Your editor will take the liberty of providing a few concluding thoughts on this timely conversation between two farmer-authors who each exhibit, as Charles Walters would say, “uncommon good sense.”
We all agree that land use/management is a vital concern to farmers and ranchers and to the general public. We also affirm that modern societies require energy production; solutions that rely on voluntary or (worse) forced austerity measures in terms of energy usage are not realistic. As ecological farmers, we should additionally agree that if solar panels are going to exist whether we like it or not, then proper regenerative grazing underneath them is far better than the alternative — grading topsoil, mowing or spraying.
Yet it’s not unreasonable to doubt whether solar developers will be content to only use marginal, fallow or remote tracts of land. They want easy access to panels for installation and maintenance — i.e., flat ground — and until better technology for storage exists, panels do have to be close to population centers.
On the issue of technology, if we’re okay with relying on yet-undeveloped technologies to solve the current problems with solar power —relatively inefficient panels and poor battery storage — why could we not also rely on a future technological solution that doesn’t require vast swaths of land at all? Is it really a foregone conclusion that solar and wind are the only viable green technologies — that others that require less of a footprint aren’t going to be practicable in the near future? Geothermal and nuclear fusion are looking promising. For that matter, if the climate crisis is truly existential, we already have a technology that could produce all the clean power we need: nuclear fission, new versions of which are safer and cleaner than ever. Is it possible that future technologies could even allow the small amount of waste produced by reactors to be processed down to inert elements (perhaps even via biological transmutation through fungi or bacteria)?
Another consideration we must reckon with is the geopolitical tradeoffs: not pumping our own abundant natural gas in North American means more production goes to authoritarian states with abysmal human rights records, like Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Mandating solar and wind also means mining large quantities of rare earth metals that are mostly found and controlled by similarly authoritarian countries who care much less about the environment than we do (although breakthroughs in materials science may change this).Finally, we also have to remember that climate change isn’t just about reducing CO2. Just as significant a factor is land use: the asphalt and buildings in our cities heat the environment much more than the forests and fields that used to be there. Solar panels may provide shade for livestock, but so do trees, and the two options have opposite effects in how they absorb and reflect heat; trees also produce condensation nuclei that are vital for the water cycle.
Every technology has downsides and tradeoffs. Are those of large-scale solar power minimal enough to justify jumping on the already moving train? Openminded ecological farmers can certainly agree to disagree. At a minimum, in our opinion, it seems that those who do climb aboard should do so cautiously, perhaps even to try to slow the train down as we let the science catch-up, wait for sufficient proof-of-concept on diverse landscapes, and carefully weigh how to use our valuable land in fulfillment of both food and energy needs.
— Editor
