Solar Panel Plague or Progress? Controversy Explodes as Farmland Disappears

by Chris Bennett (AgWeb) Roughly 2,200 acres of prime farmland is vanishing under a blue blanket of glass, plastic, aluminum, and silicon in Kalamazoo County, Michigan. The disappearing act, increasingly common in rural America, is a sweet source of income for some farmers, but a bitter pill for many adjoining producers and landowners.

“Giant solar panels mean prime farmland gone forever and the ruin of rural life, not to mention a potential environmental mess,” says Kate Smit, whose farm sits close to the proposed solar facility.

Smit’s property will be the next-door recipient of 461,000 solar panels strung in 5,400 rows, much of it surrounded by 7’-high fencing.

Bill Peter, a homeowner adjacent to the incoming facility and former longtime employee of Liberty Farms, the same operation that leased the acres for a solar transformation, is opposed to the installation: “Don’t insult me by calling it a ‘solar farm.’ I’m not fooled. What’s happening is sick, and whether you live in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, or any other state, it’s coming to your backyard. Today here and tomorrow everywhere.”

Peter was fired by Liberty Farms on March 27, he claims, as a direct outcome of his opposition to the solar lease. “I don’t agree with the ‘tiny percent of overall farmland’ excuse,” he adds. “This is one of the saddest things I’ve seen in American agriculture in my lifetime. It ends with glass and metal covering millions of acres.”

Is Peter correct? How many solar acres are planned: 10 million by 2030? 20 million by 2040? Less? More?

Standing at the edge of her 97 acres of grain outside Richland Township, Kate Smit sweeps an arm toward the horizon. She soon will be surrounded by a sea of solar panels.

According to a release, Consumers Energy “expects the Project to be in service for at least 35 years. Consumers Energy has worked diligently with nearby landowners and residents to minimize Project impacts on the surrounding community.”

“Are you kidding me? That farmland is lost way past 35 years or 50 years, or whatever ridiculous number they throw out,” Smit says. “No one wants solar panels here, and Consumers knows that. Our community is fighting this tooth and nail. Consumers came here hush-hush, did deals with MDOT, and suddenly our landscape is permanently destroyed.”

(Consumers Energy declined Agweb interview requests regarding the Richland solar installation.)

“We want to stall Consumers’ solar project until we can get a bill passed in our state senate to where townships and counties have to vote if a solar panel company wants in,” Smit continues.

“Are you kidding me? That farmland is lost way past 35 years or 50 years, or whatever ridiculous number they throw out,” Smit says.

Ironically, until March 2026, Peter was employed at Liberty Farms, the new landlord of Consumers Energy. “I’m not afraid to tell the truth and they fired me for it. That’s their choice,” he emphasizes. “I’m not sitting quietly while 450,000 solar panels permanently replace the best farm soil around.”

Generally, solar panels are made of 76% glass, 10% plastic, 8% aluminum, 5% silicon, and 1% copper.

“There’s nothing green about this green energy,” Peter contends. “They want to put glass, steel, aluminum, and plastic on top of a natural watershed area, and completely cut the ground off from photosynthesis, and then tell you it’s environmentally safe for 50 years, and won’t hurt the soil with contamination? What happens when a tornado or natural disaster tosses grinds all these panels to particles?”

Battle of the Pens
In 2021, President Biden (Executive Order 14057) mandated that the federal government reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. A massive solar push was included in the plan. How much farmland was needed to reach the net-zero goal? Estimates ranged from 10 million to 26 million acres, with upper end projections of 50 million.

In 2024-2025, solar infrastructure covered approximately 1 million-plus acres of farmland, with roughly half of the acreage directly on cropland. Overall, the U.S. contains almost 880 million acres of farmland.

Prime agricultural land is popular for solar installations, partially because it’s often open, dry, and relatively flat. Construction costs for solar conversion on farmland are generally lower than on other types of ground.

Private Land v Public Choice?
Whose ox is gored? When millions of dollars in lease contracts are at stake, how does the right to use private land as a property owner sees fit weigh into the solar equation? Simply, solar pays tremendously well compared with corn, cotton, rice, or soybeans.

Well and Good
As of 2024, American Farm Bureau Federation estimates over 1.25 million acres of farmland has been covered by solar installations:

The ERS (Economic Research Service, USDA) approximates solar’s footprint as of 2020 at 336,000 acres of rural land based on the total solar production capacity installed in U.S. Census designated rural areas. As solar capacity has more than doubled since 2020 and is increasingly coming from utility-scale solar, this estimate is woefully out-of-date. Using SIEA’s current estimate of 200 GW of installed solar capacity, ERS’s estimate of 7.5 acres used per MW of production, and AFT’s estimate that 83% of solar installations are on farmland, we roughly estimate that 1.25 million acres of farmland have been converted for use in solar production. While that may be a startlingly high number to some, it would represent 0.14% of the 879 million acres of farmland in the United States. READ MORE