Government counts solar panel arrays as agricultural lands
This article is a repost with the kind permission from the author
Concerned that rapid development threatened critical agricultural resources, Indiana’s Legislature in 2023 commissioned a study to determine the status of the state’s farmland. Noting that most agricultural land loss neighbored cities and suburban areas, the study concluded that Indiana lost 345,682 acres of farmland between 2010 and 2022.
(Some beefalo calves and a white face grazing among solar panels in Randolph Vermont.)
As Bill Gates and China notoriously gobble up price-inflating fertile lands, another pressure is devouring prime farmland. Vast solar panel arrays are disappearing farmland across the nation despite howls of protest. Perhaps that is why the Indiana study included solar panel acreage as farmland in its bizarre farmland accounting.
Solar panels are not a nitrogen-fixing cover crop, nor do they till into the soil annually like plants. Cows and sheep can dine on the grass beneath them but can’t eat solar panels any better than humans can. The quite understandable question arises: why did Indiana count solar farms’ land use as agricultural?
The omission is an admission: solar panels repurpose soil from food to energy production, even as grocery bills skyrocket. Americans are told cows are evil and must be replaced with synthetic lab meat, yet cows eat blades of grass that are God’s solar panels: they are naturally renewable, sans Chinese coal and factories. A trillion dollars in Biden renewables subsidies has contributed to a diversion of farmland to build factories that churn out forever chemicals and water pollution.
How much U.S. land has already been polluted with solar panels, which emit toxic chemicals in their manufacture and pose serious environmental problems upon disposal, is unclear. The lack of studies of just how much land is being lost to this folly may be purposeful, as the Indiana study appears to be:
Agriculture officials relied on data from the state Department of Local Government Finance [DLGF] and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create its findings. The report stated that the DLGF includes uses like renewable energy in its counting for farmland.
How much productive farmland will be vacated of cows, to be populated with solar panels? It is not just rural landscapes that are sacrificed, but people’s reliance on the soil microbiome for food, which must be transported ever farther distances as local farmland diminishes. This threatens food security and is hardly beneficial for the environment.
The climate barons’ techno-mystical proclamations reveal their plans for America’s future. An earlier estimate of the land needed to supply the nation with solar energy was 22,000 square miles, or more than 14 million acres. However, advances in efficiency have reduced that to “merely” 10,000 square miles, or 6.4 million acres.
Plans to save the world by mass manufacturing gadgets instead of food are even more ambitious. To provide enough solar energy for the global human population would require an unfathomable amount of manufacturing production and an equally vast acreage:
This would require an estimated 92.7 billion solar panels, enough to completely cover America’s 11 smallest states (South Carolina, West Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Rhode Island) plus another 4,000 square miles!
The United States has lost more than 66 million acres of farmland due to commercial development and suburban sprawl. Population growth (even without the artificial boost of illegal immigration) will continue to squeeze agricultural lands into irreversible development without the assistance of federal subsidies for inedible solar panels.
It is simple to see why renewable energy profiteers would conceal the scale of agricultural land loss attributable to their policies, just as they hide the true environmental damages inflicted by the coal-fired plants and mining operations necessary to produce them and the non-renewable landfill destiny of their planned obsolescence. (They may pollute even more than E.V. cars!)
America may have room for 10 million acres of solar panels, but characterizing them as agricultural land is deceptive folly. Planning for converting more farmland to landfill space must begin soon so there will be sufficient dumps to house inefficient solar panels upon retirement.
Perhaps the landfills will be counted as farmland…
(Previously published at American Thinker.)
