Clean Energy as a Justice Issue: Rural Gentrification Rolls Over Farmer’s Property Rights

More from my interviews with farmers in Montcalm County, Michigan.
Landowners who have sought to place wind turbines or solar panels on their land have been under attack by well organized, and well funded anti-clean energy groups, many of whom are wealthy newcomers to the area.

Above, farmers describe the new imbalance of power, as centennial farms and farmers are displaced by wealthy “Lake People”.

Just yesterday, an older farmer in Montcalm County, Michigan told me the story about newcomers around a local lake who are blocking farmers from siting clean energy due to supposed concerns about changing views. She told me she used to be able to look across the Lake from her property, but newcomers with giant homes have blocked her view. Apparently no concerns about that.
The newly minted Country Gentry generally view farmers with a mixture of resentment and disdain, and more as sharecroppers than as the bedrock of the community and stewards of the land.
For the NIMBY crowd, farmers are mere groundskeepers, whose only job is to maintain an unchanging pastoral backdrop for the newcomer’s “lifestyle”.

Often the anti-clean energy activists portray themselves as “Saving Farmland” – but in fact, it is the farmers who have been stewards of that land for, often, more than a century, and providing additional income streams – drought proof, recession proof, flood proof – is the best way to insure that farmers can continue to protect that land against development.

Below, clean energy as the best way to save agricultural land against toxic urban sprawl.

Here, Indiana experts describe how solar fields can preserve farmland and soil.

Argonne National Lab:

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory wanted to understand the ecological value of PV solar energy sites planted with native grasses and wildflowers. They examined how vegetation would establish and how insect communities would respond to the newly established habitat. The five-year field study looked at two solar sites in southern Minnesota operated by Enel Green Power North America. Both sites were built on retired agricultural land.

The two studied solar sites were planted with native grasses and flowering plants in early 2018. From August 2018 through August 2022, the researchers conducted 358 observational surveys for flowering vegetation and insect communities. They evaluated changes in plant and insect abundance and diversity with each visit.

“The effort to obtain these data was considerable, returning to each site four times per summer to record pollinator counts,” said Heidi Hartmann, manager of the Land Resources and Energy Policy Program in Argonne’s Environmental Sciences division, and one of the study’s co-authors. ​“Over time we saw the numbers and types of flowering plants increase as the habitat matured. Measuring the corresponding positive impact for pollinators was very gratifying.”

By the end of the field campaign, the team observed increases for all habitat and biodiversity metrics. There was an increase in native plant species diversity and flower abundance. In addition, the team observed increases in the abundance and diversity of native insect pollinators and agriculturally beneficial insects, which included honeybees, native bees, wasps, hornets, hoverflies, other flies, moths, butterflies and beetles. Flowers and flowering plant species increased as well. Total insect abundance tripled, while native bees showed a 20-fold increase in numbers. The most numerous insect groups observed were beetles, flies and moths.

In an added benefit, the researchers found that pollinators from the solar sites also visited soybean flowers in adjacent crop fields, providing additional pollination services.