Harvesting food and energy for a more resilient nation.

Midwest Agrivoltaics for Resilient Communities (MARC) is a regional weather resilience incubator funded in 2025 by the National Science Foundation. MARC is based at Purdue University, with support from the Purdue Institute for a Sustainable Future.

MARC is focused on the transformative potential of agrivoltaics – harvesting food and energy on the same land – to enhance the economic resilience and power security of rural Midwestern communities in the face of severe weather. Producing both food and energy locally can help diversify and stabilize landowner income, reduce power outages, and ultimately create a more prosperous rural Midwest. But agrivoltaics are new and stakeholders face many challenges and uncertainties. Overcoming these obstacles requires trust and objective information. MARC aims to fill this gap by bringing together community, agriculture, and energy partners and serve as a source of trusted information for supporting agrivoltaics decision-making.

We are focused on the following questions:

• Can agrivoltaics boost local and regional economic resilience to extreme weather?
• Can solar microgrids increase power security and reduce weather-induced outages?
• What types of agrivoltaic systems are most suitable in different regions?
• Can all of the above make solar more acceptable to local communities?

To tackle these questions, MARC is developing infrastructure to quantify the potential resilience benefits of agrivoltaics for the local/regional economy and of solar microgrids for local power security; evaluate the suitability of agrivoltaics pathways across agricultural, energy, and social dimensions; and work directly with stakeholders to foster dialogue, build trust, and identify community-centered solutions.

MARC is hosting the 2026 Indiana Land Use and Agrivoltaics Summit on Thurs Aug 27, 2026 at the Beck Agricultural Center in West Lafayette, IN. For more information, please contact Summit lead: Dr. Kara Salazar (salazark@purdue.edu)