While optimizing land use for multiple benefits is not a novel concept, prior work is largely dominated by approaches to co-locate just one activity with solar development. Some notable exceptions include co-locating pollinator habitat with both solar and agriculture [12] and co-locating solar and agriculture with horticulture and dairy-grazing [13]. This has resulted in a patchwork of co-location approaches across multiple disciplines such as energy planning and policy, food systems science, and natural resources management. However, beyond this patchwork lies a new frontier—an emerging need for broader and more deliberate consideration of multiple energy and non-energy activities on working lands. To facilitate a more systematic exploration of this frontier, we offer a novel multi-benefit value stacking (MBVS) framework to explore land use efficiencies from co-location of solar generation and non-energy uses on working lands, a clear conceptual definition of such opportunities and the scales at which they can be considered, a table of compiled examples, and key gaps for future work in research and policy.
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