“It’s very frustrating to try to protect your farm,” cotton farmer Nancy Caywood told The Epoch Times.
“It’s eyesores to me,” she said.
Caywood said that surveyors and other people are coming onto her family’s land without their permission.
“They’re very bold,” she said, adding that she’s not sure which companies have been intruding on the Caywood property.
Caywood worries about what could happen to the solar installations near her if their parent companies go under. Abengoa, the Spanish company that built Solana Generating Station near Gila Bend, Arizona, recently filed for bankruptcy.
She is also concerned that the land used for solar farms may never be able to be restored to farmland.
Even now, the land her family owns close to the new solar farm is apparently being affected by the massive installation. Caywood’s son Travis measured ambient temperatures on the east end of the family’s farm that were 10 degrees warmer than the rest of the property.
Representatives of NextEra Energy Resources didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment by press time.
The project’s website claims it will generate more than 900,000 megawatts of electricity per year from 850,000 solar panels.
A spokesperson for the Solar Energy Industries Association, an industry trade organization, offered a different perspective.
“Solar projects and agricultural lands are often highly compatible. Farmers and landowners can gain significant revenue for lands they are not actively farming and projects almost always are conducted to the benefit of both parties,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email.
Protecting Soil
Caywood isn’t alone in her concerns about the use of good farmland for solar installations.Annette Smith, executive director of Vermonters for a Clean Environment, told The Epoch Times via email that the protection of prime agricultural soils has been an issue in her New England state.
“My goal was to see that using prime ag land for solar should not be an opportunity to have the land ’switched' to commercial, industrial, or some other category simply by installing solar panels thereupon,” state Sen. Mark MacDonald, the Democratic lawmaker who drafted the language, told The Epoch Times via email.
In a telephone call, he added that the language was also motivated by prospective improvements in solar panel efficiency.
“In future years, it won’t take as many acres to produce the same amount of electricity,” he said.
“The dynamic over the years has changed,” Smith told The Epoch Times. She said Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott has given the state’s scientists more freedom to consider the downsides of solar projects than his predecessor, Democrat Peter Shumlin.
“When Gov. Shumlin was in charge, it was ‘build everything everywhere regardless of impacts,’” Smith said.
In 2014, under Shumlin, one major solar development ended up claiming what Smith called “some of the finest prime agricultural soils in Rutland County, Vermont.”
In its decision, PSB concluded that the company’s Cold River Project “will not significantly reduce the agricultural potential of the soils found at the Project site.”
The case made it to the Vermont Supreme Court, which upheld the PSB’s decision against opposition from the Town of Rutland and several neighbors.
Green Mountain Power confirmed to The Epoch Times that it’s still under that power purchase agreement. Representatives of EDF Renewables didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
“The state of Vermont really hasn’t done much to protect prime ag soils from solar development,” Smith said. “It’s a case-by-case basis and so far it has not been an impediment to approval, as long as it is returned to being prime ag after the project is decommissioned.”
An SEIA spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email that the group supports decommissioning standards “to promote transparency and clarity while encouraging responsible development of solar projects.”
Downsides
Janet Christensen-Lewis, who owns Puck’s Glen Organic Farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, thinks the wider public is only just beginning to grasp the downsides of solar power.“I think the public consciousness may have been what I was about six years ago,” she told The Epoch Times. “I just wanted to flip a light switch, totally oblivious to all of the consequences of energy production. And then when you’re faced with projects that are coming that are actually going to impact your surroundings, you take a closer look at things.”
“I suspect that if you said to people in New York City that we should take Central Park, which is 800 acres, and cover it with solar panels, they would be aghast,” she said. “What they don’t realize is that 800 acres is pretty much nothing for the solar that’s being put in now. And we’re using that land.”
That report, like some other solar energy research undertaken in recent years, envisions the “co-location of agriculture and solar energy.” But Christensen-Lewis is skeptical that such “agrivoltaic” technology could be realized at a large scale.
“You’re not going to run combines underneath—you’re never going to figure out a way to make that happen underneath solar panels.”
The Solar Futures Study also emphasizes the potential of “solar-pollinator habitats,” which are intended to combine solar panels with pollinator-friendly native plants, ultimately bolstering crop yields while simultaneously producing cleaner energy.
Christensen-Lewis, who already plants wildflowers on her organic farm to encourage pollinators, has her doubts about those habitats as well.
“We always say that when a solar company comes in and puts in their pollinator habitat, it’s three years away from becoming a patch of weeds, and then they’re going to have to use Roundup,” she said. “It’s just a label—it’s just a selling point—and not necessarily a very good one.”
The Maryland Department of the Environment ruled that Great Bay Solar I, LLC’s solar plant construction sites in Princess Anne, Maryland, violated multiple titles of the state’s environmental law. The department found that Great Bay Solar had disturbed nontidal wetlands at multiple sites, reaching a settlement whereby the company paid the department a $400,000 civil penalty.
Despite these victories, the outlook for many farmers facing pressure from major solar companies remains uncertain.
Caywood, of Caywood Farms in Casa Grande, worries her fourth-generation farm could become “an island” surrounded by utility-scale solar.
“They’re putting it [solar] out here in the rural areas, on our farmland, and in our forests,” Christensen-Lewis said. “That’s land that we see major other purposes for—for feeding people, for making sure that we have environmental protections in place.”