Why Do Farmers Oppose Solar Farms? What Your First Letter Should Admit

The sign at the end of the gravel road says "No solar on farmland." The man who put it there farms 600 acres. He owns about half of them. The rest he rents, and one of the fields he rents is on your parcel list.

Farmers oppose solar farms for five main reasons. They don't want good cropland taken out of production. Renters can lose the fields they farm. Saying yes can cost an owner standing with the neighbors. A fenced field of panels changes how the place looks. And a lot of this ground has been in one family for generations. Each of those shows up in published research as well as on yard signs.

The national acreage is small, and that rarely settles anything. A farmer weighing a lease thinks about one field, the people who farm it, and the road he drives every morning.

The five reasons farm communities push back

"That's good ground"

This is the reason on most signs, and it's grounded in numbers. American Farmland Trust's modeling says that without policy changes, 83% of expected future solar development will take place on farmland. Nearly half of that would be on the country's most productive, versatile and resilient farmland.

Owners feel it too. A Penn State study looked at Pennsylvania farmers offered solar leases. Some turned them down because they felt their land was "too valuable not to use for agriculture." Others said they needed every acre to keep the farm profitable.

The renter loses the field

This one gets the least attention outside farm country, and it may matter most to your project.

In USDA's 2014 survey of farmland ownership, about 39% of farmland in the lower 48 was rented. Most rented acres belonged to landlords who don't farm. When that landlord signs a solar lease, the person who loses the ground is often the tenant.

American Farmland Trust says solar can increase competition for land for farmer-renters. In its 2024 Texas survey, 55% of respondents named land access for tenant farmers as a concern. Some described less land to rent and higher rents near solar projects.

The tenant has no lease to sign and nothing to gain. He is also the one who knows everybody at the county meeting.

The neighbors

Signing is legal. Living with it afterward is the part owners think about.

A Cornell team surveyed 584 landowners in three New York counties. They found that landowners believed their neighbors, community, family and friends would be "slightly opposed" to them leasing. Farmers were more worried than other landowners about whether leasing part of their land would be socially acceptable.

Owners have reason to worry. Columbia Law School's Sabin Center counted 567 renewable projects across 48 states that faced serious local opposition. By the end of 2025, it also counted 888 state and local laws restricting them.

The property value side of that argument has its own post: do solar farms devalue property.

How it looks from the road

Inside Climate News covers this fight closely. It says the most common objections are that a project will change how a place looks and what kind of place it becomes. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh interviewed 32 farmers and 16 nonfarmers along the Pennsylvania and Maryland border. They found projects were more likely to be welcomed if they were smaller and built with respect for the view.

That's a design choice, and your team makes some of it before anyone sends a letter.

Land that's been in the family

The Penn State farmers who said no talked about land kept in their family for generations. The Pittsburgh researchers put it plainly: farmers' place attachment to farmland is complex.

For an owner whose grandfather cleared the field, signing for 25 to 30 years can feel like the decision that ends something. Don't try to argue him out of it. Your letter walks straight into that feeling.

Are solar farms destroying farmland?

Nationally, no. Locally, it can feel that way, and the trend is up.

USDA's Economic Research Service found that solar farms and wind turbines together directly took up about 424,000 acres of rural land in 2020. US farmland covered 897 million acres. That's less than 0.05%.

The local picture is sharper. From 2012 to 2020, 43% of rural solar farms were built on cropland. In the Midwest it was 70%. Of solar sites that were farmed before construction, 15% were no longer in farming afterward. Meanwhile about 85% of the crop and pasture land near solar farms stayed in farming.

Owners also see bigger numbers online. One farmer's widely read post puts the figure at around 1.25 million acres of US farmland converted to solar. Counts like that use different years and count different things, so they won't match the USDA figure. Your landowner won't stop to reconcile them.

Looking forward, a Department of Energy study cited by American Farmland Trust says a carbon-free grid by 2050 would need over 10 million acres of solar. That's why farm groups are paying attention now, and why the national share doesn't calm anyone down.

Can you keep farming under the panels?

Sometimes, though less often than the brochures suggest. USDA describes agrivoltaics as solar panels and farming on the same ground. Just over a quarter of agrivoltaic sites pair panels with sheep grazing. Fewer than 5% grow crops beneath the panels. About 70% are under 5 megawatts.

If your project grazes sheep or plants pollinator habitat, say so. If it doesn't, don't hint that it might. A farmer can tell a pasture plan from a promise.

What the farmers who say yes are thinking

Opposition is loud, but it isn't the whole room.

In the Cornell survey, about half of the landowners who had signed or expected to sign said they expected no change to their farming. Of those who expected a change, three times as many said it would improve their chances of staying in farming than said it would hurt them. A quarter of the farmers said they would use the income to rent or buy more land.

The Penn State farmers who said yes saw the lease as a way to protect their land, compared with selling it for development. It also kept the option for the family to farm it again.

That's the owner you're writing to. He may share his neighbors' worries and still decide the land can carry a lease and stay in the family.

What your first letter should admit

A letter can't win the county argument, and it shouldn't try. It can show the owner you already know what he's weighing. Say these plainly, in his words:

• It's farmland, and you know it. Name the parcel and say how much of it the project would use. "About 80 of your 240 acres" reads very differently from "your land."
• Who farms it now. If the parcel is rented, say you'd want to talk about the tenant too. How much ground does he keep, and can he farm it until construction starts?
• What the land looks like at the end. The equipment comes out and the ground comes back to him. Penn State's farmers counted that as protecting the land.
• Only the farming your project really does. Sheep, pollinator plantings, nothing. Whatever's true.
• A private conversation. He doesn't have to decide in front of the township. A name and a direct number tell him the first talk stays between you.

Leave out the national statistics. They're true, and they aren't about his field. The questions landowners search before they reply shows where he'll go for those anyway.

The owner who'd say yes often never got the letter

Go back to the man with the sign, who farms that field but doesn't own it.

The person who owns it might live in town, or three states away. Maybe it's four siblings who inherited it from their father, or an LLC whose mail goes to an accountant. That's the owner who decides, and the one your letter went looking for.

On farmland, the owner and the farmer are often two different people. The opposition you see is the farmer, the neighbor and the township meeting. The owner who might say yes is the one you can't see, and often the one your mail never reached. The deed has an old address on it. The heirs never updated the county records, which is its own problem we cover in who signs when the landowner has died. The registered agent files your letter with everything else, as parcels owned by an LLC explains.

You don't have a land problem. You have a contact problem.

On one campaign for a developer in Georgia, 1 in 9 parcels wanted to talk about a lease once the owners were reached a different way. Across six campaigns, 214 parcels did. The developer's own team took every one of those calls.

If you'd like to know how many owners on your list are the ones mail never reached, send us your list.