Cornell Study Challenges the Idea That Solar is a Threat to Farming

New York Public News Network | By Beth Adams

To meet its ambitious goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades, New York state will need more large-scale solar facilities.

Farmland is a prime location for solar arrays because it’s flat and unforested. And farmers can get lucrative contracts from solar companies that far exceed what they’d be able to earn by growing crops.

“If you rent out your farmland, and you might be able to get $100, $200 on the top end to rent out your farmland for someone to farm it, versus $800 to $1,000 per acre to put up a solar field,” said state Assemblymember Andrea Bailey, a Republican whose district covers Livingston County and parts of Monroe, Ontario, Steuben, and Wyoming counties.

On WXXI’s “Connections with Evan Dawson” talk show on Feb. 6, Bailey said she was concerned about what this means for farming.

“We are seeing our agricultural land being taken up by solar projects, left and right,” she said. “We have prime farmland we are losing for that.”

A research team at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences set out to determine if solar leasing is putting pressure on New York’s agriculture industry. In a study published in “Rural Sociology,” they surveyed 584 landowners, including farmers, in Genesee, St. Lawrence, and Washington counties. Their land was 30 acres or more, identified in property tax rolls as rural, vacant or agricultural, and at least 1.5 miles from existing transmission lines or within 3 miles of a substation.

The farmland owners in that group who had either signed or expected to sign large-scale solar leases were asked what they intended to do with the portion of their land that would not be used for solar.

About half of them said they expected to make no changes to their agricultural operation.

“Of those that said they would make a change, three times as many said that it would improve their chances of staying in agriculture, as opposed to reducing their chances of staying in agriculture,” said research associate Kathryn Walsh, a lab supervisor for Cornell’s Center for Conservation Social Sciences.

According to the survey, the amount of the solar contract was the most important factor for landowners. Twenty-five percent of the farmers said they would use the extra income to help them remain in farming by renting or purchasing additional land.

“But we still have some unexplored questions about how exactly this will play out,” Walsh said.

The research team hopes to expand its work to study the perspectives of landowners from different parts of New York and in various sections of the agricultural industry.

Walsh is quick to point out that views of a specific set of landowners may or may not reflect the attitudes of their neighbors or the community at large.

In fact, the farmers who responded to the survey were more concerned than the other landowners about whether leasing part of their land for solar would be socially acceptable.

“Overall,” Walsh said, “the perception was that folks believed that their neighbors, other community members, family and friends were going to be slightly opposed, and we know that can influence decision making on whether to lease land for large-scale solar.”

Image: The Remelt family farm in Henrietta, where a portion of the farmland is now leased to the solar company, Delaware River Solar. (Max Schulte/WXXI News)