Complete Colorado
I grew up hearing stories from my grandparents about how a spring freeze or sudden hail storm could destroy a peach crop. My grandfather worked for years at a local hardware store while maintaining his orchards to patch over the lean years.
Decades ago, I sketched out a plan for retractable covers that could protect orchards from frosts as well as hail. My grandmother appreciated the idea but thought it would be too costly to implement.
But I was not the only one to have that idea. Now, Talbott Farms has installed rotatable solar panels over a patch of orchard that can not only generate electricity but help protect crops from freezes, hail, heat, and water loss.
Recently my family watched the 2025 film Save the Farm, Save the Future, and it opens with an aerial shot of fruit orchards near Palisade’s iconic Mt. Garfield. The film proposes that raised solar panels, adapted for the particulars of the project, can at the same time give farmers a new revenue stream from the electricity generated and provide ancillary benefits to crops and grazing animals.
The film discusses six such projects from around Colorado, including the one involving peach orchards. Here is a brief summary of the others:
* Jack’s Solar Garden in Longmont raises various crops under raised solar panels. A video produced by the company and posted on its website quotes Jordan Macknick of the National Renewable Energy Lab: “We are seeing a mutually beneficial relationship between the solar panels and the vegetation. As temperatures get too hot, many plants shut down their photosynthetic activities throughout the middle part of the day. The partial shade from the panels allows that photosynthesis to continue occurring throughout the growing day.”
The shade also reduces evaporative water loss, and the crops, by reducing the immediate temperature, improve solar-panel efficiency.
* The Garnet Mesa Solar project in Delta County plans to allow sheep grazing beneath existing panels “when forage is sufficiently established,” according to the website. As Mark Jaffe’s 2022 article from the Colorado Sun relates, the county originally rejected the solar project and accepted it only once it became ag-friendly. Obviously this sort of heavy-handed government distresses my libertarian sensibilities.
* Huwa Enterprises in Keenesburg applies the grazing idea to cattle that, like sheep, also appreciate the extra shade of solar panels. As Mallory Tope reported last year for the Center for Rural Affairs, Huwa set up a test site in 2023 and subsequently “completed three successful utility-scale projects with cattle grazing and is now helping new and existing solar projects integrate livestock.”
* Thistle Whistle Community Solar in Hotchkiss “is building a 1 MW solar array that produces energy while farming continues underneath it,” according to its website. The site adds, “Beyond the energy benefit, the project is designed as a research and demonstration site for exploring crop performance under partial shade created by the panels in a hot, arid climate like ours.”
* Longboard Power, working with Pfaltzgraff Farms out east in Haxton, has the idea of installing solar panels for use as wind breaks. The farm site explains, “Shelterbelts are vital in windblown areas to protect crops, but living shelterbelts require water and nutrients which compete with crops for these limited resources. Join Tibor Hegedus, designer of the one-of-a-kind dynamic agrivoltaic shelterbelt that produces renewable energy, protects crops, promotes soil moisture retention, and enhances plant water use efficiency.” One idea expressed in the film is that remote solar arrays could power data centers built near them.
I don’t have a good sense of the economics of such projects, but it does seem obvious that raised solar panels can improve the quality of the land underneath for agricultural and even recreational purposes.
On the other hand, on land that’s now basically dirt and scrub brush, such as you can see driving past Grand Junction on I-70, there’s probably not much point in spending more to raise the panels.
Global warming feeds into the conversation from two angles. Whatever you think about the state mandates, those mandates do propel the state toward more solar-generated electricity. But the trend is not all driven by government. As Our World in Data shows, the costs of solar panels have come down dramatically, from $132 per watt in 1975 (inflation adjusted) to $0.27 in 2024.
On the other side, the use of raised solar panels potentially can help farmers and ranchers adapt to climate change by providing helpful shade and reducing water loss.
As the film conveys, government policies, specifically regarding wage controls and labor regulations, also have caused greater stresses for already-struggling farmers. In general, the film offers insights into various agricultural enterprises in Colorado, whatever you think of the solar angle.
I believe that, even as we continue to burn natural gas and petrol as bridge technologies, eventually we are headed for a world in which some combination of nuclear power, solar, and maybe geothermal and other technologies provide us with abundant energy. It seems like agrivoltaics could play a meaningful role in that future.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
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Ayn Rand recommended a technique for understanding, if not resolving, irreconcilable differences of opinion: “First, check your premises.” It’s pointless to argue with someone when your basic assumptions and goals are unalterably different. In politics these aren’t discussions, they’re unproductive exercises in rhetoric, gamesmanship and grandstanding ,at least on one side.
Imagine an argument on economics between Milton Friedman and Bernie Sanders.
A profound illustration of this concept was provided by James Burnham in his classic book, “Suicide of the West,” published in 1964. It addressed the fundamental conflict in world view and the order of values between those on the ideological left and right. It’s just as insightful today.
Burnham defined four key values:
Liberty – National independence, self-government, and sovereignty.
Freedom – In the sense of individual liberty.
Justice – In the sense of a “social justice” welfare state with where egalitarianism means equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.
Peace – The absence of large-scale warfare among major powers.
He observed that most people believe in all of these values to one extent or another but are often forced to make choices when one value conflicts with another and when prioritizing these values in order of relative importance. For example, would you jeopardize peace to defend liberty? Or override individual freedom to achieve social justice?
This is an approximation of Burnham’s forced-ranking as applied to today’s political divide.
Right (conservatives)Left (progressives)
Liberty Peace
Freedom Justice
Peace Freedom
Justice Liberty
Our founders crafted the Constitution and its Bill of Rights with particular attention to limiting government and safeguarding the natural rights of individuals. The conservative order of values reflects a traditional view of human nature and society. It recognizes that the world is often a harsh and competitive place populated by imperfect — and imperfectible — beings and that there are limits to what public or private institutions can do to mitigate this condition.
Conservatives believe our constitutional republic and private enterprise economy have produced the greatest measure of political freedom and economic achievement the world has ever known and that it is perpetually threatened by serious adversaries both foreign and domestic. War is a constant of human history and always will be, and peace through military strength is the best deterrent.
Today’s progressives have elevated pacifism to a principal value. Their economic vision is a socialist welfare state enroute to a communist utopia, and they share the Marxian delusion that human nature can be changed and perfected. They believe our Constitution is fatally flawed. They’d open our borders and join a world government body (imagine a largely anti-American UN with muscle). They believe disarmament is achievable, and that war can be eliminated. (Woody Allen once humorously prophesied, “The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won’t get much sleep.)
In the 1960s, Burnham noted that leftists are infected with the promise of communism simply because they share so many of its ideals such as peace, egalitarianism, secularism, collectivism, full employment, and free social services. To wishful thinkers, useful idiots, and fellow travelers, the constitution of the Soviet Union sounded better than our own. But it was all a pack of lies and its promises were never delivered. (Correction: They did impose full employment for political dissidents in their forced-labor concentration camps like its Siberian Gulag Archipelago.) The soviets needed border guards to keep their people in. That’s why communist East Berlin built a wall to keep its subjects from escaping to West Berlin. Similar conditions prevail in today’s communist paradises of Cuba, North Korea and China.
Socialism and its inevitable destination, communism, have been notorious failures. America and other nations in the free world have mixed-economies based on private enterprise, free-market forces, and personal property rights paired with a cornucopia of welfare-state entitlements that resemble socialism.
Progressives defensively claim that Scandinavian societies are models of successful socialism. Not quite. Leaders of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark assert they’re economies are not strictly socialist. True, all have expansive welfare states with high taxes and some state-owned businesses, but they still have mostly private-enterprise economies and personal property rights. That may work for them as nations of relatively small land mass, low populations of only 5 to 10 million people, and a homogenous culture.
But it’s not a suitable model for the USA with 350 million people of diverse cultures spread across a vast continent, and geopolitical interests and treaty obligations around the globe as the leader and principal defender of the free world.
Compared to America; Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are more like neighborhoods.
Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for Complete Colorado.
Data centers may be controversial, but they have uncovered a glaring issue. When renewables aren’t consistently delivering power, what can we turn to instead? PowerGab Host Amy Cooke discusses this topic with Isaac Orr from Always On Energy Research.
Show Notes:
Colorado employers are facing a crisis. There are not enough qualified, educated candidates to hire. Ed Sealover from the Colorado Chamber explains how job training pipelines might solve the problem.
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