Virginia put agrivoltaics in state law. The Black Belt is watching.
In rural Loudoun County, Virginia, there is a farm where kale, beets, lettuce, broccoli, and garlic grow directly beneath elevated solar panels, paired with a full battery storage system. The farm pays a zero-dollar electricity bill. During regional grid outages, its power stayed on. This summer, the model that farm proved out became the law of the state.
Governor Abigail Spanberger signed SB 340/HB 508 this June, and Virginia became the first Southern state to put the word agrivoltaics into its code. The law defines agrivoltaics as the intentional co-location of active agricultural production and solar generation on shared land, with agricultural productivity prioritized for the full 25-to-30-year lifespan of the solar hardware. Projects must keep farm goods in production for the life of the array, and mandatory best management practices must protect topsoil quality, light penetration, and tractor access.
That definition matters more than it sounds. Before the law, agrivoltaics had no clear legal meaning. A developer could market a standard solar site as dual-use without anything requiring the farm to survive underneath the panels. A statute gives banks, insurers, landowners, and policymakers a shared vocabulary. It lets a contract mean something.
The policy came from working soil. The Piedmont Environmental Council built Virginia's first crop-based agrivoltaic demonstration at its Community Farm at Roundabout Meadows, then partnered with the Virginia Farm Bureau to translate the proof of concept into statutory language. The bills carried overwhelming bipartisan support through the General Assembly, and the definition arrived as part of a 12-bill energy package. Companion measures push on-farm battery storage and virtual power plants, so pooled farm batteries can steady the grid at peak demand and farmers earn revenue for balancing it. Energies Media's math on the package is worth sitting with: if just 10 percent of Virginia's 39,000 farms put up modest one-megawatt systems, they would generate the equivalent of four nuclear power plants.
The same tension has played out for years across the rural South. Solar developers target flat acreage with established grid connections. Farmers and their heirs get handed a choice: sell to a solar lease, or hold on and farm. The same flat, fertile land that makes Bullock County some of the best farmland in the Southeast is the land developers eye first. Virginia's answer is a third path, and it is one Alabama can follow. The work being built in Union Springs starts from the same premise as Roundabout Meadows: the land should not have to choose.
A definition is the quietest kind of policy. It does not build a single array. But it gives every farmer who wants panels and crops on the same field something to stand on when the lease gets negotiated.
