Most flowers in 7b don't want extreme sun. We use shade cloth frequently, so solar coverage would be fine and of course have the energy co-production. Cut flowers aren't harvested mechanically at our scale, so we wouldn't have to worry about tractor access.
Meanwhile, more and more food is produced under cover for a lot of good reasons. Polytunnels, glass houses. You might get some summer shade from solar but what about season extension at the beginning of spring/end of fall? Depending on your crop and location, that could mean 4-8 extra weeks a year. What if you do geothermal energy generation for the tunnel? Now you can grow through the winter and not need the same footprint as solar. That's more appealing to me.
Anyway, I'm forever mad at corn ethanol and we should at least replace all that with solar farms. That's probably the right place to start. But also, again, zoning...
I've done hobbyist exotic (legal!) mushroom farming for a while, at a scale that is more than I could use but not like 100x what I could use. I've thought about selling but it seems like a lot of hassle doing the marketing and business parts of it.
How do you sell? Do you have a distributor that purchases product from you or is it a farmers market type deal?
Zone 7b: −15 to −12.2 °C
Zone 7a: −17.8 to −15 °C
Zone 8a: −12.2 to −9.4 °C
Its also not just the average minimum temp, its the average minimum temp over the last thirty years. A few years ago my zone changed from 6a to 6b following the regular reevaluations the USDA does.
Edit: the A/B zones were developed in 1990
Thats around 50k sq miles, which would generate ~5x more electricity than the US uses
Something around 2500W of solar can provide enough energy to drive an EV 12,000 miles a year.
When it comes to zoning. The state should require offices to install chargers for employees cars when the solar share of electricity generation is highest.
31 times, according to https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2501605122. That’s from pril 2025, so possibly slightly outdated, but I don’t think technical advances can have pushed that to “very conservatively 30-50 times as much”.
Depending on what you want to do with the energy, you are right it can easily be 50 times as much of useful work. For example, ICE cars turn over 80% of that energy into heat, electric cars less than 20%. That’s a factor of 4 in conversion ratio.
Corn ethanol never was about the energy. Corn ethanol needs so after several years of crop failure you just swap that corn with other culture and people do not starving.
(Disclaimer: I know nothing about farming)
I somewhat agree - dumping pesticides and fertilizer into the ground every year and then letting it pollute rivers is low-key insanity. But then you look at just how much farmland is out there and realize some crops just can't be put indoors, probably ever.
There are lots of variables for sure, but I do wonder how much more efficient indoor growing must get to overcome outdoor growing? Land value is vastly different between regions, so does labour, crop type, etc.
p.s. Tom Scotts recent video on strawberries was amazing - special mites to fend off other bugs and UVC light sanitizing was a bit of wow for me.
Ag runoff is certainly a thing.
But also, if you harvest a crop, those are elements that are leaving the field and need to be replenished. Annual fertilization will always be a thing for any crop or combination of crops, if only for micronutrients.
They aren’t talking about growing wheat indoors, and when they talk about tunnels it’s a bed crop in a field with plastic over it like you’d see over a box in the city.
Indoor growing has some cool stuff going for it, but you’re not going to grow row crops that we currently harvest headers wider than your greenhouse.
You’re also unlikely to put those under solar, if you’re going to do solar on that patch, it’s probably not worth farming a crop that produces 1000$ per acre under it when the solar is going to be producing way more than that.