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Bradley's grad student Sabrina Portner joins the OG3 to discuss her research project where she is growing different forage species under solar panels. Great project and great guest! Thank you for listening.
Hosted by members of the University of Minnesota Extension Beef and Dairy Teams, The Moos Room discusses relevant topics to help beef and dairy producers be more successful. The information is evidence-based and presented as an informal conversation between the hosts and guests.
[music]
[cows mooing]
Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. The OG3 is here and we have a special guest. Bradley is on just a streak here of getting guests and you're going to see that as we go here. One of his students, Sabrina Portner, is with us today to discuss what she's working on, how she deals with trying to work with Bradley, all of those things. Thank you for being here, Sabrina. How are you doing?
Sabrina: I'm great. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here on The Moos Room podcast.
Joe: It's not too much of a surprise to you, because I think you've listened to some episodes, but Emily is going to ask you our super secret questions and we can get our totals updated after that.
Emily: All right. I know that Sabrina is a frequent listener of The Moos Room, so I think she has a leg up on the questions this time around. Nonetheless, Sabrina, your first question. What is your favorite breed of beef cattle?
Sabrina: Beef cattle, I guess I'm less set on that answer, but I'm going to have to go with Shorthorn.
Emily: Ooh!
Sabrina: Yes. Once upon a time I showed for my uncle, took a step onto the dark side, and showed a beef cow at the county fair. With that heifer, I won showmanship and beat all the beef kids.
Emily: All right. That's a really good reason to like Shorthorns. Love that. All right. Then I'm excited for this one because I know it's going to make Bradley mad. What is your favorite breed of dairy cattle?
Sabrina: Yes, that's a tough one, but I think I'll have to go with Brown Swiss.
Bradley: That's acceptable because it is not Holstein.
Emily: Yes, there you go. Can you just share briefly why you chose Brown Swiss?
Sabrina: Yes. Well, starting with my grandpa, he raised Brown Swiss bulls, showed Brown Swiss bulls. That passion went on to my dad. I grew up surrounded by Brown Swiss, showed them in [unintelligible 00:02:06] and I don't know how you could like any other cow with those big brown ears and beautiful white noses. They are definitely number one in my heart.
Emily: Oh. I will say after Holstein, Brown Swiss is my second favorite. Definitely comes before Jersey. I love Brown Swiss. Specifically, their ears. They're just Oh, I love their ears.
Sabrina: There's nothing like a Brown Swiss.
Emily: Joe, I cut you off before you could do the beef total, so you'll have to run through both.
Joe: That's okay. I was looking at Bradley trying to figure out what Sabrina was going to be doing after this podcast. It's looking like she's probably going to be weeding some of the plots out there by hand because--
Bradley: No, that's already been going on for many years.
Emily: Counting flies on cows.
Bradley: Actually we are going to Sabrina's farm tomorrow, so I'm going to go experience the Brown Swiss.
Joe: All right. Let's get these totals out of the way and then we can get down to business. On the beef side, Black Angus at 14, Hereford's at 8, Black Baldy at 4, Scottish Highlander at 4, Red Angus at 3, Belted Galloway at 2, now Shorthorn at 2, and then all with 1, Stabilizer, Gelvy, Brahman, Chianina, Charolais, Simmental, Nelore, Jersey, Normande, Belgian Blue, Brangus, and Piedmontese. On the dairy side updating everything with that non-jersey answer, which is very disappointing, we have Holstein at 20, Jersey's at 13, Brown Swiss now at 7, Montb�liard at 3, Dutch Belted at 3, Normande at 2, Milking Shorthorn at 1, Ayrshire at 1, and one Guernsey named Taffy.
Emily: Shout out Taffy. Also Sabrina, do you have some other Brown Swiss-loving friends that we can get on the podcast? Just boot Jersey from number two.
Sabrina: Bet I could find some.
Emily: Perfect.
Joe: It will not be allowed. The reason that we have Sabrina on today is that she is doing a ton of work besides all the tedious work that Bradley assigns her like weeding and counting flies and things like that. She's working on a project up there that is really interesting. Walk us through what you're working on and why you're so interested in working on that project.
Sabrina: Sure. The term that encompasses my project would be agrivoltaics. It is a second stage of a previous project that Kirsten, our research assistant here worked on, which was evaluating the use of solar panels for shade for grazing dairy cattle, and so those solar panels still exist here on the farm. Now the next stage of this is growing various crops specifically more forage-focused for our dairy cattle, and then testing those crops to see their nutritive value. Mainly just seeing which crops can grow under a solar panel or not, and how that could benefit a dairy farmer, and what options it might give to dairy farmers or other farmers who are interested in bringing solar onto their farm. That is the grand overview of what my project's all about.
Joe: Perfect. Brad mentioned that you guys are headed to your farm tomorrow. Give us a little bit of your background on that, the farm side, and whether or not this project applies to your farm at home as well.
Sabrina: Yes, so I grew up on about a 280 cow, Brown Swiss dairy farm, and it's been about that size since I've been 10 years old. We've maintained and somehow we're still in the business, which is exciting, but also looking forward to the future. Hopefully, that can continue for the next generation. Just like any dairy farmer, we're always looking for ways to be more profitable or to be more efficient with our resources. This project really aligns with that idea of how can we look at farms as a complete system and how we can find ways for farmers to be profitable and also sustainable thinking about the environment. As far as my own farm, I know my parents have looked into wind energy.
The cooperative that they sell to is trying to promote that as well. For my family at least, we figured out that wind energy probably wouldn't pencil out for us, but maybe solar could be an option. If that solar panel could offer some other benefit to our animals, that would be a great plus for the farm as well. Being able to not just have that land being used for only one resource, but multiple is just a great way to efficiently or sustainably intensify our agriculture production.
Joe: As part of this project, are you guys looking at the economics as well as part of-- I know we already talked to Kirsten about some of that, where we're looking at, okay, what's the milk production that we're seeing from the shade? Are you focused on some of that side as well and including it in the whole system model?
Sabrina: So far it hasn't been in my scope, my part of the project, but it's definitely something to consider and hopefully would be something that could be calculated based on the data that we're collecting. I don't know if Brad has anything to add to that.
Bradley: Oh, no, we have big plans, of course, as always. Now, eventually, there'll be some economics in there, but we're venturing off into different realm, looking at portable. We're going to design our own portable solar shade system around here for cows so we can pull it around the pasture. It's exciting what we're going to do with it. That's the up-and-coming thing.
Emily: Bradley is always on top of the latest trend I find. I do have a question. Bradley, you said economics is maybe the next phase for this project, but for this phase in the project, what sort of data are you gathering? What are the variables and different things that you're looking at with this project?
Sabrina: With this project, we're growing 14 different species, five different sites where crops are growing. At each site, the solar panel is a little different. Really there's a lot of moving parts and it'll be a little difficult to compare panel or site to site, but at least within the site, we're going to look at how the crops fare and the data we're using to look at that. We are collecting biomass. Whenever a crop is ready to be harvest or for example, the grass would be at grazing stage, we go and harvest a biomass sample and then mow that plot to simulate grazing.
Then from those samples, we will also send them off for nutritive value. Ahead of time we also took soil samples and of course, there'll be weather data. Then we also took weed samples here before we weeded everything to look at weed pressure. Ideally, we would also have some environmental sensors underneath the panels. However, with supply chain issues, those have not arrived yet but beyond that, most of it is harvesting data that we'll be looking at.
Emily: This is a large project. There's a lot of things you're measuring. Each of the sites has the same 14 plantings there.
Sabrina: One of the sites is smaller, so it just has 10 species, but each of the other four have the 14 species and four replicates of each of those species. There's like 260 some individual plots at each that we're working with.
Emily: That's a lot of plots [unintelligible 00:10:03] [chuckles]
Sabrina: It is and the other week, we weeded them all. Thankfully, with the help of great interns, and Kirsten came out and helped, and Brad supervised, of course.
Emily: Supervised. Sat in the ranger with his legs up, sipping a nice tea or something, I'm sure.
Bradley: Yes. I usually go overboard on everything. We've probably planted way more than what we should have. We found one of the solar sites that-- We haven't got much rain here in Morris, and one of them is drying up really nice and has pretty much-killed everything so we might abandon that one.
Sabrina: Which you told us after we weeded it.
Joe: Of course, after you weeded it, he let you know that. Like Emily said, it sounds like a lot of work, lots of different variables, lots of different things going on. I assume corn is one of the forage species, right?
Sabrina: Yes. We have a couple of grain crops, and then mostly forages. We have corn, soybeans, wheat, oats. There's two different grasses, and then we have white clover, alfalfa, red clover, some field peas, sorghum Sudan, all thrown in there. We have a variety that we're trying to see what will happen.
Joe: My first question when I hear some of that is how did you plant it underneath the solar panels?
Sabrina: Yes, a very good question. We had a little two-and-a-half foot plot seeder that we used for each of the species. Probably it wasn't designed for each of those species, but we did our best with that. Just planting in and of itself took a while, and we had a very wet spring. We were dodging rain events, but we got it all done. The plot seeder basically requires two passes to plant a plot because it's two and a half feet. We just go up and down the row and made sure all our seeds were in the right order which was a puzzle in and of itself. We made it and there are plants in the right plots so that's good.
Joe: That's good because I think about the problem with planting and with harvest, if we're going to do, this is more probably looking at like a grazing aspect of these things. You're not going to have to harvest any of these small grains. Are you thinking about that as well? When you're thinking about, okay, what's being planted, how much clearance do we have, all of those kinds of things.
Sabrina: I realize the logistical difficulty of planting between solar panels. For some of the crops that we planted, for example, corn, the way the panels are set up currently might be a little difficult other than maybe one of the sites you could fit some tractors through. Right now, it's more of a proof of concept what is going to grow before we consider logistically how might this happen with various equipment.
For our plot purposes, at least we had small enough equipment both for tilling and seeding to go through. For harvesting, I'm doing everything by hand and then mowing it with a little basically two-and-a-half-foot mower as well. There are definitely considerations about how a farmer could conceivably do this. I know it's possible. There are great engineers out there that can help with that and hopefully, farmers will be involved in the process as well.
Emily: Can you maybe just share-- I don't know, are all the solar panels at each of the sites the same height? I know, when these were used for the grazing cattle, shade research, the look on Brad's face right now, I don't know what it's telling me. I know that they are higher. I think most of us when we're driving around and see these large "solar farms," the panels are just off the ground. How tall are the panels that you're working with at your various sites?
Sabrina: Sure. The panels are each between 8 to 10 feet off the ground so a cow could fit under them. All of our equipment was able to fit under them. However, there is variation. One site, for example, is on a hill and so at some points, the panel is higher off the ground than in others. You have to be careful because it's not even across the site. For our purposes, we made it through. I don't think there was any damage to any panels that I know of. That was good. Because it was thought of that there'd be cows grazing underneath is why we have this opportunity to plant crops as well.
Joe: I know there's still data coming in and you can't say anything definitively. What seems to be doing well and what is maybe struggling a little bit?
Sabrina: Sure. I don't have numbers yet. We were definitely surprised by the small grains. The oats and the wheat came in really good stands and were able to compete with the weeds. A little background these plots are all managed organically. Therefore, weed management proves to be a little complicated in that we are mainly managing weeds by weeding. The oats and the wheat were able to outcompete the weeds and had a great start both in our control plot that's not under the panels and the ones that are under the panels.
They've been doing really well. Then surprisingly also our grasses and clovers are doing well in the shade compared to in the sun. I think again, part of that might be due to weed pressure. There's less weed pressure actually we're seeing in the shade compared to in the sun. Then, of course, corn is not doing so well in the shade. Not a big surprise there. Those are our initial observations of what's going on out there.
Joe: How's the sorghum Sudan growing?
Sabrina: The sorghum is growing pretty well as well. Definitely better in the sun though. For example, we have one site completely covered in shade so there's not big gaps in between the panels. Underneath that one actually, each crop is there and I wouldn't say thriving but at least it's only a little farther behind than the one that's our control plot not under a panel. Under there we do have corn and sorghum. They're a little short right now, but they are growing. We'll see how everything turns out.
Joe: I find this fascinating. I'm just in the last couple of years between learning from Bradley and from our crops team, I'm learning about the fact that there's a million different forage species out there that I had no idea about. A lot of them are in my opinion more practical than others because of cost and that kind of thing. I really find this interesting because when it comes down to it and conditions are absolutely perfect, corn is still going to win when we're talking about how forage is produced and how much is there in the field.
I love that we have more information to add to the toolbox as far as what is there when things aren't perfect and when conditions aren't perfect for corn, what else can we use? Do you see this being something where you would approach it as a monoculture or would you think that mixing some of these species is maybe a better option?
Sabrina: I echo what you said, just giving farmers more tools in the toolbox because most of the time conditions aren't perfect. We do have grass and clover mixed and just from a soil health perspective and maybe also an animal health perspective, I think a diverse mix is a great idea, especially since we're seeing that the grasses are growing well under the panels.
It might be a great option to just plant a diverse mix, perennial mix, or even if you're doing some annuals underneath the panels and graze those, that would also free up the complication of having equipment under there to harvest. I think it provides a great option for farmers. If you were to hay that too, you can do it that way if your equipment fits between and provide another feed source for your cows.
Bradley: You asked a good question, Joe. We are going to work with a farmer in southern Minnesota that are going to grow corn and soybeans underneath some solar panels too. It's not really a controlled research project, but we'll be just monitoring it and see what happens and taking some measurements. It'll be interesting to see how that shakes out when it's out in the real world in a production environment to see what happens.
Joe: This seems like just a tiny piece in a big project as it moves forward with a lot of stages to come because like you said, proof of concept, what's going to do well, what's not, there's so many ways to go from here. What do you see as the next step? Obviously, we're talking economics, trying to figure out how the logistics. We talked about a portable unit, which makes a lot of sense for grazing. We've maybe identified species that do better. What's the next step? Where do we go from here?
Bradley: That's a good question because we might venture off into, we talked about solar portable ones, but can we use the solar energy from the panels to either maybe run some irrigation pumps to irrigate the pasture? We're also going to include an electric tractor. Of course, I wrote grant money, so to get this. We're getting in a Monarch Electric tractor. It's going to come out of California. We're going to hope that we're going to get it here towards the end of the year. We'll be able to utilize an electric tractor, powered from the solar panel. I think the sky's the limit so we can kind of utilize the solar energy in many different ways with crops, with the livestock, and tractors, irrigation, you name it.
Joe: The irrigation was something I was going to ask about. We see a lot of old pumps powered by wind still that work excellent. They've been around forever, so yes, I was going to ask about that. I'm glad that you said something because obviously, that would bolster our ability to use that area as you've seen with our lack of rain for a long time now and one site kind of dying off now.
Bradley: We're going to try and develop something like that with our portable system, at least see if we can put some sort of means of irrigation on there. I'm not sure yet. We haven't quite figured out the design, but it's a thought anyways.
Joe: That's just what you need is more water lines going everywhere, around that space. That's-
Bradley: Exactly.
Joe: -miles and miles of water lines.
Emily: I have one more question, and it's a follow up actually to what you said at the very beginning, Sabrina, and you said your research, technically the work you're doing is in agrivoltaics, and I did look it up, but I'm wondering if you could maybe just briefly for our listeners who like me have maybe never heard that word before now, what does it mean? Just the long and short of it, what is agrivoltaics?
Sabrina: Sure. I wouldn't say I don't know the exact definition, but agri is agriculture and voltaics would relate to photovoltaics. The solar energy, that's another term for solar energy that is being turned into electricity or use for humans. It's a combination of agriculture and basically solar panels on the same piece of land and trying to be more efficient.
Joe: All right. Well, something we've been doing lately when we have students on is letting them turn it back to us. If you have any questions for us, especially for Bradley, if you've been dying to ask him something and you want to put them on the spot, this is the time.
Sabrina: Anything or related to--
Joe: Absolutely anything.
Emily: Anything?
Joe: Absolutely anything.
Sabrina: I don't know. What do you guys think? Do you think that farmers will actually be interested in growing crops under solar panels?
Joe: I think that the shade is the key. The way you guys have set up this research, identifying that shade makes a huge difference. Establishing the value of that first, it makes a big difference. I think that as we see probably some of these solar panels become even more subsidized in this kind of setting. I think that yes, this is a viable option for a lot of people and I really do, I really think that farmers will pick up on it if we can establish the break-even and have it broken down into a very clear, here's what you can expect, here's how we can mitigate the cost of the solar panels themselves, and all the ways that it benefits. If we can get that in a spreadsheet, easy to use tool, I think farmers will absolutely adopt it.
Emily: Yes, my answer is really similar to Joe's. I think that there are a lot of benefits to this and I think that the biggest probably bottleneck or issue right now in getting people to adopt these practices is all of the questions. I think once all of the questions of the mechanics and the technicals and everything else, once that's figured out, like really with any new technology or new way of doing things, you have the early adapters and those are the ones who are going to work out all the kinks and run into all the problems and have all their hair turned gray. Then once all those big questions are answered, then the meaty part of the bell curve is going to move in and by then it will hopefully be more streamlined and easier for people to adapt to.
Then we can also get those late adapters at the end. Like I said, really, really similar to Joe. I think there's a lot of stuff here and we're all aware of how weather is changing, the climate is changing, however, you want to say it. Knowing that competition for land is very real. Finding these dual uses for land that really is the way forward for a lot of this type of work within agriculture and without. I'm excited to see what the final results of this project are, Sabrina, and kind of to see the next phases of it as Bradley was talking about integrating economic information and data as well. I see it, I'm a believer. I'm a believer in agrivoltaics and I just like saying that word.
Sabrina: Well, that's good to hear. People ask me what is my favorite part of agrivoltaics. I guess so far it's been telling people when they ask what my research is that I'm growing crops under solar panels. You'll never get two same responses from people when you tell them that. It's always hard to read then what people are thinking of this research. Good to hear your guys' thoughts as well. I don't know if Brad has more to add.
Bradley: Of course. I'll tell people I am not a big fan of solar panels taking away good farmland. I think there can be a lot of good dual uses. Last night I was out in the countryside and saw lots of solar panels on good farmland. I think that we should work with solar developers to figure out how we can make it dual use, whether it's crops or livestock, instead of take away good farmland. I think that's going to be a problem as we go into the future. I'm not sure that the public or anybody's going to like good land being used for solar only.
Joe: I get a really kind of weird feeling in the pit of my stomach when I drive by and I see these giant solar farms that now have turned that land into just that one use. Can't do anything else with it because of the way it's constructed.
Bradley: They have to go out and mow it if they got weeds or whatever. Why not put for me cattle? Other people have used sheep or other species, so why not make it dual use instead of just going out and mowing it?
Joe: Agreed. Before we get out of here, we need an update from Bradley. Something again, happened. We already disclosed that Bradley went off the deep end, added some holsteins to his herd at home, which was the first step in his midlife crisis. Then the second was that he again, is milking cows at home. Brad, walk us through the thought process.
Emily: Are you milking cows or are you milking cow?
Bradley: Cow.
Joe: One cow. I apologize.
Bradley: One cow. Again, it is the same cow. It is the same cow that I milked through the pandemic, so it is approaching county fair time. I went to my hometown and got her and brought her back here so we could show her at the county fair. We are milking for a little bit. I'm drying her off actually. She's going to be a dry cow. This morning I switched to once-a-day milking, so that's a whole different subject. We were milking twice a day. Now I went to once a day. She's probably going to go dry in a week and my son wants to show her, so we'll make that happen, but she's going to be a nice dry cow.
Joe: Well, that's a better story than I was expecting. I was expecting a long milking schedule for Bradley for quite a while all the way through the state fair. Now that she's going dry, that's less bad, but you're still milking.
Bradley: Still milking and everything works. I plugged in my pump and off it went. It's like I could start all over again with this madness. You never know.
Emily: I have an important question. Does this cow have a name?
Bradley: Yes, it's Fizz.
Emily: Fizz. Oh, that's delightful.
Joe: Fizz, that's a great name. All right, Em, wrap us up.
Emily: Before I wrap us up. I do have a little bit of an announcement. Bradley and Joseph already know this, but The Moos Room is now a national award-winning podcast. Last week I was in Florida for the annual meeting and Professional improvement conference of the National Association of County Agricultural Agents, where I had entered an episode of The Moos Room into the audio recording communications contest. We made it through state-level judging, regional judging, and national judging, and were named the winners for 2022 for audio recording.
Specifically, I submitted episode 84 of The Moos Room, which is the episode we did for National Farm Safety and Health Week with my dad. If you haven't listened to that one yet, episode 84, Dale Krekelberg's story, please check it out. Huge shout out to our crew here, Brad, Joe, and to my dad for guesting on that episode. I am the one who entered it, but really it's an award for all of us. Now you can tell people you listen to an award-winning podcast, The Moos Room. With all of that out of the way, we can wrap things up here for today. If you have any questions, comments, or scathing rebuttals about today's episode, you can email those to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Joe: That's T-H-E M-O-O-S R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Emily: If you have a burning question for The Moos Room that you would like us to answer on a future episode, you can call that number at 612-624-3610 to leave us a voicemail. Follow us on Twitter @UMNmoosroom and @UMNfarmfafety. Follow Bradley on Instagram @umnwcrocdairy. For more information about any cattle production topic, you can visit our website, extension.umn.edu.
Joe: A big shout-out to Sabrina. We really appreciate you being on today. Thank you.
Emily: That is a wrap. Bye.
Joe: Bye.
[00:30:52] [END OF AUDIO]
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