Fear of farmland loss slows solar and wind development

This story was originally published in the Daily Yonder. For more rural reporting and small-town stories, visit dailyyonder.com.

When Chad Raines took over his family’s Texas cotton farm in 2008, he thought the going would be easy. That’s because their first year was relatively profitable — but the success was short-lived.

“The next 11 years was just loss after loss after loss,” Raines said in a Daily Yonder interview. ​“We just kept digging our hole deeper.” Raines soon began to question whether he should continue running the farm or pivot to something else.

Then came a third option, one in the form of solar panels and sheep: a type of farming called agrivoltaics. Now, he raises 3,000 head of sheep on about 8,000 acres throughout West Texas, and all under solar panels.

Raines is contracted by the solar companies to graze his sheep under their panels, keeping the vegetation short and feeding his sheep at the same time. He is one of a growing number of farmers leasing out their own land to renewable energy companies or grazing livestock on land already in use for solar or wind.

Scientists say widespread renewable energy development — the vast majority of which will be located in rural America — plays a key part in decreasing the country’s carbon emissions, but pushback from the Trump administration has stalled progress on many solar and wind projects.

In August 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ended funding to loan programs that supported solar projects on farmland. The agency pointed to rising farmland prices as the primary reason for shutting down these projects.

“Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green new deal subsidized solar panels,” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said in a press release. The USDA defines prime farmland as land with the ​“best combination of physical and chemical characteristics for producing food, feed, forage, fiber, and oilseed crops.” These characteristics include a region’s growing season, soil properties, and water supply.

“Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available,” Rollins said. 

Whether this claim is true is up for debate. Land use experts say the real threat to farmland is urban sprawl into rural areas, not solar development.

“Thousands of acres [of farmland] are going to [urban development], and that’s completely taking it out of commission,” said Jeff Risley, executive director of a new organization called the Renewable Energy Farmers of America. The group helps farmers negotiate land leases with solar and wind companies.

Once an area is turned from farmland into parking lots or apartment buildings, the likelihood of it returning to agricultural land is extremely low. ​“Solar and wind, it’s a 30– to 40-year commitment, but it can also go back to agriculture land at the end of that time,” Risley said.

Over the next two years, solar is projected to be the fastest-growing power generator in the country, according to a recent report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. An estimated 83% of solar projects are expected to be built on farmland, according to projections from the American Farmland Trust.

While the estimated amount of farmland to be converted to solar is just a small fraction of the total farmland available in the U.S., for some rural residents, the transition is an unwelcome wave on the horizon.

In upstate New York, Alex Fasulo has spent the last year organizing against a solar project in the town of Fort Edward that would have an estimated 530-acre footprint with solar arrays, access roads, power lines, and a substation. She’s garnered more than 650,000 followers on Instagram alone, posting videos opposing the project, which is being conducted by the Canadian energy company Boralex.

For Fasulo, the solar development threatens the rural way of life she was looking for when she first moved to the area in 2023.

“I knew I was going to be surrounded by houses, farmhouses, and farms,” Fasulo said. ​“But [had I known] a commercial industrial complex would be able to come into this rural zoning, I would’ve bought land next to a Walmart [instead]. I didn’t sign up for this.”