A late summer sun beat down last Thursday morning on the dairy cows in the pasture at Maple View Farm, on a crowd of people gathered nearby - and on an array of 276 solar panels recently erected beside the pasture.

The panels, their silvery faces tilted toward the south, turned that sunlight into electricity and fed it into a transformer just across Dairyland Road, where it joined the vast stream of energy powering nearby homes, farms and businesses.

The cows seemed unimpressed. The human contingent on hand, though, expressed excitement and enthusiasm for the project, part of Duke Energy's $50 million distributed solar program, which has placed solar fields at sites throughout North Carolina.

"Isn't that beautiful?" said Aaron Nelson, president of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce, which joined the Hillsborough-Orange County Chamber of Commerce, the Maple View Agricultural Center and Duke Energy in dedicating the solar field Thursday morning.

The project is a collaboration between Duke Energy and the Maple View Agricultural Center, an educational facility that opened last year at Maple View to teach children about agriculture.

For farmer Bob Nutter, who owns Maple View Farm, the solar project is merely the latest of a string of innovative ways he has branched out from traditional dairy farming. He still does that, but he also has begun his own milk-bottling center, spun off three Maple View Ice Cream shops, partnered with Agricultural Center founder Allison Nichols to establish that project.

Duke Energy leases the land on which the solar field was built from him.

"This new project Allison has got going here, it was her idea," Nutter said. "I thought it was a good idea. It's not the first time I've tried something new - bottling our own milk, making our own ice cream, those were new things too.

"But this is the last new thing I'm going to try. I'll be 82 years old this month."

Nelson said he doubted Nutter's word on that.

"I think he has more in him," he said. "The energy and leadership and forward thinking this farm has done for this community is extraordinary."

The Maple View solar field can produce 180 kilowatts per day, enough to power 235 homes, said Brett Carter, president of Duke Energy Carolinas.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," Carter said. "This is one of 13 solar sites we're placing throughout the state. But the special thing about this location is that we believe it will help sustain the renewable energy approach by getting students, the next generation, involved in sustainable energy."

The solar field project is one of the ways Duke Energy is working to comply with legislation passed by the General Assembly in 2007 that requires power companies to produce at least 12.5 of their energy from renewable sources by 2021.

Steve Troxler, the North Carolina commissioner of agriculture, gestured toward the solar field and the cows and barns beyond it. The scene, he said, represented one of the ways that agriculture - still by far the biggest industry in the state - can "grow us out of this recession": by partnering with other industries to establish innovative programs.

"That looks like the old and the new," he said. "But it's not. What you see there is the perfect blend of what the future will be like in agriculture."