On August 12, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy hosted the second webinar in its series on combining agriculture and solar energy production on the same land. The session took up the policy picture in the United States and the Southeast: what federal and state programs exist, and how a producer is supposed to use them.
Jim Johnson, Director of Rural Development and Agribusiness and Senior Business Consultant for the South Carolina Small Business Development Centers at the University of South Carolina, and Turner Jackson, Renewable Energy Program Coordinator at the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, joined SACE’s Carynton Howard and executive director Dr. Stephen A. Smith. The recording and slides are posted on SACE’s site.
The programs they walked through are the ones a rural producer would actually need to know. The Rural Energy for America Program helps agricultural producers and rural businesses pay for renewable energy systems. It is one of the few federal tools built for rural enterprises. Massachusetts’ SMART program pays farmers for dual-use solar, which gives a producer a second income tied to the same field.
That is where the systems question starts. A payment changes what a farmer can plan around. An incentive program with staff behind it, like the South Carolina centers Johnson works in, changes whether a small producer can even get into the program. A webinar can explain both, but explanation alone does not pay for the higher cost of raising panels high enough to farm under, and it does not give a small operation a bankable second income. The tool has to be open, reachable, and paid for in a way a farmer can count on.
The Black Belt sits on fertile land and carries a long history of land dispossession and economic exclusion. That history is why access matters as much as the program itself. When a federal program is built for rural producers, the question is whether it reaches Bullock County as well as better resourced farm regions. When a state like Massachusetts pays for dual-use solar, the question is what the Southeast offers in its place. Right now, the Black Belt does not have that policy foundation yet.
The systems being built in Union Springs start from the same ground as the webinar’s best examples: keep the land farming, keep the income local, keep the power close. That model only works at scale if the policy layer works too. The Southeast will not get agrivoltaics by watching other states pay for it. It will get it when the payment and the program are as plain for a Bullock County farmer as they are for one in Massachusetts.
