Is Utility-Scale Solar Stealing Our Food? Think Again.

Over the last two decades, solar and wind power generation has soared. Utility-scale solar energy (USSE) production increased nearly 30% in the first half of 2024 compared to the previous year. While many communities, especially in rural areas, agree on wanting cheaper energy, the rapid expansion of renewable power has also ushered in a growing concern over rural land use. Opposition campaigns have successfully thwarted or delayed solar buildout in their own backyards in the name of protecting valuable U.S. farmland. But, conflicts between agricultural land and solar development prove to be rooted more in perception than reality.

While solar is made out to be the bad guy, there are other, arguably larger, forces taking U.S. farmland out of production. The leading cause of farmland loss in the U.S. is urban sprawl. This type of agricultural land conversion (e.g. to residential, commercial or industrial land uses) is typically irreversible. In contrast, agricultural land leased to solar developers can, in most cases, return to agricultural production when the lease is up.

Thanks to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act’s expanded incentives for clean energy generation and the falling cost of photovoltaics, among other factors, solar development is expected to continue to increase in the coming years. Stifling this progress in the name of protecting U.S. farmland, especially land used to grow crops for biofuels rather than food, is a misguided endeavor. USSE expansion is projected to have a miniscule impact on U.S. farmland and agricultural production, while generating net climate benefits by replacing fossil fuels.

There are real trade-offs when it comes to decisions about agricultural land-use, but whether a tiny percentage of farmland becomes utility scale solar is not among them.

Protecting U.S. farmland: noble or misguided endeavor?

Globally, the land footprint of the energy system is minimal, accounting for just 0.4% of ice-free land. In contrast, almost 50% of the world’s habitable land is dedicated to agriculture. The global shift to energy sources that can help us meet decarbonization goals are projected to expand the energy system’s land footprint. At the same time, land use for agriculture is also predicted to rise to meet growing food, feed, and fuel demand.

While global land use for agriculture has yet to peak, farmland acreage in the U.S. has declined about 2% over the last 5 years. Despite this decline, total agricultural output over this 5 year time horizon has continued to increase, thanks to improvements in management practices, technologies, and economies of scale. Continued investments in R&D are expected to sustain these trends, allowing the U.S. to produce more on less land and with fewer inputs.

Nevertheless, the perceived tension between solar development and loss of farmland has received attention in local jurisdictions, state legislatures, and Congress. Researchers found that as of 2021, there were at least 800 local zoning restrictions related to solar development. At least 22 counties in nine states have set limits on the number of agricultural acres that can be used for solar power to impede its buildout.

Despite these policies being directly at odds with state renewable energy targets and federal decarbonization goals, efforts to limit solar expansion on agricultural lands continue to pick up steam in both Democrat-controlled state legislatures and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. New York’s state legislature recently considered charging developers a per-acre fee for solar projects built on prime farmland. Earlier this year, the House Agriculture Committee passed its version of a farm bill including a proposal that would largely restrict the Department of Agriculture from funding solar projects that convert farmland for energy production.

The growing number of policies addressing perceived land-use conflicts between renewable energy production and food production are partly driven by misleading statistics that suggest sweeping changes to rural landscapes and threats to food security. American Farmland Trust warns that 83% of new solar built in the U.S. over the next two decades could be sited on farmland. Similar estimates exist at the state level. One recent study found that up to 85% of suitable land for future USSE development in New York is agricultural land. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that over the last two decades, 70% of solar sites in rural areas were sited on agricultural land. But, how much land are we actually talking about? And does siting solar developments on agricultural land mean food production is actually being displaced?

Right-sizing land need estimates for solar expansion

According to USDA, solar sites had a total rural land footprint of 336,090 acres in 2020. For comparison, this is less than 0.04% of the country’s 897 million acres of farmland. Using USDA’s estimate that 70% of the acres in today’s solar sites were previously farmland, this would account for less than 1.18% of the 20 million acres of U.S. farmland lost since 2017.

In the highest land-use scenarios for expanding solar by 2050, projections estimate 10.3 million acres will be needed for solar development. This is equivalent to 0.5% of the total surface area of the contiguous United States. Even if all of this projected need was met by converting farmland—a big assumption—less than 1.2% of current U.S. farmland would be affected.

New solar siting is also unlikely to be concentrated in certain regions or counties, impacting some communities more than others. Recent analysis shows the average percentage of both existing and queued solar in a county is less than 0.5% of each county’s total land in every region of the U.S. Even in the Midwest, the land needed for current and proposed solar development compared to land used for cultivated agriculture is proportionally negligible.

It is not a foregone conclusion that all of the land needed for solar would come at the cost of agricultural land, much less from land used for food production. The projected land requirement for solar buildout could be met with other land alternatives. In locations where farmland prices are prohibitive for development, marginal lands that are generally underused, difficult to cultivate, or have lower economic value might be attractive to solar developers. Marginal lands have few or no competing uses, including abandoned, idle, contaminated, or disturbed lands. Compared to other renewable energy technologies, solar technologies have been found to have the highest potential for electricity generation on these lands. Solar development alone on marginal lands was estimated to have the potential to produce more electricity than the U.S. consumed in 2022. The Department of Energy’s Solar Futures study found that less than 10% of potentially suitable disturbed land—which includes invasive species-impacted lands, Superfund sites, landfills, abandoned mine lands, brownfields, and other types of non-vegetated lands such as quarries or gravel pits—could easily meet the 10 million acres needed for USSE expansion.

To boot, the Biden administration unveiled proposed updates to the Western Solar Plan in early 2024 which, if implemented, could open up 22 million acres of public lands across 11 states for solar energy development. One of the proposed updates would prioritize development in areas with close proximity to existing or planned transmission. While environmental reviews, considerations of biodiversity and habitat conservation, and importance to Native American tribal heritage should be considered when siting future USSE on public lands, this initiative could significantly offset pressures on private agricultural land.

Technological advances that increase the efficiency of future iterations of solar technologies or expanded installation of solar that do not require additional land, such as floating solar, could reduce land requirements associated with increasing solar capacity. (To note, any lessened pressure on solar’s land footprint thanks to these innovations will be offset to some extent by increases in electricity demand encouraging expanded energy production.)

Furthermore, factors like soil type, shading, topography, flooding risks and other hydrologic features, as well as proximity to transmission or urban centers, reasonable interconnection costs, and market saturation, can render some agricultural land inoperable or too costly for solar developers. These factors further reduce the amount of agricultural land that could reasonably be targeted for solar siting due to added expenses.

Impacts of agricultural land conversion on net emissions and food prices

Based on current projections, proposed solar development poses minimal risk to agricultural production when it comes to land conversion. When new USSE installations do in fact displace agricultural production, the type of agricultural production displaced (e.g. cropland used to grow feedstocks for biofuels vs. crops for food or feed) will dictate whether the land conversion results in net climate benefits. Crop type, global market conditions, and other factors will influence whether displaced food production will increase food prices.

Nearly 52 million acres of U.S. cropland (5.8% of total U.S. farmland) are used to grow corn and soy crops for biofuels like ethanol, displacing a disproportionately tiny fraction of the nation’s petroleum use. This agricultural land is already being used for energy production and could therefore be converted to produce solar energy with net climate benefits. One acre of solar panels can produce roughly 100 times more energy per acre than corn-based ethanol.

Notably, politicians spanning the political spectrum staunchly support expanding biofuel production, despite its high carbon footprint. Absent from these calls for biofuel market growth are concerns about millions of midwestern farm acres that will no longer be used to grow corn for food or animal feed. And yet, converting biofuel acres to solar panels would make energy production per acre more efficient without impacting food production at all. Even if the entirety of the 10.3 million acres of solar development—the largest land-use scenario for U.S. solar—occurred on land previously used to produce corn and soy for biofuels, it would only take roughly 1/5th of biofuel cropland out of production.

Converting biofuel cropland to USSE would have little impact on food prices, and would not directly take any cropland for food out of production. There remains a risk that this could increase the price of corn and soy for biofuels, thus incentivizing farmers elsewhere to grow crops for biofuel production on land that might otherwise have been used for food crops.

Converting cropland used for growing food or feed to USSE could raise emissions due to indirect land use change. However, these indirect emissions are minimal and will be more than offset by the emissions savings from solar installations. A study investigating the solar land requirements and related land use change emissions in several countries outside the U.S., predicted land cover changes for solar energy expansion would result in a release of carbon ranging up to 50 g of CO2 per produced kilowatt-hour. These indirect emissions will be higher in regions where current and projected crop productivity are relatively high. Meanwhile, solar is widely found to displace anywhere from 400 to 1000 g of CO2 per kilowatt-hour from fossil fuel production.

In the U.S., eliminating corn and soy rotations in Iowa were found to result in about 22 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per hectare per year in emissions. For comparison, one acre of solar panels in the U.S. is estimated to save up to 198 metric tons of CO2 per year. These findings indicate that, despite some land use change emissions, we can expect overall net emission reductions when solar displaces agricultural production.

The national food supply and commodity price impacts of taking farmland used for food production out of operation are fueling much of the opposition to solar siting on agricultural land, by raising concerns for how the transition will be felt by consumers at the grocery store. Reducing U.S. farmland for food production, for any reason, can lead to increased commodity prices due to a decrease in agricultural supply. With less land available for farming, the production of crops may decline, creating a shortage that drives up prices. For commodities that are used in various end products and livestock feed, like corn and soybeans, significant declines in production could have ripple effects on price.

Determining the threshold of U.S. farm acres that would need to be displaced by solar development to significantly impact commodity prices and lead to land-use conversion elsewhere to meet demand, depends on several factors like crop type, global market conditions, and the extent to which producers employ technological advances that can mitigate the impact of reduced acreage.

Further research is needed to quantify the commodity price and land use change effects associated with the conversion of U.S. cropland to USSE sites and how net carbon emission projections change across regions, crops, and conditions. For example, one study found that when land converted to solar was seeded and managed as pasture, net land-use change emissions fell by more than 50%. Additional research could help illuminate where in the U.S. this method would have similar benefits. Additional research is also needed on land use change emissions associated with siting solar on grazing land, which is presumed to have lower tradeoffs than displaced crop production. Answers to these research questions should be communicated to producers and landowners as a key factor in decision-making concerning agricultural land use.

While it is important to understand the downstream effects of displacing cropland, the context for how much productive cropland is at risk is also important to keep in mind. Farmland preservation groups argue that nearly half of projected solar installations on agricultural land over the next two decades will take place on land best suited for growing crops. Based on historical patterns, this is estimated to be just over 1 million acres, equivalent to 0.32% of the nation’s 313.7 million acres of prime farmland (defined by USDA as “land that has the best combination of physical and chemical characteristics for producing food, feed, forage, fiber, and oilseed crops and is available for these uses”).

This conversion of productive or “prime” farmland is not unique to solar development, nor is it unprecedented. Nearly half of the agricultural land projected to be converted to urban and highly developed or low-density residential uses by 2040 is expected to occur on this category of farmland. Furthermore, the USDA has a precedent of taking agricultural lands out of production for environmental reasons. The government pays farmers to keep over 20 million acres out of agricultural production, often for more than a decade, through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). Not only do these efforts exist, but they are popular. The number of eligible acres submitted in CRP applications regularly exceed the amount USDA can accept.

Conclusions

The perceived conflict between solar development and agricultural production is largely overblown when it comes to the number of acres at stake. Despite this, counties across Virginia, Ohio, and other states have set limits on the number of acres that can be covered in solar panels or banned renewable energy projects altogether. Meanwhile states, like Florida and Massachusetts are leaning into the economic opportunities associated with scaling solar generation capacity. Both have passed laws to keep local governments from restricting solar energy buildout on farmland.

These all or nothing approaches lack nuance and generally fail to address the complex environmental impacts of solar development that results in agricultural land conversion. These impacts depend on the type of land and agricultural production displaced, as well as the land management practices used.

Local, state, and federal policymakers should consider economic incentives to encourage solar development on marginal lands or in ways that minimize the land use change consequences stemming from displaced agricultural productivity. These policies should apply not just to solar projects, but also to other renewable energy projects in rural areas, as well as projects to develop urban and highly developed or low-density residential areas.

Policymakers should also consider policies that disincentivize USSE buildout on agricultural land that will lead to net negative climate impacts as a result of displaced agricultural production. Disincentives should aim to incorporate the projected climate impacts of displaced agricultural production. Take, for example, the proposal recently considered in New York’s state legislature to charge energy developers a per-acre fee for solar projects built on prime farmland. Whether this kind of policy will effectively optimize net carbon emission reductions resulting from new USSE installations on existing agricultural land will depend on how “prime farmland” is defined. Under USDA’s current definition, cropland that is used to grow biofuel feedstocks, for example, might be highly productive and qualify as “prime”. Policies or zoning regulations that protect farmland for continued biofuel production rather than allowing for conversion to USSE—which would in turn result in net climate benefits, pose no threat to food production, and generate economic benefits for the landowner—will do nothing more than obstruct a future powered by cheap, clean energy.

In the most generous case, one could argue that maintaining “prime” farmland protects the potential for that land to be used to grow crops for feed or food. But absent a major shift in U.S. agricultural policy that abandons its stance on landowners’ freedom to choose what they grow, this hypothetical scenario remains just that.

To inform new incentives, policymakers should prioritize investments in research to quantify the land use change impacts of solar development on different types of agricultural land in the U.S. and evaluate the potential for solar development on non-agricultural land. Region-specific analyses that integrate land-use with other criteria, such as greenhouse gas emissions, provide necessary research to optimize the direct and indirect impacts of new solar development. Any policies to encourage land-sharing efforts, such as the co-location of crops and solar panels, should be backed by research on the feasibility and profitability of such systems. Research to improve technological advancements in agriculture and solar energy will be crucial for enhancing efficiency and thus reducing the land footprint of both.

Meanwhile, given the nominal threat projected solar development presents to land in agricultural production in the first place, U.S. farmers and landowners today should assess solar lease opportunities without concern that converting agricultural land for solar development will jeopardize the U.S. food supply.