On August 19, 2025, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that the USDA is pulling funding for any solar panel development on productive farmland. This is part of the Trump Administration’s overall withdrawal of funding for solar projects, which the administration considers “unreliable, expensive and dependent on Chinese supply chains.” This action does not make it illegal to install solar panels on farmland; it merely withdraws some federal subsidies for solar energy.
Reactions in the agricultural community to the USDA’s announcement are mixed, reflecting conflicting views on installing large-scale photovoltaic arrays on prime farmland. Some farmers welcome solar development leases as a better way to make an income than farming, not to mention its advantage as a lower-carbon form of electricity generation.
Others are concerned about the loss of prime farmland, which is the biggest target for solar development because it’s relatively flat and already cleared. According to a 2024 USDA analysis, utility-scale solar covered 424,000 acres of farmland in 2020. Reaching the carbon reduction goals set by the Biden Administration would require converting 10 million additional acres of farmland to solar by 2050. Installing solar panels can also cause soil erosion, reduce plant diversity, and disrupt hydrology.
Eco-ag advocates are divided as well. In the February 2024 issue of Acres U.S.A., Joel Salatin argues that solar panels “destroy life, immerse the neighborhood in electromagnetic frequencies, require massive new mines and offer a decommissioning problem that could easily bankrupt all these landowners eventually.” He recommends a reduction in overall electricity use as a more sustainable way to reduce carbon emissions.
In the same issue, Anna Clare Monlezun sees utility-scale solar panel as inevitable—“the solar energy train has left the station and there is no turning back.” She encourages eco-farmers to support agrivoltaics, which involves combining certain types of crop production or grazing with solar panels. At its best, agrivoltaics or ecovoltaics (natural habitat restoration under the panels) can reduce soil erosion and improve wildlife habitat compared to using the land for corn or soybean production. “I can safely say that the evidence is mounting in favor of agrivoltaics as a viable solution to reducing (I didn’t say eliminating) the tradeoffs in land use between agriculture and renewable energy,” she argues.
Of course, part of the seeming inevitability of new solar development stems from federal subsidies and tax breaks. Loss of these incentives, combined with higher tariffs on imported solar panels, may slow the increase in utility-scale solar construction and allow more time to debate the pros and cons of turning farm fields into power plants.
