One of the most pernicious myths about clean energy, particularly solar, is that “it replaces prime farm land”.
In fact, Solar (and wind, of course) saves prime farm land from development, something farmers emphasize to me over and over again. Farmers typically operate on a knife’s edge in the best of times, and being able to diversify their income with clean energy is a life saver for farms that have often been in the family for generations.
Moreover, solar in particular offers the added benefit of taking farmland out of cultivation for 30 years or more, while still providing a more than decent income for the farmer. This is something we’re going to have to be doing going forward if we think that preserving and maintaining productive soil is important. (it is)
For many years, the government has had Conservation Reserve Programs that pay farmers to take land out of production, allowing soil to regenerate. Solar fields make the same thing possible, but instead of taxpayers paying the bill, farmers get compensated generously from utilities, while producing a needed product, electricity.
While I applaud efforts to develop “Agro Voltaics” – the simultaneous use of farmland to produce electricity and crops, I hope that in promoting those practices we don’t amplify the false framing that land under solar is “lost” or “not productive”.
Soil that is not being farmed is renewing itself, providing habitat for insects, ground nesting birds and small mammals, thus addressing our biodiversity crisis at the very bottom of the food chain, recharging aquifers and even cleansing toxic chemicals out of them, and sequestering carbon. Fallow land is very much alive, active, and providing crucial services, even if a casual observer might not realize it.
Glad to see scientist Katharine Hayhoe, and writer Bill Mckibben, taking note.
Katharine Hayhoe on Linked In:
Many years ago, I was surprised to learn about the connection between solar farms and biodiversity through Rob Davis, formerly with Fresh Energy, a Minnesota-based organization that runs the Center for Pollinators in Energy. What’s the link?
When solar farms are carefully planned and seeded with native plants that pollinators love, they can help tackle the biodiversity crisis at the same time as the climate crisis. Well-designed and managed solar farms can create habitats for honeybees, bumblebees, and other pollinators. And when pollinators increase in number, nearby cropland benefits too!
That’s not all: solar panels provide shade and redistribute rainfall, creating their own microclimates. There are also sustainable ways to keep grass from overtaking these sites: sheep and goats are used at many solar farms around the country to “mow” the grasses back.
Curious about how pollinator-friendly a solar project is? There’s a tool for that– the Pollinator-Friendly Solar Scorecard, currently used in at least fifteen U.S. states. The Nature Conservancy has also developed a handy guide to pollinator-friendly solar.
Bill McKibben in the New Yorker:
The biggest fights, Farrell said, are often with people who insist that “prime ag land” should not be devoted to renewable energy. He pointed out that renewables won’t take up that much land—a few million acres of the eight hundred and eighty million acres of fields and pastures in this country, he says, will be enough to hit the forty-five-per-cent target. And, meanwhile, the land is resting, for the day when the panels are no longer needed, because something else—small fusion reactors, maybe—can provide the same cheap energy. “We can return it to its virgin form easier than any other form of real-estate development,” Farrell said, and, indeed, in most jurisdictions the developers put up a bond against the cost of removing their equipment when the lease expires.
But the ecological difference is most prominent when you think about pollinators. Remember that abandoned farm fields might count forty or fifty pollinators in the fifteen-minute test? I asked Mike what that number would be on an active cornfield, sprayed regularly to keep down “pests.” “That number would be close to zero,” he said. “I mean, maybe a fly resting on a leaf.” Since corn is wind-pollinated, it doesn’t suffer. But most other plants do, so encouraging pollinators can have a net benefit even for commercial farming. “We put up a field in Hinesburg,” Mike said. The farmer of the neighboring orchard told him “he hadn’t seen fruit like this since he was a kid. Fruit set is the ultimate impact measure for pollination.”
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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.