Attitude and perception of the public toward integrating solar energy with livestock farming.

• Grant number: 23/16174-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: April 01, 2024
• End date: March 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Agronomical Sciences - Animal Husbandry - Animal Production
• Principal Investigator: Matheus Deniz
• Grantee: Linley Viana Maciel
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária e Zootecnia (FMVZ). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Botucatu. Botucatu , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In the dairy industry, farmers look for ways to avoid heat stress in their animals, and in the coming years, they may choose to house the cows and use pasture areas to implement a photovoltaic system. However, consumers are increasingly concerned about factors related to farm animal welfare and often consider the zero-grazing systems to be poor for animal welfare. To avoid errors associated with the adoption of technologies or alternative systems that fail to meet social values, there is merit in investigating how the public will accept certain solutions to existing challenges, such as how to mitigate the effects of heat stress on dairy cattle and clean energy generation. To our knowledge, no studies investigated the conflicting concerns between heat abatement, animal welfare, and energy production, or examined the public's perception of the conflicting scenarios of natural life, animal biological functioning, and energy production from photovoltaic panels. Thus, this study aims to evaluate the attitude and perception of the Brazilian public regarding the use of resources for heat abatement in dairy farms associated with the use of photovoltaic panels. The survey will be carried out through the Google Forms platform and the participants will be recruited exclusively online. The questionnaire will contain open-ended, Likert-scale, and multiple-choice questions. Initially, the participants must answer sociodemographic questions. Then, each participant will be randomly assigned to one of four hypothetical scenarios regarding the introduction of photovoltaic panels on dairy farms. A brief description of the scenario will be presented, and the participants will have to answer questions so that we can assess their attitudes and perceptions regarding the scenario to which it was directed. Finally, the participants will have to answer four multiple-choice questions so that we can assess their knowledge regarding dairy production. We predict that the public will be more optimistic with animals raised on pasture regardless of the heat abatement resource. However, between photovoltaic panels and trees, for ecological and sustainable reasons the public will have a more positive perception of trees as a heat abatement resource and use of photovoltaic panels in a system of integration with pasture.