WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Tonight's Brief But Spectacular features Byron Kominek, who's returned to his family's Colorado farm with a bold idea, grow crops and harvest solar energy.

At Jack's Solar Garden, Byron has transformed hayfields into a thriving hub, demonstrating how farming and clean energy can grow side by side.

BYRON KOMINEK, Farmer: Climate change is happening.

I don't really see a way that we can stop it.

So we need to learn to adapt to it.

Agrivoltaics is a way to help agriculture adapt to our hotter temperatures.

Continuing to do the same type of agriculture 20 years from now as we did back in the '80s and prior is not going to work because it's going to be too hot for a lot of crops.

We're already seeing that on our farm of my hay grass browning earlier.

I'm getting less production out of it and that's happening with plenty of other people too.

When I moved to the farm in 2016, I didn't really have a lot of connection to it.

Jack was my grandfather.

Never met the fellow.

Born in 1895, he was a carpenter the first half of his life, a farmer the second half.

He had a 120-acre farm in Westminster in Colorado, where my mother grew up.

I did five years with USAID in Zambia a couple years, in Mozambique.

I wanted to see what it would be to do something in my own culture.

The farm was there with nobody living on it for at least eight years.

And I learned about how we were losing money haying the fields.

It wasn't anything that was looking towards the future of what our farm could be for our family.

And the idea of solar came about because it was something that could be passive income for the land.

Dual land use is taking two different things and just doing it together.

With solar it could be a tennis court underneath solar panels.

It could be a beer garden, a bowling alley, whereas agrivoltaics is a subset of that where you're specifically integrating agricultural activities.

The dumbest thing I hear is that things can't grow in the shade.

I tell people go look in the forest.

There's plenty of things that grow underneath the trees.

The shade from the solar panels reduces the overall temperature on the property over the course of the day.

It reduces stresses on the various types of vegetation and shade keeps moisture in the ground longer.

And the hotter it is, the drier the land is.

So the more shade that's there, the more moisture can stay in the ground longer.

Dual use for landowners provides multiple streams of income and it -- oftentimes, for farmers and ranchers, it keeps the purpose of the land there.

For our land, it's really nice having people on the land.

I have a couple thousand people that come out to visit my land every year.

It makes me feel more part of the community.

It feels like I can be a better contributor to the community that I live in.

My name is Byron Kominek.

This is my Brief But Spectacular take on agrivoltaics.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.