by Chris Mallory (The Counter) Agrivoltaics—putting solar panels on farmland—lead to astonishing productivity gains and improved energy efficiency. Except when they don’t. — … Mounted on 9-foot-tall beams, so lofty a tractor could pass below them, the solar panels slant against the blue sky of the high desert, throwing shade on the short rows of basil and onions beneath. (University of Arizona biogeographer Greg) Barron-Gafford has been testing agrivoltaics—a term for land that combines agriculture and solar farming—for 8 years. He started with a single solar panel at Biosphere 2, in Oracle, Arizona, a site the University of Arizona has owned since 2011. More recently, his project has expanded to sites in nearby Tucson and even a large plot overseen jointly by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Longmont, Colorado.