In the aftermath of Fukashima, Japan is accelerating its focus on renewable energies, particularly
solar. This week I received an alert in my email inbox highlighting the implementation of
solar sharing systems on productive farms in Japan, work that has been going on since probably before 2000. According to the report, "the practice of food and
energy double-generation, known as 'solar sharing' in Japan, was originally developed by Akira Nagashima in 2004." Like the United States and other developing countries, the average age of farmers in Japan is more than 60. Moreover, an increasing number have quit farming because their farms were not
profitable or they had to take on 2nd jobs to make up for reduced revenues from farming.
However, recently, government support for solar sharing has forced energy providers in Japan to buy energy from
local farmers enrolled in a special program, giving them a "living wage" so that they can continue to farm or to help young people stay on the farms. When I say farmers, I'm not speaking of mega farmers as would occur in the US, but small farms with as little as 2.5 hectares (about 7 acres). In Japan, municipal agricultural committees make decisions like these rather than the state and federal govt, which may account for the emphasis. Also, to remain in the program, there is a baseline that farmers must meet: "To ensure continuous farming, municipal agricultural committees require farmers to report annual amounts of cultivation and demand to take down the PV system from the
land if the amount of crops cultivated on the solar shared farmland gets reduced by more than 20%, compared to the pre-PV installation." This is to insure that some participant does not decide to become just an energy provider, rather than a food producer.
The cost of installation is borne by the farmer from the FIT proceeds received from energy providers over a period of 20 years. While the cost of a small solar system is not cheap ($126,000), it is more than offset by the FIT or feed-in-tariff rate which for the farmers described ranged from $16K-25K per year. Of
course, if the farmers continue to practice business as usual, their farms will still not be self-sustaining. You can read more at the link below and others from searching "solar sharing". There are also a few videos on youtube about Japan and solar energy policies. What permies might find interesting is that the technology is light and designed to be mobile or at least taken down and re-employed elsewhere easily.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/10/japan-next-generation-farmers-cultivate-agriculture-and-solar-energy