You have the solar panels protecting the lower ponds of azolla which don’t like direct sun. The solar panels provide excess electricity and power any machinery used to harvest the azolla. The azolla grows over TEN TIMES as fast as grass or any other plants, so you are cycling it rapidly producing truckloads of green biomass on a monthly basis.
I also added a concept image of a soybean farm with vertical solar fences. The idea being that you can harvest solar energy using very little horizontal space, while the plants still get full mid day sun. These images were generated using AI.
4 Comments
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 48d
So then what are you doing with the azolla?
And what are you doing with the solar energy?
jaykrown@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 48d
Those are good questions. The excess solar electricity would be sold, any type of machinery used to power the operations would come from the electricity like squeezing the azolla. The azolla could be sold as animal feed directly and rapidly, or it could be squeezed to get rid of the water and dried to become biochar. Azolla fixes nitrogen from the air, so it is a good nitrogen fertilizer.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 48d
So you would want to budget for the machinery, and kilns if you are going feed or biochar, whatever; you gotta budget in the equipment costs, etc. And if you are going feed, you'll likely want to be vertically integrated (since thats where the margin is), so what animals are you going to feed the outputs to, and how much do you need relative to what you can produce, etc.. Not to mention, if you plan on selling it into the grid, that means you now need to connect to the grid, at whatever necessary scale. And then what price guarantees do you have?
I ask these not only as an exercise, but also as an opportunity to farm some ideas. I grow vanilla in a tropical climate, and we get plenty of sunlight. And vanilla, in particular, has many advantages that make it an excellent candidate for agro-volataics. Specifically, you need to build a shade structure for vanilla regardless, and that costs money. So if you are already paying for poles and a rigid structure at about the same spacing as solar panels, por que no los dos?
However, its a very mixed bag on certain aspects of all this. One issue being, the places where land is cheap enough for farming to be profitable, where I live, is basically disconnected from centralized infrastructure. Basically, there are no power poles and everyone already lives off grid. So for practical purposes, if you are over-producing electricity, there is no guaranteed buyer. This is compounded with the electric companies here being "Unreliable partners" when it comes to small and midscale solar projects. They have a pattern of giving a pretty raw deal in terms of prices and using their monopoly power to screw over small suppliers.
This shifts the question to "what can I do to create value add on farm with additional electricity.
jaykrown@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 48d
I've seen that ducks really like eating azolla, so probably ducks. I think duck meat and eggs sells for a good amount, so you're effectively adding value to the azolla as a product by directly feeding it to animals that fetch a higher profitable price. As far as the complexities of producing electricity to sell to the grid, that's something that would need to be worked out, highly dependent on location. The solar panels would shade the azolla, ensuring optimal growth, and the azolla could be fed to ducks or squeezed into fertilizer while the excess electricity can be used for various operations like powering harvesting equipment and other essential logistics. Thanks for the questions!