• 2026 Indiana Land Use and Agrivoltaics Summit. MARC co-hosted a statewide Summit on August 27, 2026 at the Beck Agricultural Center in West Lafayette, IN, convening nearly 90 participants from more than 40 organizations — farmers and landowners, local officials, solar developers, utilities and rural electric cooperatives, agricultural organizations, and researchers — for a full day of presentations and facilitated breakout discussions on land use and agrivoltaics in Indiana. Summit lead: Dr. Kara Salazar (salazark@purdue.edu).
• Community focus groups. Structured focus groups with Indiana stakeholders on solar siting, land use concerns, and what information communities need to evaluate agrivoltaics. Results were presented back to participants and to the broader audience at the Summit.
• Statewide survey. A survey of Indiana residents and landowners is planned for fall 2026, building on themes surfaced in the focus groups and at the Summit.
• Extreme weather trends database. We are building a public, county-resolution database and interactive visualization of long-term U.S. extreme weather trends — hail, tornadoes, thunderstorm wind, freezing rain, peak wind, and precipitation — to give communities a common factual basis for understanding their local weather risk. Public release is planned; details to follow.
• Farm-scale economic resilience modeling. Modeling how dual-use solar affects farm income variability and economic resilience to weather extremes, at the farm and regional scale.
• Rural microgrid and energy resilience modeling. Multi-layer modeling of rural distribution systems and solar microgrids to quantify their potential to reduce weather-induced power outages.
• Industry, utility, and agricultural partnerships. Ongoing engagement and data-sharing collaborations with solar developers, investor-owned utilities, rural electric cooperatives, farmland management and agricultural finance organizations, and conservation groups across Indiana and the Midwest.
• Indiana Sustainability and Resilience Conference panel. The full MARC leadership team presented a joint panel — "Midwest Agrivoltaics Incubator: Increasing Resilience and Prosperity in the Midwest" — at the 2026 Indiana Sustainability and Resilience Conference, hosted by the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute, spanning the project's weather, economic, agricultural, and energy dimensions and gathering feedback from sustainability professionals, business leaders, and elected officials from across the state.
• Advisory Board. MARC convened its first Advisory Board meeting in January 2026 and will hold a second, partner-driven working meeting on Purdue's campus in fall 2026.
• Research dissemination. MARC results will be presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting (December 2026) and the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 2027).

MARC is a non-advocacy project. Our role is to provide objective information to help communities, key stakeholders, and decision-makers navigating the rapidly-evolving agrivoltaics landscape.