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About The Animal Farm
The Rutgers Cook Campus New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Animal Farm hosts equine and livestock facilities. Horses, beef cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats are raised and maintained for faculty research, teaching, and demonstration needs. The cattle, goats, pigs, and sheep are raised as production animals, producing offspring throughout the year.
Agrivoltaics at the Animal Farm
Designed to study pasture forage production and animal grazing patterns in combination with vertical bifacial solar panels
The rows of solar panels are oriented North-South and the panels are arranged in a fixed vertical orientation to collect energy while allowing for larger farming equipment to pass between the rows and for reducing the row-to-row shading
The installation is a randomized, replicated, controlled experiment designed for the evaluating of two factors: Row spacing (20 feet or 40 feet apart) and mounting height (clearance height of 2 feet or 4 feet). The four combinations of these two factors are augmented with control treatments without panels
The different experimental treatments were randomly allocated to equally-sized plots and the solar array effects on pasture growth and animal behavior is being studied within these plots
- Vertical bifacial arrays
- Control (open sky)