Not Farms

A few years ago I began to hear a constant staccato metallic clinking noise. It would start around seven in the morning and go until dusk. It wasn’t too loud, but just enough to be irritating. One day curiosity got the better of me and I decided to track down the racket. Across the road and over a hill the dairy farmer neighbor was putting in solar. Great!, I thought to myself until I spoke to him.

Turned out he had leased a portion of his land to a solar energy company. Other farmers, especially dairy farmers, had also signed on. Over a thousand acres between here and the Maryland border are under construction as I write.

The beautiful acreage with the brick barn where a colonel settled after the Civil War is now over a hundred acres of soon-to-be solar panels. I passed that farm every Sunday on my way to market and now take a different route so I don’t have to look at the destruction of prime farmland.

Wait, shouldn’t I be happy about the rise of an alternative to fossil fuels? Well, maybe if we were being smart about it.

When I look at the solar farms going up on land that once produced food I get a little queasy. That’s less food for the local economy. And if you think that doesn’t matter, just remember who kept y’all fed during the supply chain issues that left the grocery store shelves bare during the pandemic.

But it’s not only the food supply that gets short changed. It’s the environment, too.

Every single one of those solar farms is enclosed in a tall woven wire fence. Let me ask you this: when you fence off a thousand acres where does all the wildlife go? The same question can be asked about all the ginormous warehouses along the major travel arteries in the mid-Atlantic region. We’ve put in over 700 million square feet of warehousing in the last 20 years in the Northeast corridor.

I’ll tell you where they go. They end up in housing developments eating all the fancy landscaping and bringing deer ticks carrying Lyme Disease and other tick vector illnesses closer to the human population. They move on to remaining farmland putting more pressure on the natural environment and causing overcrowding within their own species. More animals end up on roadways causing accidents. Wasn’t this last pandemic caused by a virus spilling over from animals into the human population?

And here’s the biggest kicker of all—none of those folks leasing their land for solar projects are getting free or even discounted electricity. Over a hundred acres of solar panels and they still have to pay for power.

As a farmer who relies on targeted grazing, you’d think I’d be elated at all that potential pasture in my neighborhood. First of all, these massive project strip off the topsoil so very little will grow under the panels. Others spray massive amounts of weed and grass killers. On the existing solar projects I’ve not seen a single sheep, which are the only livestock suitable for grazing under solar panels. Goats would have every wire stripped bare and ripped out within hours of being turned loose and cattle would win every game of push against the infrastructure. Even if a shepherd were to graze the solar farms, it would require large numbers of animals to effectively get the job done. We’re talking about multiple tractor trailer loads of sheep being trucked in. So much for reducing fossil fuels.

I understand why so many dairy farmers are giving in to leasing to solar companies. Right now the price of fluid commodity milk is so low that farmers are losing as much as $6-21 hundredweight (approximately 12 gallons). Milk cows aren’t like faucets and cannot be turned off on demand.  Think of it this way, you work a 40-hour week only to be told that you still owe your employer money.

We can’t call these solar installations farms because they’re not. We speak about buying local and keeping money within our communities, but the solar project across the street is owned by a German company and run by a firm out of California.

So what are we to do to reduce our energy dependence on fossil fuels? For one—start using common sense. If we really want to speed the adoption of solar power, from here on out every single structure built needs to generate its own power, be it solar, wind, or hydroelectric.  Let’s put solar installations on existing impervious structures like abandoned shopping mall parking lots. Or how tearing down factories, neighborhoods, and office parks that have been vacant for years? Anywhere but our premium properties that are used for producing food. Let’s keep farms farming.