Hey, I'm Ira Plato, and you're listening to Science Friday.

In America's heartland, some farmers are experimenting with technology to make their farms more environmentally and economically sustainable.

One practice called agrovoltaics and involves solar panels, farmers growing their harvest under the panels.

The panels create shade for the plants and the evaporation from the plants cools the panels, making them more efficient.

Seems like a win-win.

My next guest has been reporting on how agrovoltaics is working for small farmers across

the Midwest.

Jana Roes-Schleiss is a news producer at KBIA in Columbia, Missouri.

Her podcast series, The Next Harvest, is available to listen on podcast platforms.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much for having me.

Nice to have you. Okay.

Did I get agrivoltaics right on this one? You did, totally. What it is is sort of in its name.

The word itself, agrivoltaics, is a combination of agriculture and the term photovoltaic,

as in a PV panel. So it's the idea of doing these two activities, farming and generating solar power, simultaneously and on the same piece of land.

So farmers are getting two harvets out of this, the traditional crop and then the solar energy and making money on that too.

They could, yeah.

A farmer has said to me in the past, it's sort of like farming the sun.

Well, can they make more money on the solar side than on the farming side?

Potentially, and that kind of gets into the minutia of how the energy is used.

A lot of farmers will lease land to a solar developer or a utility for one of those

large-scale solar projects. And in that case, they would receive, like, essentially a rental

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