Greg Barron-Gafford

Greg Barron-Gafford, the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Southwest Borderlands Food and Water Security,  is a Biogeographer and Earth System Scientist. He and his band of collaborators have been building the field of agrivoltaics - the co-location of an ‘understory’ of agriculture below an ‘overstory’ of renewable energy production. This is a novel way of linking the societal needs of food and energy in a way that benefits both - all while reducing dependence on irrigation. Through this agrivoltaics approach, Barron-Gafford's team is directly targeting simultaneous sustainable development goals with a singular system. The understory gets protection from the summer sun and winter freezes, and solar panels are cooled by the transpirational water loss from plants below. 
 

Greg began this work in the borderlands of southern Arizona to study the benefits across the food-energy-water nexus. Today, he and his team are building an international network of community-driven agrivoltaic installations that creates resilience in their food access, brings renewable energy to the many that still lack access, and offers the potential of water pumping, desalinization, and water purification because of the overstory of solar power. The team is connecting researchers and rural community leaders across the American Southwest, Mexico, Kenya, Tanzania, Israel, and Morocco.