levels, and the headache of that development is not worth what is already a thriving industry.

That' s a really interesting idea.

I just couldn' t imagine what kind of price tag that would come with that.

Cost.

100%.

Cost and what does it look like to get these installed?

You know, for me, it really comes down to cost.

What' s it going to put in my pocket?

It' s our passion, but it' s all about the money.

I think it' s a it' s a great id and you know whether or not would work for us.

It' s questionable.

I mean, you know, the size of our equipment.

I mean, a lot of our stuff is 30 feet in width.

The crops that we grow to get our equipment in there, it wouldn' t make sense.

Very large combines.

And you just, you can, you don' t walk through and pick anything.

The main challenge with agrivoltaics becoming more common is just more expamles.

People need to see it, to believe it.

That' s what we' ve been saying at Jacks Solar Garden for years.

The most common type of solar array is a utility scale one that takes up hundreds, if not thousands of acres.

Society is simply not asking of them to make it so that we can still have agricultural activities underneath them.

These solar arrays are being built and they' ll be in place for a really long time.

The decisions that we make now are going to impact our grandchildren.

Solar development is in a big boom phase right now.

Capacity that' s proposed to be installed outpaces everything else proposed.

Whats fueling growth is a few things.

Solar is getting to a point where it is cost competitive with traditional energy, like fossil fuels or lower cost.

It' s actually cheaper than operating your existing coal plants.

You can deploy a lot of low cost wind and solar.

The Inflation Reduction Act is the most meaningful piece of legislation.

It has stabilized what is otherwise a shortsighted industry.

Now we have a ten year runway to say these projects can receive tax credits up to 30% for everything installed.

Colorado historically was a very coal heavy state.

So if you were to go back 20 years ago, about 70% of our energy came from coal and most of the rest came from burning gas.

We' re on a transition to clean energy right now.

About 35% coal, 25% gas and about 40% renewables.

And were on a trajectory right now where by 2030, every coal plant in the state will be retired and will be about 80% renewables.

Energy resources needs are only going higher and higher.

The advent of AI and data centers are going to create what' s been proposed as 15% more energy need over the next five years.

Agricultural land is generally among the most attractive.

I mean, farmland specifically.

It' s relatively flat for the most part.

It' s usually an area that has some existing infrastructure, whether that be access roads or existing electrical infrastructure that' s available to the site.

If you talk to people in rural communities, they' re generally not afraid of climate change.

They' re afraid of the solutions And what that change means for them and for their community.

All of a sudden, you' re taking 10% of the land in a county out of agricultural production to build a solar project.

And that' s already happening in counties in Illinois, for example.

More times than not, those solar companies are pushing farmers probably too hard for their land.

It removes agriculture.

It takes this ground out of production.

Then what are people going to farm?

That square mile will never be in production again.

There' s a there' s a part of me that winces.

There' s a part of me that grimaces, particularly where it really is prime and unique land.

When we start getting rid of ag land, we' re starting to get rid of our ability to make food.

I think rural communities are generally more hesitant to developing the land for a use like solar.

They become fearful of a change of land use.

A solar farm, said to be the largest of its kind, is coming to Delta County, but not everyone is a fan of the idea.

In fact, even the county commissioners were split on the project.

The Garnet Mesa project is a good example of agrivoltaics really helping delvelopers cite projects, where the county actually refused the permits.

It' s a large solar project, and there was community opposition and specifically concerns about the loss of irrigated farmland and the water rights associated with that.

In Delta County, our master plan states that we will preserve ag land.

So when we start talking large solar fields like the one that' s going in up on Garnet Mesa, we' re truly concerned about maintaining that agriculture.

People live and move to Delta County because of the open space and the irrigated ag lands.

Yes, it is a concern.

This is how we eat, and this is a real basis for our economy.

In their second application to the county, the one that passed, they raised the level of the solar panels and they also made sure that their irrigation structure was more suitable for that type of environment.

County commissioners were not willing to approve this solar project until they integrated sheep grazing into the management plan.

This project will be the determining factor of whether agrivoltaics work in Delta County.

If this works, it' s possible it can work elsewhere.

I can tell you I grew up a few miles from this location.

Things grow best in the shade out there.

It gets hot in the summertime.

It takes a lot of water to make things grow.

And this may prove to be one of the best things they' ve ever done to get grazing out there.

The political divide here, like everywhere else in the country, is significant.

If this is a point that we can meet up and say, this seems like a good idea, that' s great.

This is good for rural Colorado for my constituents and good for climate change activists all at the same time.

If we look just at the western U.S., the Bureau of Land Management, they' re proposing opening up 31 million acres for solar development.

But much of this comes into conflict with existing grazing leases.

And, you know, this could put family farms, family ranches out of business.

Half of our agricultural lands are used for cattle ranching.

And so that' s a lot of land.

And a lot of that space is out here in the western part of the U.S., where we have very good solar assets.

And it' s also the cheapest land that' s available to solar companies to be able to lease.

So ranch land is where solar arrays are being developed.

Agrivoltaics is one way that we can build solar and not put ranching families who have been here for generations out of business.

I' m not aware of anywhere that has cattle, really.

They' re too hard on the equipment.

They' ll rub against it.

They' ll break it.

They' re too big.

I think a lot of folks are afraid of cattle within solar arrays, because they see how they interact in confined spaces, or with a solo tree out in the middle of a field, whereas within a solar array, it' s long rows and multiple rows of lots of shade where these animals can have access to the shade.

There are a few projects doing cattle grazing under solar.

They' re still fairly small scale, but there' s also a ton of research going into this.

We do need innovation.

We need developers who are willing to take a little more risk on their projects in order to do this.

You might need to elevate the panels a little more.

Or you might need to modify your tracker operations a little bit.

I oftentimes think the concerns around having cows within solar arrays are blown out of proportion, simply because people haven' t seen it done yet.

You know, no one wants to take the risk, whether you' re the rancher or the developer, because no one' s done it before Were active in farming and also in the reclamation space.

We do a fair amount of projects for gas and oil, utilities and also in the renewable space so that involves wind as well as solar.

We build the roads, we do the seeding and after construction we come back in and do the veg maintenance, so weed management, mowing.

I spent a Monday trying to help my wife plan for pasture, the hay that we were going to need to feed our cows.

The next day I' m on a solar sit and we' re mowing the grass and I' m saying, look this is crazy.

Why aren' t we figuring out a way to hay this or graze this and utilize this product?

It has, it has, an economic value to the ag world.

Basically, we were tired of talking about it, researching it, studying it, and just ready to put it into action.

So that' s exactly what we' re doing.

There' s certainly pushback.

A lot of it' s education.

Not a lot of people understand cattle or have been around cattle.

So they naturally think that they' re going to ram the piles or that they' re going to just start tearing things up.

And so our experience is that is not true.

They' re not going to just start tearing things up.

However, we do need to mitigate some of the potential risks.

The pile height and the torque tube height matters.

Cattle selection is going to be important.

Their docility.

We' re excited about the cattle, mostly because of the economic value that they have versus sheep.

We think there' s benefits with the panels.

Cattle benefit from shade.

Their digestion is better, their ruminant works better, their body temperature, the amount of water they consume, the rate of gains better.

It also creates microclimates that actually extend our grazing seasons.

And so actually I had this conversation with my wife.

I said hey lets start thinking of these solar panels as shade structures.

They just happen to have a module on top of.

When we looked at solar power generation for our farming operation, they wanted to put them on rooftops or in most cases took land out of production.

My thinking was no, I want to explore the possibility of a symbiotic relationship between orchard production and power generation.

For the local growers here, especially the larger growers, if you' re running a packing shed in a cold store, you have very, very high energy needs in the middle of summer.

And so we' re looking at this as a means of cutting down on the energy cost, but also benefiting their crop.

It's sort of like a win win.

I see three potential benefits.

One, to achieve some degree of frost protection.

The data shows that the panels actually raise the night temperature so it stays warmer under the panels compared to no panels.

There have been publications that say you can raise the temperature by two centigrade.

That would be almost four fahrenheit.

That' s the difference between 100% spring frost damage or maybe no spring frost damage.

Two, to have some degree of hail protection.

And finally, three, to manage the light prescriptively.

There could be less evapotranspiration if it' s a real hot day and I can shade them some more.

Less sun burning on the fruit.

And yet theres times in the year I want them to have that full light.

Couple of years ago, for example, we had sunburn on half of our apple crop.

Too hot, too sunny.

You end up losing half your crop.

So agrivoltaics in that respect seemed like hey, heres a technique by shading plants at certain times that may be beneficial.

It' s always been a bit of a gamble to try to grow food because of weather, but the risk is greater now.

I' m convinced that I can do better growing some of the things that I grow under panels.

Tomatoes and peppers and potatoes and greens.

We can reduce the amount of water I need and improved growing conditions.

So this area will be panels raised up, in space so I can fit my tractor through and manage to till and cultivate.

Our ambition is to spread the cost savings out among the people who are receiving electricity, not by the owner of the land.

It' ll save money, and it' ll reduce the amount of fossil fuels being used.

Traditionally, solar and agriculture don' t coexist.

If it does, it' s like a canopy and then there' s, like, vegetable crops grown under it.

But there' s nothing that works with our scale.

There' s nothing that works with the combines and and the size of equipment that we' re dealing with.

It' s going to have to be something different.

We' re on a family vacation, and as were heading west, there' s a whole row of snow fences that were out there, and just at that point, kind of popped in my head that this would be a good application to put solar on.

Take the boards off the fence and replace the boards with solar panels.

Our concept is just a variation on the 1930s shelter belts.

It' s basically an agrivoltaics version of it where we' re doing the same thing.

We' re slowing down the wind speeds.

When he showed me a sketch of the design, I was like, yeah, that that will work with what we do.

I' m not worried about farming around it.

We' ll be able to set the panels in the position that we want.

We' ll be able to farm up close to it.

We' re just excited because there' s so much upside compared to what we have right now, which is just lots of wind with nothing to protect the crops.

So it' ll, track the sun throughout the day.

And then as the wind speed gets to a certain point, the fence will actually go into a vertical position and hold itself there until the wind diminishes.

And this would slow the wind, and it would help reduce our evaporation.

It would give protection to the crops.

And we' re taking measurements at each specific site down to about two feet.

We' re here to prove out our system, but also prove the naysayers wrong when it comes to, you can do agrivoltaics on cropping.

The problem with the solar panels is people think that, oh, you' re going to grid tie them.

The problem is, is the electric companies really aren' t interested.

Joe Schmo farmer that you drive by when you' re going to Boulder he' s near electrical infrastructure, and I can build 1-2 megawatt project to make it economic.

When you' re way out in the eastern fields, I need to build a 500 megawatt project to make it economic, to feed the power back, to build the infrastructure.

If you want to do behind- the-meter solar, that' s great, but that' s not at production agriculture scale.

If we do an entire field, that' s way more electrical use than we ever would have.

The big financial opportunity is to be selling that electricity to the grid for use elsewhere.

But what we can' t get is the rate that really makes the economics work well.

And that pushes us toward more grant funding and more difficult efforts to find money elsewhere.

Solar developers are really interested in these larger scale projects.

If you' ve got a 15 acre farm, no developer wants anything to do with that project.

All it is is about how cheap can you produce a solar array so you can make more money?

There' s nothing about the land.

We need to incentivize developers to steward the land better.

That can be through the tax system.

That can me through permitting the interconnection.

The solar companies, our utilities.

our government have the power.

The more people that ask of them for this, that' s how the change occurs.

They don' t want it on the grid.

If we put it on the grid, they don' t want to pay us very much for it.

It' s funny, everybody talks about buying local except the power company.

So instead, there' s examples out of Texas that they' re actually starting to mine cryptocurrency with it because that takes an incredible amount of electricity.

Our thought process is you can bypass the transmission portion.

And our business is basically data processing centers co-located on agricultural fields.

Some of these companies are running a lot of AI technology that AI technology takes a lot of power.

They could actually house equipment in the area off grid, tied to these systems, that would allow those kind of technologies to evolve without having a large carbon footprint on it, and it would actually be helpful to us in the long run, because it would help slow down the silly wind.

Bringing the jobs from a data center out into a rural area, that would have a significant impact on rural economy and help increase numbers in rural areas that have been decreasing for years.

Traditionally, honestly, oil and gas and ag have worked really well together because they lease a lot of private land.

And so that hasn' t been the cas with the new, greener energies.

And I think now the green energy companies are starting to see that they need to have that relationship with landowners and people in rural communities if they want to bring that kind of stuff in.

It has to be mutually beneficial.

I' ll be 100% honest.

We were having some pretty serious discussions about liquidating and going out of the business.

So when this opportunity came along with the solar facility, it really was something that made us pause and say, maybe we can go forward.

We started realizing that this is like a mutually beneficial program because we would get forage.

We would also get paid because it' s vegetation management for the solar company, and they actually end up benefiting because it' s cheaper to pay us to come in and graze instead of landscaping company.

And it' s better for the environment because now you' re not just cutting the grass and throwing it away.

You' re having a regenerative program where the sheep come in and graze, but they also fertilize.

We' re encouraged that the solar panels are going to help shade the area, so that we' ll get some better feed value, and it' ll be cooler for the sheep.

My hope is to demonstrate that not only do we preserve production within the orchards, we actually enhance it.

We enhance the quality or the reliability of production and the health of the trees.

If we have that experience, then the possibilities to expand that model across many more acreages could be quite exciting.

If the agrivoltaics is beneficial to the crop, then it becomes a tool and the grower might not even think as much about the energy gain, but saving a crop.

That's a very different economics.

We hope to have an agrivoltaics center right here in Colorado, where we can continue to help agrivoltaics evolve.

This solar project is something that could truly revolutionize what farming looks like in northeast Colorado.

There would be additional revenue for farmers, which means they're less reliant on the weather.

I would love to be able to have our entire farm lined with this.

Will you make it?

Will I make it?

I will make it.

Yeah, I' m convinced I will.

I' m not sure what the path is right now, but I will make it.

I' m stubborn and persistent and have the ability to make this hold together.

We depend on farmers.

I mean, I saw a great sticker.

If it weren' t for farmers, you' d be naked, hungry and sober.

They' re very underappreciated.

And this is a bridge that we can give them.

I think that' s worth paying for I have no doubt Colorado could be a leader in advancing the agrivoltaics conversation, you know, much, much farther than we have already.

Society only has two things.

Your people and your lands.

How you treat them both is important because that' s how society is going to be able to function in the future.

We take care of it well now then, we' ll have more to offer our future.

We have to decide, you know, what are the outcomes that we want in the energy transition?

Do we just continue to beat our heads against the wall and maybe go out of business?

Or do we try to branch out and come up with new opportunities People need to see it, to believe it.

That' s what we' ve been saying Jacks Solar Garden for years.

The more opportunities there are around our country for people to take a look at it, the more it will have people thinking about it, being creative, and then doing it.

I know it' s a little cliche, but the stars are kind of lining up to go, we have access to the resource and there' s demand for that resource, so let' s figure out how to collaborate and work together to create really positive outcomes.