Two Massachusetts cranberry bogs that had stopped making financial sense to farm are growing berries again – with solar panels overhead helping pay the bills.

The Black Cat project in Plymouth and the Ring Road project in Kingston combine cranberry farming, community solar, and battery storage. Distributed Energy Infrastructure (DEI), which built the projects, says income from leasing the land for solar has made it viable to cultivate the long-idle bogs again.

It’s a particularly challenging form of agrivoltaics because cranberry bogs have soft, peaty soil and established vines that need to survive construction. You can’t just roll in with heavy equipment and start installing panels.

So the solar had to fit the farming. In a September article in North American Clean Energy, DEI cofounder and executive vice president Prateek Tare described panels raised 10 feet above the ground, leaving room for farm machinery underneath. Rows have more than 18 feet of clear space between them, and solar panel angles let sunlight reach the cranberry bogs.

Farmer Iain Ward helped work out those details, along with how construction could proceed without damaging the bogs. Even the protective mats needed changing: Black ones absorbed too much heat, so crews used white ones instead.

That care added time. Tare said construction took around eight months – roughly twice as long as a comparable conventional solar project.

“The DEI team was phenomenal at understanding and adapting solar construction so that energy production could coexist without damage to the perennial cropping system,” Ward said.

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