AU in der HALLERTAU, Germany (AP) - Twenty-foot-tall, glowing green snakes head toward a display made of solar panels at Josef Wimmer's Bavarian farm.
He grows hops, which are used to make beer, and also produces electricity in recent years by installing solar panels on 1.3 hectares of his land in the small town of Au im Hallertau, an hour north of Munich in southern Germany.
The pilot project—a collaboration between Wimmer and local solar technology company Hallertauer Handelshaus—launched last fall. The electricity generated on this farm can power around 250 homes, and the hops get the shade they need more often as climate change accelerates the summer heat.
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Plant-mounted solar panels have grown in popularity in recent years as incentives and demand for clean energy have increased. Researchers want farmers to get the most out of it, and farmers are looking for ways to protect their crops from extreme heat , conserve moisture and potentially increase yields. The German team says their venture is the first agricultural photovoltaic project focused solely on HOPS, but projects have also appeared in various countries around the world for various crops, fruits and vegetables.
Hop production can suffer when it gets too much sun, said Bernhard Gruber, who leads the solar component of the project, and since solar panels were already on the farm, it made sense to give them a secondary purpose by mounting them on poles above the plants.
In addition to protecting the plants from sun stress, the shade means "rainwater lasts longer and stays in the ground longer" and "hops are healthier and less susceptible to disease," Gruber said. The scientific study of the benefits of plants will be completed in October.
The farm works with researchers to figure out how to strike the right balance so that the hops get enough shade and sun for the best harvest every year.
In the UK, where the climate is also getting warmer and more variable , a team of researchers is studying how to fit solar panels into greenhouses or polytunnels - plastic-covered frames in which plants grow - with semi-transparent or transparent installations.
"You can get your renewable energy from the land you cover, and you don't have to put these giant solar arrays on good agricultural land like you've been doing so far," said Elinor Thompson, a senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich who led the research.
Thompson, a plant biologist, and his team are working with an orchard in Kent, southern England, to help plants make the most of solar structures.
"No one can afford to lose a crop, especially in the current conditions," he said. "We're looking forward to a hotter summer in the UK, we have a water shortage problem and we need to be efficient in all aspects of farming."
Having shade where it's needed and monitoring the impact of different arrays of solar panels on different crops will help prepare the world for a climate-changing future, Thompson said.
In East Africa, which is suffering from a long and painful drought that scientists say has been exacerbated by human-caused climate change , solar panels can also help retain moisture in plants and soils and reduce the amount of water needed, said Richard Randle-Boggis, a research associate at the University of Sheffield, which is developing two photovoltaic agricultural systems in Kenya and Tanzania.
Randle-Boggis said the systems "can be used for resilience to climate change and to improve the environment for growing crops by providing low-carbon electricity." Some plants in the partial shade of solar panels need 16 percent less watering, he said.
Solar farms have seen higher yields of corn, wheat and beans, and while growers have seen lower yields of onions and peppers, they still have the added benefit of producing clean energy.
But yields can also change "depending on the weather, because we're seeing climate change," Randle-Boggis said, though she added that she's "really surprised and surprised by some of the results we're seeing" with solar crops.
"About 50% of Tanzanian farmers grow maize. Corn is also a plant that loves the sun. So the fact that we have achieved an 11% increase in maize yield is a tremendous achievement,” he said.
And Randle-Boggis said these designs can continue to be replicated around the world for many different cultures, as long as the systems are "designed with the local context in mind."
A future with more crops under solar power is also Gruber's hope for beer hops.
"At the end of the year, we will bring another solar farm online," which will have ten times the energy production capacity of the current project, Gruber said.
But this is still only the beginning.
"We get a lot of inquiries from hop growers," he said, "even from abroad."
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Beltaji reported from London.
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