Oregon farm uses six giant solar “sunflowers” that track the Sun while tractors and lettuce share the field
The sun heats up the rows of lettuce like a cover as early as seven o’clock in the morning on a summer day in Sherwood, Oregon. The fields of Our Table Cooperative’s 58-acre farm lie quietly in the morning sunlight—and above them, six high structures start moving.
Gently, almost silently, the six 20-foot solar panel structures tilt to face the sun. With each tilt, the fields below them experience patches of shadow moving slowly—dark, ephemeral shadows as clouds do in bright skies. Even the tractors can move below them uninterrupted. The lettuce continues growing.
There is something new happening in this field.
Climate stress, energy costs, and land scarcity don’t resolve themselves separately, and a system that addresses all three at once is worth watching closely.
A farm under pressure from a warming climate
Our Table Cooperative manages a 58-acre certified organic farm in Sherwood, Oregon, and is responsible for providing food to thousands of locals. At a glance, it seems to be all about simple farming – soil, seeds, harvest, and repeat. However, summers have complicated the process significantly.
The heat of the Oregon summer is putting the temperature-intolerant crops, such as lettuce and other leafy greens, under pressure. These types of plants do not cope with the heat well. The quality suffers, there is less product, and the chance of a successful harvest is getting smaller every year.
“We are all affected by climate change,” says Narendra Varma, Executive Director of Our Table Cooperative. “It really has an impact on our bottom line.”
This is no exaggeration. If there is no effective strategy to deal with increasing temperatures, the future of both crops and the farm is uncertain. Therefore, Our Table needed to find a way to deal with the heat issue without disturbing the farm itself.
Six ‘sunflowers’ that follow the sun — and cool the field
The solution turned out to be six Stracker S1B elevated solar trackers – structures that move gradually above rows of lettuce during mornings now. Each tracker has a 20-foot pole as its base and solar panels mounted on two axes, which allow them to move according to the position of the sun on the horizon and change angles according to seasons. Six such trackers in total have 168 bifacial solar panels that generate 75.6 kW of energy. This means that these panels collect energy not only from one side but also from reflections from the ground.
However, it is not the movement itself that makes these structures unique, but the consequences that come with them. Due to the movement of arrays, their shadows move too, creating constantly moving shade above crops. It means that these trackers create not a stationary shade on a certain piece of ground, but constantly changing shade above growing plants.
This technology allows leaving the farm working as usual due to the minimum distance from the surface that equals 14 feet and allows tractors and other agricultural machinery to pass below them without any changes in practice.
Power, resilience, and a battery that keeps the food cold
With this system, it is anticipated that 150,000 kWh of renewable energy will be produced each year — sufficient to provide 100% of the farm’s electrical needs. Quite significant in itself. Yet the system goes beyond this.
A Sol-Ark battery backup system provides the necessary backup electricity for the store and food refrigeration in the event of power failures. This is crucial for a farm providing products to thousands of people in the community. Without this backup system, a failure of power would constitute a food safety concern. The system provides for this necessity.
The economics are quite clear. Savings of about $16,524 per year are expected, with an anticipated payback period of about ten years and savings over twenty years of more than $563,000. The funding for the project comes from the Renewable Development Fund offered by Portland General Electric and made possible through the Green Future℠ program from PGE.
A research partnership to prove the model at scale
It is not just an improvement of the farm, but it is a research collaboration established between the College of Agricultural Sciences at Oregon State University, the Manav Foundation, and Our Table Cooperative, with the purpose of researching how partial shading of crops with solar panels impacts the yield, quality, and profitability of the farm. Intuition says that shading is beneficial for heat-stressed lettuce. Intuition is not evidence, and evidence is what agriculture requires before implementing this innovation in other regions.
“What we are trying to do is figure out how we can integrate the use of solar into farming so that we can continue farming and make sure that both the solar and the farming remain profitable,” says Chad Higgins, Assistant Professor at Oregon State University.
This duality is crucial. Agrivoltaic systems will not work if any part of the process is negatively impacted by the other. The project has been called the first agrivoltaic microgrid in the U.S., making this research nationally significant.
What Sherwood’s lettuce rows might mean for American farming
Narendra Varma is direct about where his priorities lie. “Although energy generation has an immediate benefit and has a really positive impact on our bottom line as a business,” he says, “it’s almost more important for us to have the crop part of it work out.”
That framing matters. Agrivoltaics — using the same land simultaneously for food production and solar energy — is increasingly discussed as a response to competing pressures on agricultural land. Climate stress, energy costs, and land scarcity don’t resolve themselves separately, and a system that addresses all three at once is worth watching closely.
If the OSU research validates what Our Table Cooperative is observing, it could offer a replicable blueprint for organic farms across the country facing similar pressures. The model doesn’t ask you to choose between farming and solar. It asks whether the two can simply coexist.
In Sherwood, however, the story is far from finished. The trackers change direction. The shadow moves slowly down the rows. The lettuce grows under shelters, which, at this time, are not only electricity generators but also parasols.
Kelly is an experienced writer with 15 years of experience exploring the big stories that shape our world, from tech breakthroughs and space exploration to climate, energy, and the fascinating quirks of science. She has a talent for turning complex ideas into sharp, memorable insights that stay with readers long after they’ve finished reading.
