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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Are there realistic ways of harvesting vegetables at scale that are underneath mounted solar panels, with all their supports?

Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?

I'm just imagining that you are going to need a lot of vertical clearance for tractors, and support posts will have to be widely spaced enough that the horizontal beams supporting the panels will have to be quite strong, and that at some point this is less solar panels in a field, and more like constructing a building with solar panels on its roof.

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> Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?

It's hard to see how this would work well with corn, since corn is pretty tall, corn harvesters are pretty huge, and putting panels even high enough for a different set of smaller, realistic harvesters would still require supports that I can't imagine would be cost effective given all the other hurdles they would cause.

Other crops like cotton, alfalfa, and hay aren't as tall, but have the same harvesting problems.

Most harvesting efficiency gains are directly tied to GIGANTIC machines. Farming is insanely efficient and competitive. It's hard to see how smaller machines could be viable and no one would have discovered it until this tech.

I'd guess there is far more potential in grazing land (unrelated to this tech), which is already actively being developed at scale.

We are right at the point where fully automated harvesting machines start to gain ground. And removing the operator (or moving the operator outside the machine) allows for designs that are less tall. The benefit of wider and wider machines also shrinks with full automation, even if it doesn't fully go away

The good news is that as someone else pointed out, we mostly grow corn for energy, so in a way, this is more about getting the ground we use for corn back than it is getting more energy.

You can see there are already huge examples of this in Australia with sheep grazing under panels and it's just barely starting in New York state with a cornell pilot. In my opinion it's the future of electricity in agricultural areas.

Smaller scale market gardens could benefit. Many rely on more manual labor and smaller machines.

There are some small organic farms using a system of chained paper pots and frames to quickly fill them with soil and sow with seeds, then once they're sprouted you use a hand pulled machine that spreads the chain out while directly placing each plant into the soil automatically.

Depends on what the crop is. Broccoli I imagine, is manually cut. same with tomatoes.

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