From scale-neutral to scale-specific: rethinking agrivoltaics through small farmers’ rationalities

Small-scale farmers in middle and high-income countries face considerable challenges in sustaining their operations. This has led some researchers to question how new agricultural technologies, such as digital technologies, which have rapidly scaled up in large-scale agriculture, may benefit or burden small farms. To date, however, scholarship on agrivoltaics has largely been scale-neutral and techno-optimistic. In this study, we investigate the potential of agrivoltaics, the co-location of solar panels and agricultural production, to specifically benefit small-scale producers in arid, semi-arid, and water-stressed contexts. Drawing on interviews with small-scale farmers in Tucson, Arizona, we demonstrate how they are adapting solar and other renewable energy technologies to fit their needs and goals but are largely not considering agrivoltaics for their farms often due to political-economic considerations including tenure, ownership, and control. We show that small-scale, diversified farmers in Arizona draw on diverse rationalities to evaluate agrivoltaics, some of which challenge the primacy given to profit motives in existing agrivoltaics literature. Through this research, we help to expand the critical social science study of agricultural technologies by adding a case study of a novel technology (agrivoltaics) being proposed to support farm livelihoods. We also build on the budding social science study of agrivoltaics, contributing a more critical view that questions the distribution of benefits from this technology, centering the voices of small-scale farmers.