Farmers should see solar energy as a marketable product. Ottawa--Renewable energy is gaining ground among Canadian farmers with solar-generated electricity leading the way, says Farm Credit Canada. Farmers need to treat electricity produced through various solar systems as a commodity that they can sell on good days and purchase on overcast ones, FCC said. According to the 2021 Census of Agriculture, 11.9 per cent or 22,576 farms, reported some form of renewable energy production, more than double the 5.3 per cent, or 10,185 farms, in the 2016 census. The 2021 Ag Census found 17,080 farms produced renewable energy for their own use while the rest were selling it. FCC said farmers can come out ahead if they can sell electricity on sunny or windy days to a local or provincial power network and pull electricity from the grid when they need it. Producers should check for national and provincial incentives for adding alternative energy to their operations. They include potential subsidies, interest-free loans, rebates and buy-back of energy produced. FCC said that Nazim Cicek, a biosystems engineering professor and associate dean of agricultural and food sciences at the University of Manitoba, attributes lower costs and stronger incentives like carbon taxes as playing a big part in the growing number of farmers adopting solar energy systems. Solar energy production is the most common form of renewable energy production on Canadian farms, the Ag Census reported. Solar includes solar panels, solar heating equipment, solar fencing systems and solar water pumps. One factor at play in the growing adoption is the drop in solar costs by almost 90 per cent over the last 10 years. The number of farms that reported producing this form of energy rose to 68.5 per cent from 2016 to 14,587 in 2021. A bonus is that farmers can scale their setup to what they need. It might be for a high-electricity-consumption dairy farm, a crop farm that does not need as much or producing more than the operation needs and selling the excess. “If you can't feed the grid and utilize the grid as a storage, or don't have battery or another kind of storage technology, that becomes a problem.” Some of the cheapest sources of electricity that can be produced come from wind and solar, Cicek says. Like solar, the cost of harnessing the wind has also been slashed. “Wind energy cost has dropped by about 70 per cent over the last 10 years,” Cicek said. Wind was the second-most renewable energy-producing system reported in the census at 1,955 farms, up from 1,597 in 2016.