In Big Lake, Minnesota, a solar garden has new neighbors. Three farmers grow food between the rows of a 1-megawatt array, on land that would otherwise sit fenced off for the next few decades. The project started as a pilot in 2023. This year it went permanent, with the farmers signing 10-year leases.
The Food Group, a Minnesota nonprofit that helps emerging farmers get on land and fights hunger, partnered with US Solar to make it work. The partnership put irrigation and a walk-in cooler on the site, so the farmers can grow and store a real harvest. The land earns twice: power from the panels, food from the rows between them.
Winifred Sylvah is one of the three farmers. She came to Minnesota from Sierra Leone as a student in the 1980s and spent more than 30 years in banking. She farmed before at The Food Group's Big River Farms, and now she works about an acre and a half in Big Lake, one acre inside the solar garden and half an acre beside it. She grows onions, collard greens, green beans, and scallions, along with okra, sweet potato greens, eggplant, and bitter balls, crops in demand in Minnesota's Liberian community. She sells through a CSA and delivers to public school districts in Albertville and Buffalo. She had already picked about 140 pounds of cucumbers.
The arrangement matters because of what happened around it. In March, the USDA announced $300 million in cuts to a grant program that helped new farmers get land and market access, defunding three programs aimed at farmers of color in Minnesota. The federal support went away. The project went ahead anyway.
That is where the systems question starts. A solar garden is a piece of infrastructure with a developer, a lease, and a revenue stream. A farm is a business with a grower, a crop, and a market. Big Lake works because someone built the connection between the two: a nonprofit that holds the farmer relationship, a developer willing to share the ground, and a lease long enough to plan around. Ten years is the number that makes it real. A one-season trial is a demonstration. A ten-year lease lets a farmer plan.
The Black Belt has the same pieces and a harder history. Black farmers have lost millions of acres over the past century, and the federal programs meant to help farmers of color get land back are being cut. The question in Bullock County is not whether solar is coming. It is who gets a lease, who gets the income, and whether the land keeps feeding people while it generates power.
The systems being built in Union Springs start from the Big Lake answer: keep the land farming, keep the lease long, keep the income local. A solar project that leaves the farmer out is a landlord deal. A solar project that puts the farmer in is a food system. The Black Belt does not need to wait for Washington to rebuild the programs it cut. It needs the arrangement, the lease, and the local partner willing to sign it.
