FAYETTE TWP., MI – The costs are rising and the list of them is long.
At Dale Baker’s dairy and crop farm near Jonesville, the veterinary bills are $2,000 to $3,000 a month. The seeds are $85,000 to $100,000 a year. Add diesel and fertilizer ingredients potash and nitrogen.
Meanwhile, the price of milk and corn? Low and static.
So, when Ranger Power, working to develop a second Hillsdale County solar farm, approached him and offered to lease his land for more than double an acre what he typically gets for corn and without the yearly financial input, it was hard to argue.
“It’s just a no brainer when you pencil it out that you can make a good living, a really good living, without having nearly the expense,” Baker, 76, said this week from his home on North Adams Road, just outside of Jonesville in Hillsdale County’s Fayette Township.
He was sitting in overalls in his home office, surrounded by four miniature Schnauzers. He rubbed their ears and pulled up the window shade above his desk to reveal a view of his rolling acres and dairy operation.
His father purchased the original farm in the 1940s and expanded. Baker now owns about 1,000 acres.
Working with his wife and sons, he has planted soybeans, corn and alfalfa, mostly to feed about 170 cows, but construction is already underway to build solar panels on 150 of the acres and another 850 acres could be part of a second project.
Chicago-based Ranger Power submitted last month an application for a special land use permit in the township, for a 140-megawatt, utility-scale solar farm, called Heartwood Solar II, roughly between North Adams Road and U.S. 12 east of Jonesville and west of Half Moon Lake Road. It encompasses parcels totaling about 1,350 acres.
The company already has a project, Heartwood Solar, under construction in the area of Bunn and Jonesville roads, west of Jonesville, in Fayette and Allen townships.
Many residents gathered Monday, Jan. 12, at a township board meeting, moved to Jonesville High School to accommodate an unusually large crowd. Public commenters, concerned largely about property values and changes to the agricultural landscape, all opposed the project.
The board did not address the proposal, which is now before the township planning commission. The commission, which meets on Monday, Jan. 19, is to first consider Ranger Power’s application for a special use permit.
“Makes a good impression for people to be opposed. But who doesn’t show up? The people who either don’t care or think it is fine,” Baker said.
Some on Monday called for the resignation of any members of township boards with financial interest in the solar projects.
The township supervisor, Nate Baker, is Dale Baker’s son, and Dale Baker serves on the planning commission.
Both Bakers previously abstained from decision making and said they will not participate in any vote on the project.
Nate Baker, working on equipment Monday outside his home a few doors from his father’s, declined to comment.
“The public trust is being broken,” said David Danford, 40, who lives on Moore Road in Fayette Township.
“All of you were elected to represent our interests, not your own.”
Dale Baker, listening Monday at the back of the high school cafeteria, said he doesn’t vote on the projects. “So, what’s the difference?”
He has served on the board about 20 years and was appointed “because they couldn’t find anyone to do it.”
It is difficult to fill such a job, he said, and other business beyond solar energy comes before the board.
He acknowledged some people say they don’t like the look of solar panels. They don’t want to see them from their yards. Residents on Monday called the panels ugly and an “eyesore.”
“Do you think it’s right that people should tell me what I can do with my property?” Baker said.
Ranger Power approached Baker years ago. Their offer, which he was reluctant to specify, was appealing due to low returns. The price of milk has the farm barely breaking even, if at all, and corn generates $4 to $5 a bushel. This amounts to, at most, about $750 an acre minus expenses, which also total about $4 to $5 a bushel.
There have been more good than bad, but the margins can be tight, he said.
He’s been farming for 50 years, since after he went to college in the 1970s. “And what have I been doing but harvesting the sun, right? Harvesting the sun to raise corn and soybeans and alfalfa. So now I’m going to harvest the sun to raise electricity.”
In his mind, he’s still farming.
Now on Jonesville Road west of Jonesville, panels are going up. There are long, seemingly endless rows of them. The area is busy with trucks, workers and activity.
They are visible behind Tylor Lash’s home on Bunn Road. It wasn’t too pleasant when the steel posts were going into the ground, but the work has quieted, he said.
He rents, but he says he would buy his home if he could, even with the solar farm. “That doesn’t bother me a bit,” Lash, 28, who works at a local pork plant, said Monday as he was home with his three young children.
What he doesn’t like is the disappearance of wildlife.
There were once millions of dragonflies in the tall, unfarmed grass around the property. “And now you can’t see any of them.”
When the solar fields are complete, a native pollinator mix will be planted below and around the panels to support insects or small animals, Brady Friss, Ranger Power development manager, said.
The land is bustling during construction, but the solar farms when online are good neighbors, Friss said. The Heartwood project will generate minimal sound and the panels – made largely of glass, silicon and aluminum – do not produce harmful emissions. Solar is one of the lowest impact forms of energy, Ranger Power says.
Local residents are suspicious of the technology. They said they worry about the environmental impact and any effect on water quality, which Friss said is not a concern; there is no hazardous runoff.
Baker notes as farmers, he and his family are conservative and try to honor the soil and the land, but more than seeds go into the dirt. “They don’t have any idea how many chemicals we use to produce commodities, and fertilizers,” he said.
Even if the solar project proceeds as proposed, the land could again be used for crops. Ranger Power is obligated, Friss said, to return properties to their initial states under contracts with landowners that have end dates, 25 years or more.
Baker said he will likely plant crops at least one more year on the land and there should be acreage leftover for continued farming; the precise footprint will likely not encompass all the acreage. He intends to sell the cows but is not sure when.
As he looks out toward his fields, he admits he will miss the view from the home his parents built in the 1970s across January-bare fields from the original farm house.
He won’t miss the cows. “I’ve dealt with them enough years to be tired of them,” he said shortly before he headed out for afternoon chores.
“It’s seven days a week. Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year’s.
“The cows are there in the morning. They are there at night.”
He’s been impressed with Ranger Power. The company has been transparent, responsive. He believes they know what they are doing.
“If honestly, if I thought this was going to hurt our water supply… I don’t want to ruin the country. I don’t want to ruin our neighbors. I don’t want to poison anybody.
“I just, when it comes right down to it, it’s my land, and I should be able to do whatever I want to with it.”
Danielle Salisbury is editor at The Ann Arbor News and the Jackson Citizen Patriot. She worked from 2007 to 2018 as a public safety reporter in Jackson, where she received multiple awards for her enterprise and… more
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