Between 2017 and 2024, 160,000 American farms went out of business. Not because farmers stopped caring. Because the economics stopped working. Costs climbed, markets shifted, drought years stacked up, and agriculture alone could no longer hold a rural community together. The Daily Yonder put numbers to it in May: 160,000 farms gone in seven years.
Solar is already on the land. About 83 percent of new solar development is going on farms and ranches, according to the American Farmland Trust. That is happening whether rural communities want it or not. The question is who benefits when it does.
The record so far is mixed. Between 2018 and 2023, an estimated 30 percent of large-scale solar and wind projects were canceled because of community opposition, according to a study from Columbia Law School's Sabin Center. By the end of 2024, 459 counties and municipalities in 44 states had adopted restrictions on renewable energy siting. In 2025, local restrictions rose another 32 percent. Meanwhile the federal government canceled a new grant cycle for the Rural Energy for America program, which had helped farmers and rural communities pay for solar of their own.
None of that reads as opposition to solar itself. A 2024 survey by the Solar and Storage Industries Institute found 70 percent of farmers are open to solar on their land, if it brings supplementary income and they can farm around or under the panels. A 2023 study in Energy Policy found large-scale agrivoltaics projects receive less public backlash than large-scale solar on farmland. Neighbors are more willing to accept a project when the farming continues and the community sees a benefit. As one cranberry grower farming under an array in Massachusetts put it, tailoring a project to what a region has always grown, and engaging the farmer to keep growing it, changes the conversation.
The systems question is who captures the value. In a straight lease, a developer pays a farmer for the use of the land, builds the array, and sells the power to a utility. The farmer gets a check and steps back. In a dual-use arrangement, the farmer keeps farming. The panels create cooler microclimates and reduce soil moisture loss, which can help heat-sensitive crops like leafy greens and herbs. The lease payment stacks on top of the harvest instead of replacing it. A farm that was marginal becomes sustainable, and the land stays in production and in the family.
That is the math that matters in the Black Belt. The region's soil has produced abundance for centuries. What it has not produced, for most of the families who work it, is enough financial security to survive the next drought or the next market dip. Farm loss and food insecurity are not abstract statistics here. They are the reason a second income stream matters, and the reason the terms of that income matter as much as the amount. A lease that takes a family off its land is a different deal than a lease that keeps them on it. The work in Union Springs is built on the second kind: panels overhead, crops underneath, and the income from both staying close to the people who work the ground.
The Black Belt does not need to choose between farming and energy. It needs a deal where the farmer keeps farming.
