Abbott Myers has been farming on his land in the north Mississippi Delta since 1969. Between the rising costs of everything from land to equipment to chemicals, as well as the toll of recent droughts, Myers knows his industry is in a precarious place.

“The next couple of years are really going to be some hard years in agriculture it looks like,” he told Mississippi Today over the summer. “Unless something changes.”  

With a growing market for clean energy and a medley of financial obstacles for modern agriculture, farmers in Mississippi and elsewhere are exploring the potential of putting renewable power projects on their land. 

Earlier this year, energy company AES partnered with Amazon to open the state’s first utility-scale wind power facility on land that includes Myers’ farm. Myers, who lives in the small town of Dundee, admitted that he’s not much of a renewable energy enthusiast himself – “They’re too inefficient,” he said – but he was thrilled by the business opportunity. He’s being compensated, he said, for not only the space but with a cut of the power revenue, too. 

Relative to a solar farm, he explained, wind turbines don’t take up much space. There are 19 turbines scattered across 1,600 acres of his farm, but just about 10 of those acres will be unfarmable, Myers said. By next year each of the machines will be surrounded by the rice he’s growing. 

“I had a good friend come by and tell me I was ruining the aesthetic value of the Mississippi Delta skyline with these ugly things sticking up 700 feet,” he said. “Well, I told him we got transmission lines, we got cell phone towers sticking up everywhere. I can’t see a whole lot of difference in that, but some people don’t like them.”

Myers said he had some concerns going into the endeavor, such as noise from the turbines or their threat to flying birds. After looking at some research, though, he found out that “a lot more birds are killed by kitty cats than by wind turbines.”

“You’d be amazed how many kitty cats kill birds,” he said, adding that his house is within half a mile from the turbines and he mostly never hears them.

Elsewhere in the state, farmers are looking into the potential of “agrivoltaics,” a growing practice that merges farming with solar power generation. Kendall Garraway and Ted Kendall head their family’s Bolton-based company, Gaddis Farms, and recently leased land mostly made of pine timber to a solar developer. 

They’re unsure exactly what kind of farming they’ll be able to do around the solar panels – traditional row crops like soybeans and cotton are out of the picture – but they believe there’s potential to have grazing animals like sheep or a pollinating setup with honeybees. Either way, the solar panels, managed by Apex Clean Energy, will bring in a new source of revenue.

“We just saw this as a further diversification of our operation,” Kendall said, explaining that the market for pine timber has gone downhill in recent years. “You can’t get anybody to pay you for pine timber that needs thinning.” 

Many nearby residents, though, weren’t pleased with the decision and protested Hinds County’s approval of the solar project earlier this year (one protestor is appealing the move in circuit court). Their objections ranged from the panels being an eyesore to the potential impact on the surrounding wildlife and to the land itself. 

“A lot of the stuff that people are worried about, like screening and cleanup… We’re not planning on leaving,” Garraway said, adding that the project will include wildlife-friendly fencing and that, under their contract, any cleanup of the project would ultimately fall on Apex. “We’re not looking to devalue our property.” 

The agreement with Apex lasts for 30 years, Kendall said, and he feels comfortable that they could still farm on the land again if they decide not to renew the lease. 

Others, like Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson, worry that the expansion of solar facilities especially may displace farmland. During a “Solar Summit” the Public Service Commission held over the summer, Gipson quoted a 2022 study projecting that 83% of the country’s new solar projects will likely end up on farms. His concern, he explained, is that solar companies are using temporary federal funds to take advantage of a struggling agriculture industry.

“Farmers are being faced with these pressures, they’re being approached with financial payments that would be many times what (they would make) continuing to farm that land,” Gipson said. “One of the questions we as a state have to answer is, what happens when that money dries up?

“We understand there is a place for solar in our power grid, but we also must consider the long term impacts on agriculture. For every acre we convert to solar energy, that is an acre of land we do not have or may not have for food production.” 

Others are less concerned. Ex-Central District Public Service Commissioner Brent Bailey, for instance, said later at the Solar Summit that existing and proposed solar projects make up just a small fraction of the state’s farmland and yet provide significant public economic benefits. 

“We actually rank 37th in the nation as far as the amount of solar installed in Mississippi, our four neighboring states have more solar on the ground and operational than we do,” Bailey said. “So the perception that we have all this solar just coming up everywhere, and the timescales for development, it’s misleading, I think.

“Solar farms actually occupy 0.056% of (Mississippi’s) agricultural land… If all projects approved and under review are built, still only 0.22% of agricultural land will be impacted. These projects total $4.5 billion in private sector investments in Mississippi, leading to millions of dollars of local revenues to public schools and county budgets.” 

The potential for renewable projects on farmland has also caught the eyes of the state’s academics. Last year, a Mississippi State University student began working with the company Cubico at its solar plant near Greenwood to study how well turfgrass can grow alongside the panels. 

Cory Gallo, assistant dean for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at MSU, explained that the dual purpose of farming on a solar company’s land can deliver financial benefits in both directions. 

“Whether it’s animals (that graze the land) that can be sold for protein, or turf that’s sold as a product, that’s a win economically,” Gallo said. “You have soil (around the panels) that’s less erodible, you’re managing the land. There’s a lot of overlap there in that it’s a benefit for the (solar companies), and also a win for farmers and food production and environmental management. Which, in my mind, is the best of both worlds.”

Gallo clarified that he doesn’t advocate for or against the practice. He said it’s important to mitigate any impacts to surrounding natural life, and said he hopes the university’s research will help inform landowners interested in using their land for wind or solar farms. 

“How do you preserve the character of a place at the same time you’re doing these (projects)?” he said. “That comes back to leaving environmental corridors for habitat as well as water quality, which could be a good practice that helps to mitigate the impact of essentially clear cutting a large area of land. At the end of the day, these (facilities) are in large parcels that change the nature of what’s on the ground.”