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Solar panels destroying farms? The U.S. President and members of his cabinet say so. The peer-reviewed science says otherwise — and we’ve got the receipts.
We’re back with another FUD-busting episode, and this time it’s something near and dear to Nikki’s heart. From claims that renewable energy can’t coexist with farming, to the idea that solar panels monopolize prime agricultural land, we dig into the actual evidence — and show this narrative for what it is: a malicious attempt to stop farmers, rural communities, and working families from gaining the energy independence that could save the family farm.
👉 Watch on YouTube — or if you’d prefer (we would), PeerTube.
Regardless of your opinion on classic literature, it’s hard not to ignore the fact that our current political landscape in many countries around the world has started to resemble the world laid out in George Orwell’s 1984.
And while that dystopian future did in no way arrive when the book title suggested it would, it has, unfortunately, come to pass in so many ways. We have cameras surveilling our every movement. Google “DeFlock” if you want to go down a really big rabbit hole there. We have mega corporations dictating entire industries, often creating the impression to the less-informed consumer that they have choice, when in reality all brands are owned or made by a handful of companies.
I mean, seriously, if you need a really good example of this, check out how many independent spectacle companies there are left in the world. The answer? Not very many. And all of those brands you see displayed when you go to the opticians? They’re usually sibling brands from a few mega corporations that own the frames, the lenses, and very often the actual opticians you are at too. Vertical integration, baby!
But while those characterizations from Orwell’s most famous dystopia are here, along with a sizable smattering of the archetypes from his second most famous dystopia, there’s one feature from 1984 currently prevalent in the highest corridors of power that really grinds my gears.
Alternative facts and doublespeak.
And here at Transport Evolved, you know we love context, love explaining things, and fight quite vigorously when we feel disinformation is being spread. And today, as much of the northern hemisphere faces uncomfortably low rainfall totals and temperature records that…
Wait, how does the US president put it?
[Trump clip]
Yeah, that. What he said. I seem to be encountering a fair amount of anti-renewable FUD — that’s fear, uncertainty, and doubt — just as the price of oil is skyrocketing quicker than the odds of a presidential impeachment on prediction markets.
And there’s one that, presumably because I grew up on a dairy farm and live in a more rural area, I’m seeing a lot of. The idea that solar panels are somehow bad for farmers, or rather, bad for farming.
So today, it’s time to grab your favourite hat, put on some decent work boots, and join me as we investigate the benefits of growing electrons alongside your crops. And while this is a video that’s got very little to do with EVs at first glance — and we are a channel called Transport Evolved — this is most certainly a very important and relevant conversation to have, because more solar generation means more renewable energy to charge your EV with, which in turn means less fossil fuel use.
And of course, I also honestly believe that if you’re interested in making transportation cleaner and greener, you’re probably also pretty vested in making the world a better place for everyone, and everything on it too.
[Intro music]
I fully expect people to claim that I, looking the way I do and sounding the way I do, have zero experience in farming or indeed rural life. After all, what you see most of the time on this channel is a nerdy, EV-loving liberal who likes gardening, keeps chickens, and has a little plot of land somewhere just west of Portland, Oregon. As so many folks are eager to remind me, that doesn’t necessarily make someone who understands farming, especially now with my obviously-a-trophy EV that’s clearly never been used to haul or work or… oh crap, you weren’t supposed to see that.
But jokes aside, I do know the farming world very well. I grew up in a rural part of the UK. My dad was a dairy herdsman. Not a farmer — a farm worker — and he worked bloody hard every day to provide for three children and my mum. He would wake up daily at 3am, grab a bowl of cereal, go milk the cows, come back for second breakfast. Yes, I can confirm, my dad was very cool and also a hobbit. Then he’d go back out for another four hours before lunch. He’d carry on that way through the rest of the day, and if I was lucky, he’d be home just in time to spend an hour or so with us before bed.
It was a hard life, and I learned so much from seeing both my parents work so hard. I learned to respect the land, the animals, and the plants. And I learned a lot about how those with money will quite happily take advantage of those who have none.
Growing up in the farming community, I also saw what happened — admittedly in the UK rather than here in the US — when global geopolitical instability impacted the cost of fertilizer, or feed, or indeed when a drought hit or a flash storm destroyed fresh pasture. That latter one, by the way, was how, in 1992, my family had to uproot and move. My dad’s employer decided to shut down the dairy farm because a once-in-a-lifetime flood that now happens every other year killed the fresh-water marshland grass that the cows grazed on in the summer.
The point is, I get it. I know farming is hard. And while I don’t have as much arable or indeed forestry experience, I understand the economics involved, as do many multi-generational farm children who decide to leave farming and pursue different career paths.
Which brings me to this.
[Trump social media post]
The current US president is famously anti-wind and anti-solar. Just last week, he yet again authorised the US government to pay three energy companies — at a total cost to the American taxpayer of nearly two billion dollars — to walk away from offshore wind projects they’d already committed to, and pledge that money into fossil fuel exploration and extraction instead. Some might call that a bribe. The administration prefers the word “reimbursement.”
He also famously ranted about wind farms in front of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who sat next to him with the expression of someone who had just found a wasp in their scone, and has claimed for years that wind turbines kill birds.
Which, technically, they do. Just several orders of magnitude fewer than, say, a house cat. Or a window. Or, for that matter, a fossil fuel power station. So the lives of Max, Gwen, and their friends are probably safe from the terrors of a multi-gigawatt wind turbine.
Fun fact: mallards don’t actually migrate, which makes the entire premise of the kids’ film Migration quite the conceptual stretch. Yeah, my father was also a very keen amateur ornithologist and entomologist — the man liked creatures of all kinds. He taught me a lot. Thanks, Dad.
Of course, it’s not just wind. President Trump and his agriculture secretary have been claiming that solar panels are destroying farmers’ livelihoods and monopolizing prime farmland. Secretary Brooke Rollins put it most plainly recently, saying — and I’m quoting directly here — “Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with Green New Deal-subsidized solar panels.”
Now, if you don’t live in a rural area and you don’t have a feel for how farming economics actually works, you might be tempted to believe them. After all, for most people in urban settings, solar panels are the things that sit on top of buildings that already exist — tucked onto rooftops, bolted above car parks. They’re not perceived, therefore, as consuming additional land, because they aren’t. And so the mental model that most people carry around is that solar panels on the ground must be doing the opposite — smothering the earth beneath them, crowding out everything else, turning productive farmland into an industrial wasteland of glass and aluminum. They think of land use as a zero-sum game. Solar or farming? Pick one.
And that assumption, it turns out, is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting for people who’d quite like you not to look too closely at the evidence.
See, just as the wartime “Dig for Victory” campaigns of the 1940s popularized the kitchen garden and the allotment — only for those good intentions to be quietly hijacked in the late fifties and sixties by industrial agricultural movements that convinced an entire generation that the only way to feed the world effectively was to rip out every hedgerow, drain every wetland, and drench the land in pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers — something many are now quietly reconsidering — the idea that solar panels and farming are fundamentally incompatible is, it turns out, not so well supported by the evidence.
In fact, there’s a name for the practice of running solar generation and active farming on the same land at the same time. It’s called agrivoltaics. And it has a real, peer-reviewed science behind it.
More than that: in an era where the kind of extreme weather events that once happened once in a generation are now happening once a season, agrivoltaics can offer farmers something that goes well beyond a secondary income stream. Done right, it can provide genuine stability — for the land, for the crops, and for the animals that depend on both.
Part of the issue — part of the myth that solar panels are bad for farmers — comes from historical context. From a time when solar panels were large, heavy, and not particularly efficient. From a time when your average commercial solar panel converted somewhere between ten and fourteen percent of the sunlight that hit it into usable electricity, and cost the equivalent of tens of dollars per watt to manufacture.
[Animation: cost and efficiency curve]
That picture has changed a lot over the last fifty years. Modern commercial solar panels routinely achieve efficiencies of twenty to twenty-two percent. The cost of the panels themselves has dropped by roughly ninety-nine percent since the 1970s. And crucially, the physical footprint required to generate a meaningful amount of power has shrunk accordingly.
So let’s put this into perspective. My home is an early 2000s Adair home. For those not in the Pacific Northwest, that’s a prefabricated kit home, solidly built, nothing fancy. It’s got four bedrooms, around two thousand square feet. It has a fifteen kilowatt peak solar array on the roof, and on a good summer day, I can generate between sixty and ninety kilowatt-hours of electricity from that roof, sometimes even a hundred. And I live in a location that is bordered on three sides by tall Pacific Northwest old-growth forest. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, in prime solar territory.
Twenty years ago, generating that kind of power from a rooftop would have required a roof the size of a small aircraft hangar. Forty years ago, you’d have needed something closer to the footprint of a large barn. And even then, the panels would have been so heavy, so inefficient, and so precisely oriented that any farmer looking at them would have laughed you off the property.
That world is gone, and the assumptions built around that world deserve to go with them.
Modern solar panels are lighter, cheaper, and require far less complicated power electronics to function. They’re built to withstand substantially more punishing weather conditions than their predecessors — higher wind loads, heavier hail, heavier snow loads, greater temperature extremes. They require fundamentally different support structures, too. They can be mounted on taller, more svelte frames that sit well clear of the ground, and in many cases incorporating single or dual-axis tracking motors that rotate the panels to follow the sun throughout the day.
That alone increases their potential generation significantly — and for anyone concerned about return on investment, it meaningfully reduces the payback period. A 2025 peer-reviewed analysis published in the journal Energies — which reviewed more than four thousand scientific studies on solar tracking systems published between 2019 and 2025 — found that single-axis trackers achieve between twenty and thirty-five percent higher energy yield than equivalent fixed-mounted systems. Dual-axis trackers, which follow the sun across both its horizontal path throughout the day and its vertical angle above the horizon — which changes with the seasons — achieve between thirty and forty-five percent more output than a fixed panel pointing in a fixed direction.
So far, I’ve talked about changes in technology, less so about how it can help farmers and landowners. So let’s go there.
With more efficient panels that require less complex, chunky supports, there’s now space for both arable and animal use underneath or between solar panels. And there’s also this reasonably new way of using photovoltaics in agriculture that uses bifacial solar panels as kind of fences. But I’m going to come to that a little later on.
A very basic, rudimentary understanding of how crops grow might assume that plants need sunlight, water, and soil nutrients to survive, and that the sunlight needs to be direct and plentiful at all times. And while it’s true that most modern crops require a decent amount of light to produce a high yield, it’s not quite that simple. Because direct sunlight — full, uninterrupted, eight-hours-a-day direct sunlight — can actually be damaging to certain crops. Or at the very least, it puts them under increased stress.
Why? That’s a long and complicated answer that deserves more time than I can give it here. But the short version is this. In hot climates — and even reasonably temperate ones — a crop subjected to direct sunlight for a full day requires significantly more water. Water that is, for most farmers, a finite and increasingly expensive resource. And it’s not just the soil drying out. Transpiration — the process by which water evaporates directly from a plant’s leaves — can cause wilting and compound that stress further. And stressed plants produce lower yields. Full stop.
So while an eighth-grade understanding of agriculture might lead you to expect that crops grown in the partial shade of a solar panel will grow and fruit less vigorously, the reality is that many — though not all, and I will come to that later — crops require high ambient light levels rather than direct, unfiltered sunlight beating down on them every day, all day.
And there are real, peer-reviewed studies — not just anecdotal pro-solar enthusiasm — to back this up. The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany, one of the world’s leading solar research institutions, ran field studies during the hot, dry summer of 2018 on the impact of solar panels on crops. The discovered that wheat yields increased by 3% and celery harvests improved by 12% in fields where crops were given the partial shade of solar panels, compared to open fields with no panels at all.
That’s not a trivial finding. And it’s not just northern-climate crops, either. At the University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2 research facility, Dr. Greg Barron-Gafford — and yes, I’ll put his name and the study in the description — found that peppers produced three times more fruit under solar panels than they did in open fields. Tomatoes produced twice their usual yield. And because transpiration rates were reduced without meaningfully lowering ambient light levels, water consumption for the peppers was 65% lower than those grown in an open field with no shade whatsoever. 65% less water, three times the fruit, on the same land that is also generating electricity.
Now, I did promise we’d come back to the crops that don’t fare as well under solar panels. And we should, because intellectual honesty matters. And frankly, the people who want to argue that agrivoltaics is all upside and no trade-offs are just as wrong as the people who say solar panels destroy farmland.
A 2026 study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that in the humid eastern Midwest of the US, solar shading reduced maize yields by 24% and soybean yields by 16%. Those are significant numbers, and they deserve to be taken seriously.
But here’s the thing worth sitting with for a moment. Maize — i.e. corn — and soy are among the most resource-intensive crops grown at scale in the US. They require enormous inputs of water, synthetic fertilizers, and herbicides to produce the yields that modern industrial agriculture demands. And a substantial proportion of the corn grown in the American Midwest isn’t grown to feed people or even animals. It’s grown to produce ethanol biofuel. In fact, nearly 52 million acres of US cropland is currently dedicated to growing corn and soy specifically for biofuels. That’s roughly 6% of all American farmland already being used to produce energy.
So when someone argues that putting solar panels on farmland takes food production out of the equation, it’s worth asking: which farmland, growing what, and for whom? Because the land-use argument looks rather different when you hold it up next to 52 million acres of corn that’s going straight into an ICE car’s fuel tank.
And look, I would love to include a clip from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight episode on corn and ethanol, because it’s magnificent, it’s thorough, and it makes the point far more entertainingly than I just did. But HBO are litigious bastards and I would rather not spend the meagre income this channel generates fighting them in court. So instead, I’ll just put a link to it in the description. Go watch it. It is worth your time.
Speaking of which — a very quick word from me to you. This channel exists entirely because of the amazing community of supporters we have on YouTube, Patreon, Ko-fi, PeerTube, and the occasional very welcome cheque that arrives in the post. Unlike a lot of channels, we don’t take big sponsorship deals, and we exist because you support us — and that means we answer to you, not to a brand. So if you’d like to join that community, there’s a link below. And if you prefer to watch us on the Fediverse, because we believe everyone deserves free, untracked access to information, that link is down there too. Right, back to farming.
So I’ve covered the arable side of this argument, so now let’s go to the animals. And it goes without saying that intensive animal farming methods are deeply detrimental to both the animals themselves and to the planet. But luckily, there are still farms out there that believe happy, well cared for animals should be the standard, rather than the stressed, unloved members of some vast, anonymous megaherd.
And — one second. Just, maybe, a camera or two. Okay, I need to vent.
As the daughter of someone who cared extraordinarily deeply for his herd of around a hundred British Holstein Friesians — cows who had good food, good health, and clean bedding, and who were treated as individuals rather than units — I find it genuinely upsetting when I’m on a work trip to California and we pass those mega dairy operations on the I-5 between Sacramento and Los Angeles. My team hears about it every time. My dad won awards for his animal husbandry and his herd’s milk cleanliness for more than a decade, uncontested. He only lost his crown after being made redundant, and then later falling ill and succumbing to glioblastoma. No animal should ever be asked to live in those kinds of conditions. I’m sorry. In fact, no, I’m not sorry. I just…
No. Horrific, inhumane megaherds aside — and it’s worth noting that the United States is genuinely one of a small handful of countries where that particular model is even a widespread thing or allowed. Most farms around the world have livestock that are actually very well suited to living alongside solar panels. And again, the science backs this up.
Lambs raised on pasture grown alongside solar panels have access to a higher-quality diet than those in open-grazed environments. Why? Because grass, like most plants, benefits from partial shade too. It stays greener, more nutritious, and more digestible for longer. Shade also allows animals to escape the worst of the day’s heat, which reduces stress and improves both meat and wool quality.
Multiple studies in 2024 – primarily in Australia but mirrored in other places – tracked sheep over two years on agrivoltaic pasture and found not only improved thermal comfort and better forage quality, but a measurably reduced parasitic burden compared to open-field-raised sheep. Healthier animals, requiring fewer parasitic prevention treatments, meaning lower costs for the farmer. All while resulting in a healthier, happier animal. Which means a better product. Whatever that product is. Same land, two financial benefits.
And lest anyone think this is purely a wacky European socialist experiment — and I know that roughly 10% in our comments section will be thinking exactly that — a 2025 study published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, conducted across 28 commercial solar sites in the northeast US, found that sheep grazing under solar panels improved soil organic matter, reduced compaction, and produced more nutrient-rich, higher-quality forage, benefiting everything from fresh pasture to hay and silage.
Now, sheep are one thing. But what about cattle?
The evidence for bovine benefits from agrivoltaics is newer and thinner than the sheep research, largely because cattle are bigger animals and need taller, more widely spaced panel configurations to graze comfortably underneath them. But it exists, it’s growing, and it’s coming from some credible places.
The University of Minnesota — and if there’s a state that understands dairy cows, it’s Minnesota — has been running one of the most comprehensive cattle agrivoltaics programs in the country at its West Central Research and Outreach Centre, operating 24 cows out of a larger 275-strong heard under and alongside solar panels. Researcher Kirsten Sharpe found that solar panel shade can reduce a dairy cow’s body temperature by around one degree Fahrenheit. Now, that might not sound like much, but for a dairy cow, thermal comfort is directly tied to milk yield, reproductive performance, and immune function.
And the numbers tell you exactly how much it matters at scale. Heat stress currently costs the US dairy industry an estimated $1.5 billion a year in lost milk production. That figure comes from peer-reviewed research published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science and corroborated by the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. $1.5 billion every year, because cows get too hot.
Solar panels, it turns out, are rather good at providing shade.
There are also working examples beyond the research facilities. In Vermont, Maple Ridge Meats — an organic beef operation — grazes cattle alongside solar panels, benefiting from the dual-income stream of power generation and meat production, while the cattle manage the vegetation underneath the panels for free. In Tennessee, Silicon Ranch has been pioneering cattle agrivoltaics at commercial scale, with the Associated Press covering an active site in Christiana just this week. And in West Virginia, where 68% of agricultural producers currently need off-farm income because farming alone doesn’t pay the bills, West Virginia University is running DOE-funded research specifically on cattle and solar co-location, with an explicit goal of giving struggling family farms a viable second income stream.
Which brings me to something I mentioned in passing earlier. Neither dairy nor beef farming is exactly profitable, unless you happen to be part of a small cooperative, sell directly to consumers, or offer speciality products like your own cheese, yoghurt, or ice cream. Dairy farmers in particular have been systemically squeezed by large supermarket chains for decades, forced to sell their milk at prices that don’t even cover the cost of production.
And as for the current administration’s comments to beef farmers — let me read you something. In October 2025, with American beef prices running high — not because of rancher greed, but because of the US beef herd being at its smallest in 75 years, depleted by drought, disease, and an ageing farming population — President Trump proposed importing cheaper Argentinian beef to bring consumer prices down. His own cattle ranchers, who had overwhelmingly voted for him, revolted. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association — not exactly a hotbed of radical leftism — put out a statement saying they “cannot stand behind the president while he undercuts the future of family farmers and ranchers.”
Republican senators from Nebraska and South Dakota pushed back publicly. The House Speaker expressed concern. And Trump’s response, posted to Truth Social, was this.
[Trump clip]
“They have to get their prices down.”
To the farmers who were finally, finally having one marginally profitable year after decades of losses, trying to pay down the debt accumulated during all of their unprofitable years. Get your prices down. This is the man who says solar panels are destroying farmers.
[Trump clip]
Quite something, isn’t it? Right. Let’s talk about something that actually helps them.
You may think that by now we’ve exhausted the benefits of solar for crops and animal welfare, but let’s remind ourselves of those edge cases — the crops where direct overhead sun really is required for a good yield. Soy, corn, and a handful of others. For those crops, there’s also a solution, and it’s called bifacial technology.
As the name suggests, unlike traditional monofacial solar panels — where only one face carries the photovoltaic elements — bifacial panels have solar generation capability on both sides, which means they can be installed rather like a fence: upright, vertical, generating electricity from both faces simultaneously. And because modern solar panels can still generate meaningful amounts of power from ambient and diffuse light alone — not just direct sunlight — bifacial panels mounted vertically offer an elegant solution for farms where full overhead sun exposure is essential for the crop, or indeed, for situations where large farm machinery needs to pass between the rows without worrying about vertical clearance. And this is where bifacial panels really come into their own.
And yes, there are studies. In 2025, a paper published in the journal Energy Nexus — from a research team at Aarhus University in Denmark — became the first peer-reviewed study to report increased crop yields from vertical bifacial agrivoltaics in a temperate environment. The setup was straightforward: bifacial panels installed in a vertical east-west orientation, with winter wheat and grass clover grown in the rows between them. And the results were pretty striking. Yields increased rather than decreased, stress from winter winds was reduced because the panels themselves acted as windbreaks — which, it turns out, is rather useful in a Danish winter. Standard farming equipment could also tend to the crops without modification or restriction. And because the panels faced east and west rather than tilting southward like a conventional array, they generated their highest outputs during the morning and evening periods — precisely the periods of peak grid demand when conventional south-facing solar farms are producing least. The crops get full overhead sun during the day, the panels get light from both sides at dawn and dusk. Everyone wins.
Of course, bifacial won’t work everywhere. Some crops — corn being the obvious example — grow tall enough that they risk blocking the panels entirely when fully grown. But here’s the thing that’s really kind of important. Corn, depending on the variety, has a maturity window of roughly 90 to 120 days from seed to harvest. And it’s only actually at full height for around 30 to 40 of those days, which means the incompatibility between tall crops and vertical bifacial panels is a seasonal constraint, not a permanent one. And careful rotational planning can help work around that.
Which brings me to the financials, because I suspect that for many of you watching this — particularly those of you who actually work the land, or grew up around people who did — everything I’ve discussed thus far is interesting, but interesting doesn’t pay the bills.
And while I’ve been drawing heavily on US data throughout this video — partly because that’s where a lot of the English-language research lives, and partly because the political context we started with is very much a US story right now — I want to be really clear: the financial pressures facing farmers are not uniquely American. They are a global phenomenon. And so increasingly is the agrivoltaic solution.
So let’s start with a baseline. Farming is hard, everywhere. In the US, the USDA’s own data shows that the median household income from farming in 2024 was negative — basically, farmers lost money at the median from the act of farming itself. Most farm households survive on off-farm income. In the UK, farm incomes have been volatile and declining in real terms for years, with small and medium operations particularly squeezed between rising input costs and supermarket pricing power. Across the EU, the average farm income per worker sits well below the average wage in most member states. And in Japan, where the average age of a farmer is now over 67 — the highest of any developed nation — the question of farm viability and succession is nothing short of a demographic crisis. In India and across sub-Saharan Africa, smallholder farms face energy poverty alongside agricultural volatility, often paying more per unit of electricity than urban consumers, when they can access it at all.
The thread running through all of this is the same. Farming is capital-intensive, weather-dependent, commodity price-dependent, and increasingly climate-dependent. It is structurally set up to reward scale and punish smallness. And in every country where farmland is appreciating as an asset class — which is most of them — the quiet, steady pressure of institutional investment is making it harder and harder for the next generation of farming families to afford the land their parents farmed. And that pressure is taking a very real human toll. Farmer suicide rates are significantly elevated above the general population in the US, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and France. That’s not an abstraction. It is a crisis.
Private equity firms, real estate investment trusts, and institutional investors have identified farmland as one of the most attractive asset classes available. Think about it: stable returns, inflation protection, finite supply, growing global food demand. In the US, for example, you or I or anyone can buy fractional stakes in American farmland through online investment platforms today, starting at fifteen thousand dollars, traded just like any other stock. In the UK, pension funds and institutional investors have been steadily acquiring agricultural land for years. In Aotearoa New Zealand, foreign investment in farmland has become a live political issue. The family farm, in every wealthy nation, is under the same quiet structural pressure, and the families who work the land are increasingly the last people who can afford to own it.
Now, I want to be clear. A solar lease doesn’t solve all of that. But it does something important — it makes the family farm financially viable enough to survive. And before we go too far into that, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page.
While some farmers — especially small family operators — will choose to go solar themselves, investing their own capital or taking out a loan to generate their own power, a more common path is to lease land to specialist solar generation companies, utility companies, or local cooperative community solar programs. This is an important distinction, because you don’t necessarily have to spend a huge amount of money. You lease the land, they build and operate the system. You receive a guaranteed annual payment.
Now, how much land are we talking about? A well-designed solar farm generates roughly one megawatt of power per five to seven acres, which is enough to power around two hundred homes. A ten-acre agrivoltaic installation — which is small enough to fit on the corner of many small family farms — can generate one to two megawatts while leaving the remaining land in full agricultural production. The average American farm is four hundred and sixty-six acres. A farmer who leases just ten percent of their land — around forty-six acres — to a solar developer while continuing to farm the rest could generate enough electricity for nearly a thousand homes, and receive a guaranteed lease payment in the process.
In the US, more than fifty percent of farmers who discussed solar lease arrangements with developers in 2024 were offered annual payments of one thousand dollars per acre or more — guaranteed, regardless of whether commodity prices or what the supermarket decides to pay for milk this quarter. Solar leases typically run twenty-five to thirty-five years, with annual escalation clauses built in.
An escalation clause, in case you’re not familiar, is a contractual provision that automatically increases the lease payment each year — usually by a fixed percentage, often between one point five and two point five percent annually, or sometimes it’s tied to inflation. It means that the payment you receive in year twenty-five is meaningfully higher in real terms than the payment you received in year one. It’s the kind of contractual protection that most farmers almost never get from commodity markets or supermarket supply agreements.
For a farm household whose median income from farming is currently negative, a guaranteed payment on a portion of their land for the next three decades — rising every year — isn’t a supplement. For many families, it’s the difference between keeping the farm in the family and selling it to an investment fund.
In Europe, the picture is similar in spirit if different in structure. In Germany, KfW offers below-market loans of up to fifty million euros for farm solar installations, with repayment terms of up to twenty years. Italy’s Agrisolare program — which covers forty to eighty percent of installation costs for farms putting solar on barns, greenhouses, and other agricultural buildings — has been so oversubscribed it’s had to run multiple funding rounds. France became the first major European country to enshrine agrivoltaics in law, with Decree 2024-318 creating a specific legal framework and feed-in tariff for agrivoltaic projects, guaranteeing a rate of electricity fed into the grid for twenty years. South Korea has changed regulations to allow rice paddies and orchards to host solar without penalties. Japan, with its ageing farmland population and land-use pressures, now has more than three thousand agrivoltaic farms. India has been promoting agrivoltaics as a solution for energy access in remote farming communities for over a decade.
Globally, agrivoltaic capacity has grown from just five gigawatts in 2020 to over twenty-five gigawatts by the end of 2024. The market is projected to reach over twenty-three billion US dollars by 2032. This is not a niche — it’s a structural shift in how the world thinks about land and energy.
And the Solar and Storage Industries Institute found that leasing as little as five to ten percent of farmland for solar — while continuing to farm the rest — can significantly improve overall farm profitability, and that agrivoltaics can increase the total economic value of a farm by more than thirty percent compared to conventional farming alone. Not by replacing farming, but by adding to it.
Now, beyond the individual farm, there’s a community argument that is almost entirely missing from this conversation. Rural communities — in the US, in the UK, in India, across Africa, across the Pacific — are disproportionately vulnerable to power grid failures. The infrastructure is older, the distances are greater, the customer density is lower, and the economics of maintaining it are less attractive to whoever owns and operates it.
When Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in 2024, some rural communities lost grid connection for months. Months. Solar-powered microgrids — solar generation paired with battery storage — kept the lights on in places the main grid had abandoned. In Tanzania and Kenya, agrivoltaic installations have been shown to generate electricity at a lower cost than the national grid, providing energy access to farming communities that the centralized system has never reliably served.
And when solar is tied to grid-connected battery storage at scale, it enables something called peak shaving. During the middle of the day, when the sun is at its strongest, solar farms often generate more electricity than the local grid immediately needs. That surplus is stored in batteries. Then, during the evening peak demand period — when the sun has gone down and everyone is at home cooking dinner and watching television — that stored energy is released back to the grid precisely when it’s needed most, and when grid prices are typically at their highest. This reduces strain on the grid during its most expensive and vulnerable periods, reduces costs for utility companies, and in a well-regulated market, the savings flow back to consumers — including the rural communities who are historically last in line for grid investment and first to lose power when things go wrong.
And then there are the buildings themselves. A dairy barn running refrigeration and milking equipment needs power around the clock. A grain dryer running for weeks at a time during harvest needs power. A greenhouse heating through a northern European winter needs power. A poultry shed running ventilation 24 hours a day needs power. These are enormous, consistent energy loads, and they are exactly the kind of loads that a well-sized rooftop solar installation on an existing agricultural building can offset directly — especially when paired with batteries. No land taken out of production, no panels over crops, just cheaper energy from the roof of the building that was already there.
In Italy alone, the Agrisolare program has prioritized exactly these farm building installations, recognizing that energy costs is one of the single biggest pressures on agricultural viability, and that solar on a barn roof is one of the simplest and most cost-effective things a farmer can do.
Which brings us neatly, and somewhat frustratingly, back to where we started. Alternative facts. Doublespeak. The deliberate construction of a narrative that serves power at the expense of the people it claims to protect. And the claims from a man who couldn’t tell mastitis from milk fever, or in fact wheat from barley.
And look, I am no fan of the British monarchy. I believe countries should be run by representatives elected by the people, not by one person born into the job. And I believe that inherited privilege isn’t an affront to democratic values — but I am going to defend King Charles III of the UK for approximately 45 seconds, and here is why.
Last Wednesday, April 29th, 2026, while on a state visit to the US, King Charles had a full schedule: Congress, the 9/11 Memorial, business leaders at the Rockefeller Centre. And he could have filled every available moment with those things. Instead, as someone who does farm, he specifically requested to visit Harlem Grown — a non-profit that has transformed 14 abandoned lots in Harlem into urban farms, teaching kids about food, sustainability, and growing things. He planted lavender and mustard seeds with school children. He fed chickens. A child told him she liked his hair and he said, “Do you? Good.” He told a reporter he was very impressed. And one of the young people there said — and I love this — that when she heard he’d insisted on coming despite his packed schedule, he went from being King Charles III of the UK to just Charles.
That’s someone who understands farming, and what it means to grow food, and why it matters. Something our current wannabe king here — the one telling cattle ranchers to lower their prices while importing Argentinian beef — demonstrably does not.
Oh, and Harlem Grown? Currently having its federal funding cut by the Trump administration. Because of course it is.
The claim that solar panels destroy farmers is a not-good-faith policy concern. It is not the conclusion of someone who has looked at the evidence and found it wanting. It is a talking point — carefully constructed, widely amplified, and strategically useful to people whose financial interests lie in keeping fossil fuels central to the global economy for as long as possible.
We have spent the last however-many minutes looking at the actual evidence. Peer-reviewed studies from universities in the US, Germany, Denmark, France, Japan, and Australia. Data from the USDA, NREL, the Fraunhofer Institute, and the European Commission. Real farms, real animals, real crops, and real families trying to make a living from the land.
And what the evidence shows is this. Solar panels deployed thoughtfully alongside active farming can increase crop yields for a wide range of produce. They can reduce water consumption by up to 65% for certain crops. They can improve pasture quality for livestock. They can produce healthier, less stressed animals with better wool and better meat. They can stabilize soil, improve organic matter, reduce compaction, and create more resilient growing conditions in an era of increasingly volatile weather. They can generate a guaranteed income stream — rising every year for 25 to 35 years — that makes the difference between a family keeping their farm or losing it to a private equity fund. They can power rural communities that the centralized grid has historically underserved. They can reduce peak demand pressure. They can keep the lights on when a storm hits. They can do all of this on a fraction of the available farmland.
Less than a quarter of a percent of US farmland currently hosts solar. Converting just one percent of farmland globally to agrivoltaics could meet a significant portion of the world’s renewable energy goals without removing a single acre from food production.
The people telling you that solar destroys farmers are the same people who told cattle ranchers they needed to lower their prices while importing Argentinian beef to undercut them. They are the same people who gutted the one federal program specifically designed to help farmers afford solar. They are the same people paying nearly two billion dollars of taxpayer money to energy companies to abandon clean energy projects and invest in fossil fuels instead.
They do not love farmers. They love the idea of farmers — as a rhetorical device, as a voting bloc, as some bucolic thing from the past, as a useful face to put on a policy that serves someone else entirely.
George Orwell. He would recognize it immediately. He wrote the manual.
The good news is that the evidence is on our side. The science is on our side. And increasingly, the economics are on our side. Agrivoltaics are not a fringe idea being pushed by well-meaning environmentalists who’ve never been on a working farm. It is a rapidly growing global industry, backed by peer-reviewed research, embraced by governments from France to South Korea to India, and being actively chosen by farmers who’ve done the maths and like what they see.
So the next time someone tells you that solar panels are destroying farmers — ask them which farmers. Ask them which studies. Ask them who benefits from you believing all of that. And then, if you feel so inclined, send them this video.
Thanks for watching to the end. If you made it this far, let me know in the comments below if there are any agrivoltaic farms near you. And if you are a solar farmer, tell me about your experiences and how it affected your crops. Keep it civil. And remember, your opinions aren’t the only valid ones.
We’re 100% independent, and if you’d like us to stay that way, there’s a link down below in the show notes to support us on Patreon from $1.50 a month. And that means you can join this amazing list of channel supporters right here. You can also send us money on Ko-fi, buy some swag from our swag store, and please, please hit subscribe. YouTube won’t reliably tell you we’ve pushed a new video though, so do make sure you also follow us on social media, or join our Discord or Fluxr chat rooms.
Thanks for watching, thanks for helping be the positive change in the world we need, and until next time — keep evolving!
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