![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/080326newyorksolar.png\")
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Lori Van Buren\/Albany Times Union via Getty<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\tGet your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.<\/a><\/p>\n This story was originally published by\u00a0Canary Media<\/a>\u00a0and is reproduced here as part of the\u00a0Climate Desk<\/a>\u00a0collaboration.<\/p>\n In rural areas across the US, solar power opponents keep leaning on the argument that utility-scale arrays are gobbling up valuable farmland. But plenty of evidence proves that\u2019s just not true, and now, New York is tackling the misinformation head-on.<\/p>\n After the Trump administration\u00a0accused the state<\/a>\u00a0of fast-tracking solar farms on prime farmland, New York leaders\u00a0fired back<\/a>\u00a0last week, saying that renewables\u00a0\u200b\u201cempower our farmers to keep their land in use and in their family, while avoiding the threat of permanent conversion or abandonment.\u201d That\u2019s because farmers can lease a\u00a0plot to solar developers and return it to agricultural use at the end of the array\u2019s life, as the state officials explained in\u00a0their\u00a011-page letter<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cA\u00a0recent study by Cornell<\/a>\u00a0found that the overwhelming majority of farmers who received solar lease payments used that income to continue or even expand farming on their land, not to exit farming or scale back operations,\u201d the leaders wrote.\u00a0\u200b\u201cDiscouraging or inhibiting property owners\u2019 ability to independently make choices about what they can and cannot do with their land can cause financial harm and undermine fundamental property rights.\u201d<\/p>\n Anti-solar advocates often ignore the good that the clean energy source can do for farmers nationwide.<\/p>\n The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has more proof that solar and farming can work hand in hand, and\u00a0outlined all that in a\u00a0major guidebook<\/a>\u00a0it released last year. Sheep and cattle are munching below panels on several New York farms, the guidebook notes, and the state has zoning rules and protections in place to preserve undeveloped land.<\/p>\n New York\u2019s pushback squares with the findings of a\u00a0recent report<\/a>\u00a0from the Solar Energy Industries Association. That study shows solar farms currently take up a\u00a0mere\u00a00.13 percent of New York\u2019s roughly\u00a013,000\u00a0square miles of federally designated prime farmland, a\u00a0stat that resonates\u00a0across the country<\/a>. Solar covers just\u00a00.07 percent of all US farmland, according to\u00a0SEIA. That\u2019s three times less than golf courses and six times less than suburban development.<\/p>\n And yet solar panels, not cul-de-sacs, are the focus of a\u00a0particularly potent campaign from upstate New York\u00a0influencer Alexandra Fasulo<\/a>. Fasulo has amassed more than a\u00a0million followers across TikTok and other social platforms, where she\u2019s constantly posting videos that inflate solar\u2019s threats to agricultural and undeveloped land. Similar sentiments are being spread on social media by John Rich. He\u2019s one half of the\u00a0\u200b\u201cSave a\u00a0Horse, Ride a\u00a0Cowboy<\/a>\u201d guys, and was\u00a0recently hired<\/a>\u00a0by the White House to advocate for landowners on a\u00a0national scale.<\/p>\n These and other anti-solar advocates often ignore the good that the clean energy source can do for farmers nationwide. In California\u2019s Central Valley, for example, years of drought have led hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land to go fallow. Economics and water availability have driven farmers to stop growing there, but they can still make money and hold on to their land by\u00a0leasing their plots to solar developers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Plus, as New York\u2019s guidebook points out, farming is still happening alongside solar installations. I\u00a0recently visited an\u00a0Illinois solar farm<\/a>\u00a0where sheep were grazing underneath and around panels\u2014an arrangement that the sheep\u2019s owners love because they don\u2019t have to maintain expansive pastures back at home. Meanwhile, researchers have found that\u00a0tomatoes<\/a>,\u00a0saffron<\/a>, and other crops can thrive below panels, and so can\u00a0native plants<\/a>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to mention the climate benefits of ditching planet-warming fossil fuels, which are driving droughts, floods, and other weather disasters that are legitimately threatening farms in the US and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lori Van Buren\/Albany Times Union via Getty Get your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313975,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":["post-313974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}