“Tell me that is a gorgeous country.” Dave Rogers, an Oregon farmer, points across an expanse of green ryegrass fields. “My goodness, look at that.”
We’re walking along a stretch of land that is under contract for solar development by Hanwha Qcells, a Seoul-based firm known for opening the United States’ largest solar manufacturing facility in 2023. Rogers describes the new project, dubbed Muddy Creek Energy Park, as a “huge amount of construction, three miles of solar panels, a football field with hundreds of batteries” to be built.
Rogers, a wiry man with tanned skin in a plaid shirt, is easily distracted by pointing out the local flora and fauna. He has spent the better part of two years fighting the project, pitting him against his neighbor John Langdon.
Rogers has known Langdon, also a farmer, for Langdon’s entire life. Langdon’s late father was friends with many people now opposing his son’s choice to lease the family land for agrivoltaics, the integration of solar panels into farmland. It’s a practice seen by proponents as vital to expanding cheap renewable power. Several other landowners in the area—who are neither farmers nor locals—have also leased their land as part of the same solar project.
“The only local farmers who signed the [solar] lease,” Rogers says, are “terrible, terrible farmers.”
Neighborly love can go only so far, it seems. Rogers and Langdon have chosen not to name each other in several interviews, though each is aware I am speaking with the other.
When I return to the same spot next week, Langdon talks about his plans to grow crops and graze sheep under the panels. He’s the only landowner leasing to Hanwha Qcells who has committed to agrivoltaics, which he hopes will help keep the family farm viable and profitable; opponents of the project, he thinks, are overstating the blight and the risks.
“My brother and I feel a huge responsibility to not only take care of the farm, but to move it in the future for the next generation,” he says.
Langdon runs a website, Solar Saves Farms, that shares information about agrivoltaics; he frequently speaks with legislators about the promise he sees in the technology for the agricultural community and its farmland. “We have an equal message for left and right,” he tells me. “We are farmer-first.”
One industry proponent calls agrivoltaics the “single greatest opportunity for…land production in a generation.”
Rogers feels a similar weight of responsibility to the land. He has spent his life growing native plant seeds on his farm, which he sells to those pursuing wildlife conservation. And he has converted 750 acres of his farmland into a wildlife sanctuary for birds, selling seed blends to attract waterfowl for hunters; he sees conservation and hunting as entwined. Between pointing out birds, Rogers excitedly tells me about his plans to buy more land for conservation.
For Rogers, the agrivoltaics project, like any development, threatens birds. “There’s tens of thousands of waterfowl that use that area,” says Rogers, referring to the planned solar farm site. “If they’re allowed to do this, it’s gone.” (The effects of utility solar on birds are a point of dispute: Research has both found positive and negative effects on avian populations.)
When I drive through Rogers’ and Langdon’s farming community in Linn County, Oregon, I pass numerous signs from Rogers’ group, Friends of Gap Road, against the development.
Its members “discourage this project of taking valuable farmland and putting solar panels on it,” he says. “It’s contradictory to good sense.”
A registered PAC, Friends of Gap Road describes itself as an “informal association of ten local landowners.” It raises money to speak out against the development and donate to local candidates who support farmland conservation and wetland conservation, says Troy Jones, its director. Friends of Gap Road is supporting Angelita Sanchez, a Republican, in the race for Oregon House District 11; in that district’s last race, it supported an independent. But the PAC characterizes itself as single-issue around agricultural land use.
“This is a bipartisan issue,” Jones says. “We say that because we have people from the left fighting” with others from the right, he adds, citing the historically left-leaning 1000 Friends of Oregon, another group weighing in against the project.
Opposition to development is nothing short of a historical legacy for farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The state has myriad restrictions on development, especially around building on “prime” rural farmland—all originating in the valley in which Rogers and Langdon farm.
Oregon’s governor during the late ’60s, Tom McCall, ran against the encroachment of urban development on rural land, with the strong backing of the valley’s farmers. By 1973, the state legislature had passed the Oregon Land Use Act, which strictly regulates the conversion of agricultural land. Jones says his side feels that it is carrying the torch: “There’s still that same love of the beauty of Oregon—forest, beaches, and farmland—that we’re trying to retain here.”
An agrivoltaics project in Ohio was described by an opponent as “spitting in the face” of the county’s voters.
Langdon says the well-coordinated opposition didn’t give him a chance to explain his view. “They all came out and immediately opposed the project,” he says. “All those people have my phone number, most of them I’ve known for years, and no one called me.”
Rogers and Langdon represent a wider fissure around the technology: While the majority of farmers are open to some amount of agrivoltaics, surveys show that at least 30 percent of American farmers are firmly opposed to trying it.
It’s because of the Oregon Land Use Act and subsequent legislation that solar developments of more than a dozen acres require public input, the approval of a seven-person local council, and developers’ demonstration of community benefit, especially advantageous location, and a minimal loss of farmland, alongside many other environmental considerations.
That’s a large part of why the solar project on Langdon’s land hasn’t moved forward in the three years since it was proposed. Why, Langdon asks, do so many other voices get to dictate the choices he makes on his farm?
“It kind of bothered me that everyone has an involvement or an opinion or perception,” he says. “This is not their business. It’s our property.”
The idea of integrating solar farms with agriculture was first conceived in the 1980s by a pair of German researchers as a way to alleviate poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. The plan never panned out, but about a decade ago, scientists in Japan reconsidered the technology as a potential player in the urgent push to decarbonize the world economy. Over the past decade, it has spread rapidly across the globe.
Unlike solar installations on sunnier, less-vegetated deserts or those on developed areas, agrivoltaics in temperate areas like Oregon get an efficiency boost because the vegetation cools the systems. Not all crops are suited for it; some see a yield reduction, and those that demand a lot of sun—like corn, soybeans, and cotton—are a better match for wind turbines. But other plants can actually benefit from the unique microclimate under the solar panels. Oregon State University hydrologist John Selker is researching a solar array in Corvallis, not far from Langdon’s property; he found that soil under agrivoltaics held water more efficiently, describing the panels as “miniature greenhouses.”
As of 2024, the last year for which statistics are available, there were more than 600 agrivoltaics sites in the United States producing 10 gigawatts of energy, enough to power 7.5 million homes—double the capacity of just four years before. But the US, where most agrivoltaics projects are still backed by university research or international firms like Hanwha Qcells, is only a small player compared with agrivoltaics leader China, which generates more than three times as much energy from such projects, or second-place France, which gets 20 percent of its solar power from agrivoltaics.
Silicon Ranch is a rare exception: an American-owned solar firm that’s invested heavily in agrivoltaics. Established in 2011, the company built utility-scale solar across the South and in 2013 started a project next to Will Harris, a regenerative farmer in Georgia. Until then, Silicon Ranch had been managing vegetation under panels by spraying herbicides and mowing. Harris didn’t like the prospect.
“I knew it could be done differently,” Harris says. He invited Reagan Farr, Silicon Ranch’s CEO, to learn more about grazing management. Silicon Ranch turned that project, and others, into agrivoltaics developments, three of which Harris is now contracted to graze. The company maintains an in-house sheep herd to graze the others. The practice, Harris says, has brought a much-needed influx of cash into those rural communities.
Loran Shallenberger, who leads the agrivoltaics program at Silicon Ranch, says he’s come to see it “as probably the single greatest opportunity for sheep production and land production in a generation.”
Still, many farmers are skeptical. Those who adopt agrivoltaics often face community ostracism for its perceived effect on land and property values— lowering or raising them, depending on the complaint—and for risking the health of the land. Stories like Muddy Creek’s are playing out again and again across the country. One agrivoltaics project in Ohio was described by an opponent as “spitting in the face” of the county’s voters. In Kansas, an opponent said a solar project threatened “the character of our communities.”
In a comment to a state oversight body drafted by Portland attorney James L. Buchal, farmers opposed to Muddy Creek alleged that the solar project would harm local wildlife, pose a fire risk, leach toxic metals into the ecosystem, and lower nearby property values, in addition to being “aesthetically displeasing.”
But Buchal isn’t just the lawyer for Friends of Gap Road: He’s a Republican politician known for successfully defending the leader of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, collaborators of the better-known Proud Boys, against charges of riot. Jones said Friends of Gap Road was unaware of Buchal’s other clients and hadn’t hired him for his political affiliations.
“He’s a force to be reckoned with,” Jones says.
The concerns about battery fires, toxic metals, and soil damage aren’t easy to definitively confirm or refute without many more years of testing, even if there isn’t yet much direct evidence to back them. Battery fires, for example, while highly publicized, are exceedingly rare in practice.
In terms of agricultural viability, though, USDA research suggests that land with agrivoltaics projects continues to be used as farmland at high rates, and that only one percent of total domestic farmland would be required to meet the nation’s renewable energy needs. Initial research shows promising effects on soil quality. Long-term outcomes are much more opaque, especially since solar installations remain in place for 20 to 30 years.
“We know very little because there has been almost no published research on it,” says Lee Daniels, a Virginia Tech professor emeritus of soil science who has spent the last 40 years studying the effects of land disturbances like mining on soil and water quality.
There is a similar dearth of research on the long-term potential for toxic metals to leach from panels into soil. Ryan Stewart, another Virginia Tech scholar who works with Daniels, says that’s a concern he hears often from local farmers.
“There have been some studies saying that you basically have to mash up the panels into dust for this to be a concern,” Stewart says, but he cautions that research is still in early phases. Daniels agrees that it’s an “area that needs further work.”
Daniels and Stewart are collaborating on a multiyear study assessing the soil and water quality effects of utility-scale solar projects and how best to mitigate them. It’s already clear, Daniels argues, that proper siting and management can prevent the irreparable harms to the land that some farmers fear.
The best practices Daniels cites—leaving topsoil onsite, reducing cut-and-fill leveling—are what Langdon says he plans for his land.
“The land’s been here long before humans, and it’s going to be here for a long time,” Langdon says. “It may be in different uses or look different, but my brother and I truly look at it like we are stewards of the land.”
Without proper management, Daniels acknowledges that the effects can be devastating. He has seen agrivoltaics projects remove nutrient-rich topsoil to level hilly properties, which can cut the land’s productivity by as much as half.
In a comment about the development plan, representatives from Hanwha Renewables emphasized that the project will entail minimum cut and fill because it’s on a flat site. “Topsoil will be retained and preserved to continue crop production for the duration of the operating period of the project,” they wrote.
“I think we can do solar well,” Daniels says. “I think we can minimize impacts. We need to move away from fossil fuels.”
As I walk the valley with Rogers, I probe him about some of that research. He may not be an expert on the science, he grants, but he doesn’t like the idea of his backyard becoming a “lab.”
Setting agrivoltaics aside, I ask him about transformation and development, full stop.
“Anything that changes the land offends me,” he says, “if it isn’t farming or wetlands.”
Langdon, when we take a similar walk, tells me that a major draw of the solar project is the thought that it will help him with farming and conservation. The current use of the valley is to conventionally farm grass seed, which isn’t a food source or native habitat for migratory birds, so solar provides an alternative.
The influx of cash from the solar lease allowed Langdon to plant 220 acres of more expensive Oregon wild rice, one of the same crops Rogers grows. “It’s been the biggest wildlife attraction that we could have imagined,” he says. He wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise.
It all depends, of course, on whether the project goes through. Hanwha Qcells submitted its notice of intent to file an application for project back in 2023, which sparked the public backlash. Four months later, the state of Oregon responded with requirements needed for a formal application such as site studies, community comments, and local ordinances. Hanwha Qcells had a year to respond to the project order with an official application, but requested and got an extension.
Now, for the project to move forward, Hanwha Qcells will need to submit an official application by May. Friends of Gap Road posted about that nearing deadline on its Facebook page on January 27: “We are ready and prepared for this action. Please make sure you are ready to fight like hell!”
The future of agrivoltaics, like all clean energy in the United States, is in a weird spot. Shortly after I first visited the farmers, the USDA announced it would stop funding renewable energy projects on farmland. While Langdon’s array comes from an agreement with a private solar company, many farmers’ access to the technology depends on grants like these. The solar credit many farmers use has become more complicated under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. And then there’s the increase in overall solar costs thanks to tariffs.
In January, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek ordered state agencies to move faster on renewable energy projects. But Friends of Gap Road remains “cautiously optimistic” that it can stop the project, Jones says.
Although his father’s friends have become staunch opponents, Langdon says his dad would have been supportive. “He would be very disappointed to make the neighbors unhappy, because these are lifelong friends,” Langdon says, “but he’s a guy that’s going to do what he has to do to make a living and to make his farm better for the next generation and generations to come.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.