Solar Panels Over Crops May Boost Farmworkers’ Comfort

Putting solar panels above agricultural crops may do more than produce food and clean energy on the same land: It can also significantly augment quality of life for farmworkers, according to new research to be presented at AGU’s 2025 Annual Meeting in New Orleans. Worker-reported benefits include shelter from the sun, cooler drinking water and reduced fatigue, while physical measurements indicate the panels can help farms avoid conditions conducive to dangerous heat stress.

“In a lot of [food] sustainability conversations, we’re thinking about resource use and not about farmworkers and their bodies,” said Talitha Neesham-McTiernan, a human-environment researcher at the University of Arizona who led the research. She will present her work on 15 December at AGU25, joining more than 20,000 scientists discussing the latest Earth and space science research.

A Bundle of Overlooked, but Crucial, Benefits

Hybrid solar-food fields, better known as “agrivoltaics” systems, typically involve solar panels mounted at or above head height, spaced among crops to allow sunlight to pass through the gaps between. In addition to making efficient use of land, these systems can benefit crops by reducing both sun damage and water lost to evaporation and even by trapping some heat near the ground during colder months, Neesham-McTiernan said.

In her four years of fieldwork on farms like these, often during brutal Arizona summers, Neesham-McTiernan noticed a pattern: Researchers and farmworkers alike would strategically plan to work in the panels’ shade during the hottest hours.

“It just seemed to be something that people in these systems were doing, but nobody in the research area was talking about it,” she said. That struck her as odd, as farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die from heat-related illness than non-agricultural workers. With climate change pushing that figure higher, making any tool to reduce heat stress would be increasingly valuable.

To end that silence, Neesham-McTiernan and her coauthors asked seven full-time farmworkers at Jack’s Solar Garden, a small agrivoltaics farm near Longmont, Colorado, how their experiences differed from those on traditional farms.

The biggest reported perk, by far, was shade. One worker, Neesham-McTiernan said, confessed they found it hard to imagine ever going back to work on traditional full-sun farms where, they added, their favorite crops had always been tomatoes, because of the shade the tall plants offered.