Is Solar Taking Up Farmland?
Why are we covering all of our farmland in solar panels when we need that land to grow food?
This is a common refrain I hear online and off, and it’s effective, because as always, there’s a piece of truth buried inside of it.
Solar projects are frequently built on farmland. Sometimes, on very good, productive farmland. And I don’t think it’s wise to shrug off the concerns.
That said, there is a large gap between “some solar is built on some farmland” and “solar is taking up all of our farmland.”
So how much farmland is solar actually using?
Turns out, very little. And once you start comparing solar with the other ways we already use agricultural land (including the millions of acres of crops we grow specifically for energy and not food production already), the conversation gets more interesting.
How Much Farmland is Used for Solar in the US?
Between 2012 and 2020, 43% of utility-scale solar projects were installed on land previously classified as cropland, while another 28% were installed on pasture or rangeland. Clearly, agricultural land is being used.
However, percentages without denominators make things sound much larger than they are. The USDA also estimated that, in 2020, solar and wind together would directly affect 424,000 rural acres. In total, the US has approximately 897 million acres of farmland.
Do the math, and you’ll realize that works out to less than 0.05%.
Solar deployment has, of course, grown considerably since 2020, so that figure is admittedly dated. Yet more recent analyses still put solar’s agricultural footprint at a small fraction of American farmland.
A January 2026 analysis found that utility-scale solar occupies an average of 0.07% of prime farmland across states. In 36 of those states, it occupies less than 0.1%. In 12, it’s below 0.01%.
Even the Department of Energy’s much larger future solar scenarios aren’t talking about converting anything remotely close to a majority of American land. The DOE estimates ground-mounted solar would require, at most, 10 million acres by 2050. That’s still less than 1% (0.5%) of the contiguous United States.
Land use clearly is a legitimate conversation to have, but scale holds an important place there.
How Much Farmland is Already Used for Energy and Ethanol?
The idea of using farmland to produce energy instead of food is not a new one. We’ve been dedicating agricultural land to energy production for decades (and, yes, at the “taxpayers’ expense,” as the naysayers like to say about solar).
We just haven’t always called that production “an energy project,” because it looks a lot like a cornfield.
40 million acres of corn are grown for ethanol each year, equivalent to 4.5% of U.S. farmland. That’s an enormous amount of land compared with the acreage currently or potentially occupied by solar.
Corn Grown for Ethanol Doesn’t Just Produce Energy
But there’s an important caveat here, because reducing ethanol corn to “we grow 40 million acres to just put it in gas tanks” isn’t particularly accurate or helpful, either.
When corn goes into an ethanol plant, the entire kernel doesn’t disappear into your gas tank. The starch is fermented into ethanol, while valuable co-products remain. Most notably, ethanol production creates distillers grains, a high-protein livestock feed used by beef and dairy cattle, hogs, and poultry. Distillers grains are sold domestically and internationally, which means those acres are simultaneously supporting the energy, livestock and export markets. Corn oil and other co-products add additional value.
So I don’t think it’s entirely fair to count every acre of ethanol corn as an acre producing only energy. But I do think it’s fair to ask why we talk so differently about the land beneath two energy systems.
Especially when you consider that corn ethanol isn’t something that emerged from an entirely free agricultural market, either.
Federal policy has spent decades building and supporting the biofuels market. Today, one of its biggest supports is the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires specified volumes of renewable fuels to enter the transportation fuel supply. Corn growers, like producers of other major commodity crops, also operate within a broader farm safety net that includes federally subsidized crop insurance and commodity programs.
These policies exist for reasons, and I’m not necessarily arguing for or against them. Agriculture is incredibly volatile; weather, commodity markets, trade, input prices, and global production all have the ability to turn an excellent year into a terrible one quite fast.
Why Farmers Consider Solar Leases When Corn Prices Are Low
And corn farmers are getting a stark reminder of that right now. The United States produced a record 17 billion bushels of corn in 2025, with a record average yield of 186.5 bushels per acre. Harvested acreage reached 91.3 million acres, its highest level since 1933.
It’s an incredible production story. What it’s not is an incredible profitability story.
That same enormous supply pushed inventories higher and put pressure on prices; USDA projected the 2025-2026 season average corn price at around $4.15 per bushel, well below the prices farmers saw during the commodity highs earlier this decade.
Meanwhile, the cost of growing corn hasn't returned to where it was before the run-up in fertilizer, machinery, land and other expenses.
From 2014 to 2020, the average value of corn production did not cover total production costs. Even when corn prices improved, higher expenses ate into the gains: in 2023, USDA estimated corn producers netted only about $11.60 per acre over total production costs.
And unfortunately, this isn’t much news; while the few years have been particularly hard for corn growers, it’s just one chapter in a very long book about why it’s so difficult to make money farming.
That’s worth thinking about when we talk about why a farmer might consider a solar lease.
A farmer can plant corn, take on all the costs and production risk, watch global commodity markets all year, and just hope and pray that weather, yields, and price cooperate (remember, farmers are price takers, not price-setters; while other businesses can adjust pricing to accommodate for rising input costs, farmers generally cannot).
On the flipside, a landowner might be offered a solar lease paying $1,000 to $2,000 an acre, per year, for decades.
We can debate the consequences of the decision for agricultural land all day long, but we shouldn’t pretend the farmer making it is irrational or self-serving. The economics of farming are what’s helped to create the opportunity for solar in the first place.
Solar vs. Ethanol: Which Produces More Energy Per Acre?
And then there’s the energy-per-acre comparison.
Even after acknowledging the value of ethanol co-products, solar generates dramatically more usable energy from an acre of land; solar produces roughly 30 to 100 times more energy per acre than corn grown for ethanol.
That’s still not an argument for ripping 40 million acres of corn out of production and replacing them with solar panels. Ethanol, despite its many flaws, supports corn markets, livestock production, rural economies, and an enormous existing transportation system. Liquid fuels still do things electricity can’t easily replace.
I’m just arguing for some consistency in the debate. If using farmland to produce energy is inherently a misuse of farmland, then we’ve had an enormous farmland problem for decades.
Why are we just talking about it now?
Why Do Solar Developers Choose Farmland in the First Place?
There’s a practical reason why you see solar projects proposed on farms: think about what makes a field good for farming.
It’s generally open and accessible. Often, it’s relatively flat. It isn’t covered in mature forest, buildings, or rock. You’ve generally got roads and nearby infrastructure (ie, existing transmission abilities).
Those same characteristics also make land attractive for solar. Clearing 500 acres of forest to create an open solar site requires considerably more site work and cost, and creates an entirely different set of environmental problems, than building on already-open ground.
Another reason developers often approach farmers: farmers often own large contiguous pieces of land.
A project might require hundreds or thousands of acres, and assembling that kind of acreage from dozens or hundreds of suburban property owners would be enormously complicated, a fool’s errand.
Of course, there’s the most important angle to consider of all: the farmer’s equation.
Solar leases, as you can see from the simple math I laid out above, pay substantially more than agricultural rent. One survey found that among farmers who had recently discussed a solar lease, 69% had been offered at least $1,000 per acre per year, while 27% had been offered more than $1,500.
For comparison, the national average cash rent for non-irrigated cropland cited by the American Farm Bureau Federation was $146 per acre.
This still doesn’t automatically make solar the right decision. But it does help explain why a farmer may say yes.
We talk a lot about preserving farms, but remember: farms have to make enough money for somebody to keep owning them. Farmland doesn’t remain farmland on a wish and a prayer. It remains farmland with hard work, dedication, and perhaps the most cogent to this argument, money.
Why Don’t We Put More Solar On Rooftops?
I get this question constantly, and I understand the appeal. Put solar on a Walmart. Over parking lots. On warehouses. Or even on houses. But for God’s sake, leave the fields alone.
We should put solar in those places. But the thing is…we already do.
More than a third of all solar capacity in the US is small scale solar, much of which was installed on existing structures. But the issue is that a thousand residential rooftop systems and one 200-megawatt solar project aren’t interchangeable just on the premise that they both contain solar panels. There are practical limitations to rooftops, including:
Roof orientation
Structural capacity
Ownership
Shading
Building age
Cost
Project size
Transmission infrastructure
The amount of usable surface area
Parking lot canopies are a good option, but they’re generally more expensive to build because you’re constructing elevated structures around existing infrastructure while maintaining the property’s original use. And then there’s the piece that gets overlooked in just about every version of this argument: the grid.
Electricity has to get from the panels to somewhere it can enter the electrical system, which is why utility scale solar isn’t sprinkled randomly across a map wherever someone finds inexpensive acreage. Developers spend enormous amounts of time looking for places where projects can feasibly interconnect with substations and transmission infrastructure.
You could theoretically find thousands of acres of "better" land somewhere else. But if there's no feasible way to connect a project there, it doesn't solve the problem.
Building new transmission is neither quick nor cheap. It can take years. So when you see several solar projects clustered in a rural area, part of the explanation may be agricultural land availability. But another major part is often what you can't see when you're driving past the panels: the electrical infrastructure nearby.
Can Farmland Still Be Farmed After Solar is Built?
Yes. And this is where I think we need to stop treating every solar project as though they’re identical.
While solar construction can compact soils, disturb drainage, and create erosion problems if not managed correctly, solar doesn’t eliminate agricultural use. Agrivoltaics intentionally combines solar generation with agriculture. Sheep grazing is currently one of the most common examples, although cattle, crops, hay production and other systems are being tested and used.
The USDA’s research has found that about 85% of crop and pasture-rangeland near solar farms remained in agricultural production following development during the period researchers studied. While this doesn’t mean that 85% of acreage underneath panels was being farmed, and it doesn’t prove there was no agricultural displacement, is does show why “solar arrives and agriculture disappears” is too simplistic of a narrative.
If ten projects concentrate in one farming community, telling a neighboring farmer that solar occupies only a tiny percentage of American farmland isn't going to help them rent the field they just lost. Because a large portion of American cropland is rented, solar lease payments can make it extremely difficult for a working farmer to compete for land.
That's especially relevant for younger farmers who don't own much ground, like us. Yet there are also plenty of young farmers who have found entryways into farming via solar and agrivoltaics (like us) they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
So I think we need to be able to hold two ideas at once:
Solar is not consuming American farmland at anything approaching a national food-security crisis, based on the acreage currently involved.
And poorly planned or highly concentrated solar development can create meaningful agricultural impacts at the local level.
Those statements don't contradict each other. It’s all in the planning, and in the nuance.
Is Solar Taking Up Farmland?
Yes. Some of it.
But if we’re asking whether solar development is swallowing American farmland on a scale that threatens our ability to produce food, then no. The numbers don’t support that conclusion. We have nearly 900 million acres of farmland in the United States. We already dedicate tens of millions of those acres to producing energy crops.
Current utility-scale solar occupies a tiny fraction of agricultural land, and even aggressive long-term solar scenarios would use a small percentage of the country's overall land base.
Again, this shouldn’t be an excuse to throw good site planning, environmental review, and, especially, agrivoltaics out the window. It does mean attention to detail is needed.
When solar and agriculture can realistically occupy the same acre, we need to make it much easier for that to happen. Preserving farmland requires us to understand what’s actually threatening it. And we can’t have that conversation honestly if every acre with solar panels on it is treated as evidence that America’s farms are disappearing.
FAQ
How much U.S. farmland is used for solar?
Current estimates vary depending on whether researchers measure all farmland, prime farmland or specific types of solar development. A 2026 American Clean Power analysis found that utility-scale solar occupies an average of about 0.07% of prime farmland across states. USDA previously found that solar and wind together directly affected less than 0.05% of U.S. farmland in 2020.
Why are solar farms built on agricultural land?
Farmland is often attractive for solar because it is already cleared, relatively flat and accessible. Large farms can provide the contiguous acreage utility-scale projects require. Proximity to substations and transmission infrastructure is another major factor in determining where projects can feasibly connect to the electric grid.
Why can't all solar panels be installed on rooftops instead?
Rooftop solar is useful and should continue expanding, but rooftops vary in size, orientation, structural condition, ownership and proximity to electrical infrastructure. Utility-scale projects generate far more electricity per individual project, so rooftop and ground-mounted solar serve different roles in the electric system.
Does solar permanently destroy farmland?
Not inherently. Construction can damage agricultural soils if it is poorly managed, which is why siting, construction standards and decommissioning requirements are important. Solar facilities are generally designed for a finite operating life, after which equipment can be removed. Some sites continue agricultural production during operation through agrivoltaics.
Can animals graze underneath solar panels?
Yes. Sheep grazing is already used at solar facilities around the United States, and researchers and farmers are experimenting with cattle and other agricultural systems. This practice is generally called agrivoltaics when agricultural production and solar generation intentionally share the same land.
Does solar use more farmland than corn ethanol?
No. Roughly 40 million acres of U.S. corn production are associated with ethanol annually. Current solar development occupies far less land. On an energy-per-acre basis, ACP reports that solar can generate approximately 30 to 100 times more energy than corn grown for ethanol.
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