In the brief time that it wasn’t raining at Elon University this past week, a varied group of educators, staff members, students and community members gathered together to explore Loy Farm.
“It’s just solar panels, right?” said sophomore Annie Skeadas.
This confusion and curiosity of the farm led the Office of Sustainability to open up more tours of Loy Farm for anyone looking to learn more about the property.
Isolated off campus, just past the intramural fields, Loy Farm is home to farming systems, long-term ecological research, greenhouses, the Design Build Studio for Responsible Architecture and the recently added solar farm.
Home to the sun
Elaine Durr, director of sustainability, and Jessica Bilecki, education and outreach coordinator, led the group on an hourlong tour of Loy Farm. They began with the solar panels, one of the most popular features of the farm.
According to Durr, there will be 9,900 panels across approximately 15 acres when the installation is complete. Workers were still in the process of installing the remainder of the panels while the group toured the farm.
“We expect to generate enough energy from the solar panels to power 415 homes per year,” Durr said in an email. “To think of it in terms of university energy consumption, on an annual basis, this farm is expected to produce 10 percent of the university’s annual electricity needs.”
Durr emphasized the significant difference the panels will have on the university’s sustainability goals.
“Another way to think about this is if we were to do this with a carbon source of energy, its about 21,000 metric tons of carbon that would have been used if we had used a carbon source of fuel,” she said. “Twenty-one thousand metric tons is 450 cars per year.”
These solar panels are not actually owned by the university. Rather, the university leased the land to Loy Farm Solar LLC, a third party that is responsible for the development and construction. The initial lease is for 15 years.
There were a few reasons that led Elon to lease the land to a third party rather than install the panels itself. The biggest factor was cost.
“This is a fairly expensive project, it’s about a $6 million project,” Durr said. “The primary reason Elon wouldn’t just do this on our own is because the university would have to pay that amount. We really needed to find a third party that had tax liabilities. It is an investment for them.”
But the university was determined to have this farm for many educational reasons.
“First, the educational opportunities for our students to come here and learn about this facility and to learn how solar works and the output,” she said. “Once the facility is functional we will be able to send output information to the university using the dashboard system.”
There is also a dashboard online containing information about several buildings on Elon’s campus and their energy usage.
The dashboard shows specific information regarding how much energy residence halls use and how much energy academic buildings use on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. The dashboard also tracks the energy used hourly so people can see what times of day energy is being used the most and students can examine why this happens.
Reduce, reuse and relive
From the panels, the group then took a BioBus — another eco-friendly resource of Elon — to see the urban studio, food and farming systems, the other features of Loy Farm.
The urban studio looks like a mobile home from afar, but it is an art studio. Bilecki clarified as to what made up the interesting choice in architecture. A class was responsible for designing and building this studio.
“It is made out of four different shipping containers,” she said. “Shipping containers are a pretty big waste problem and concern. They take up a lot of space. People were looking to reuse them and now we have that whole workshop made out of containers.”
Other eco-friendly materials also make up the workshop. The class used wood that was cast off from other construction projects. Additionally, there is an entire wall that is made up of plastic glass.
“This clear Plexiglas wall allows sunlight to come through,” she said. “If you think about the types of indoor spaces you like to spend time in, generally if there is daylight, people are more productive in those spaces.”
The Plexiglas does make the studio a little colder because of the lack of insulation, but there are heaters placed in the studio that heat the place using as little energy as possible.
Giving back to the community
During the tour, there was a class seated at picnic tables near this studio. Bilecki encourages students, faculty and staff to use this space for learning or just enjoying.
“The agricultural part of the farm is used for undergraduate research and for students who are in classes,” she said. “It is really an education space where students can learn about farming, sustainable food systems and the methods and theory behind that.”
The Office of Sustainability only asks that groups tell Janet MacFall, professor of environmental studies and biology, they want to use the space, so she can orchestrate the farm’s visitors.
Additionally, students who participate in the Peace Corp prep program come down to the farm to learn about the agricultural component of their program.
A little way past the urban studio is the hoop house: a greenhouse with a large dome-type structure that allows produce to grow year round.
“If it gets really cold, you can put another row cover over the produce that acts like a blanket,” Bilecki said. “There are no additional tie-ins to electricity.”
Some food that is grown at Loy Farm goes to Campus Kitchen, an organization that provides meals to community members in need. They cook about 200 meals with the produce that will go to Allied churches or two senior citizen centers.
Other food goes to catering.
“If you are having an event you can ask to incorporate food from Loy Farms,” Bilecki said.
But she said if groups do choose this option, they should have an open mind considering there will be limited option for meals.
“You’re going to get what’s in season, so you don’t have a lot of say in what they give you,” Bilecki said.
Many different members uphold the farm and all of its different features. Along the walk, a tour group member spotted beehives in the distance.
“One of the beehives actually came from a building on campus where they had swarmed,” Bilecki said. “We had a great groundskeeper who was able to get them out here.”
Currently, Loy Farm doesn’t harvest the honey, but the bees do vital work as they help fertilize and pollinate plants. In the future, Durr and Bilecki hope to use them for undergraduate research.