When Chad Raines took over his family’s Texas cotton farm in 2008, he thought the going would be easy. That’s because their first year was relatively profitable — but the success was short-lived. 

“The next 11 years was just loss after loss after loss,” Raines said in a Daily Yonder interview. “We just kept digging our hole deeper.” Raines soon began to question whether he should continue running the farm, or pivot to something else. 

Then came a third option, one in the form of solar panels and sheep: a type of farming called agrivoltaics. Now, he raises 3,000 head of sheep on about 8,000 acres throughout west Texas, and all under solar panels. 

Raines is contracted by the solar companies to graze his sheep under their panels, keeping the vegetation short and feeding his sheep at the same time. He is one of a growing number of farmers leasing out their own land to renewable energy companies or grazing livestock on land already in use for solar or wind. 

Scientists say widespread renewable energy development — the vast majority of which will be located in rural America — plays a key part in decreasing the country’s carbon emissions, but pushback from the Trump administration has stalled progress on many solar and wind projects. 

In August of 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) ended funding to loan programs that supported solar projects on farmland. The agency pointed to rising farmland prices as their primary reason for shutting down these projects. 

“Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green new deal subsidized solar panels,” said Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins in a press release. The USDA defines prime farmland as land with the “best combination of physical and chemical characteristics for producing food, feed, forage, fiber, and oilseed crops.” These characteristics include a region’s growing season, soil properties, and water supply. 

“Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available,” Rollins said. 

Whether this claim is true is up for debate. Land  use experts say the real threat to farmland is urban sprawl into rural areas, not solar development. 

“Thousands of acres [of farmland] are going to [urban development], and that’s completely taking it out of commission,” said Jeff Risley, executive director of a new organization called the Renewable Energy Farmers of America. The group helps farmers negotiate land leases with solar and wind companies. 

Once an area is turned from farmland into parking lots or apartment buildings, the likelihood of it returning to agricultural land is extremely low. “Solar and wind, it’s a 30 to 40 year commitment, but it can also go back to agriculture land at the end of that time,” Risley said.  

Over the next two years, solar is projected to be the fastest growing power generator in the country, according to a recent report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. An estimated 83% of solar projects are expected to be built on farmland, according to projections from the American Farmland Trust. 

While the estimated amount of farmland to be converted to solar is just a small fraction of the total farmland available in the U.S., for some rural residents, the transition is an unwelcome wave on the horizon. 

In upstate New York, Alex Fasulo has spent the last year organizing against a solar project in the town of Fort Edward that would have an estimated 530 acre footprint with solar arrays, access roads, power lines and a substation. She’s garnered more than 600,000 followers on Instagram alone, posting videos opposing the project, which is being conducted by the Canadian energy company Boralex.

For Fasulo, the solar development threatens the rural way of life she was looking for when she first moved to the area in 2023. 

“I knew I was going to be surrounded by houses, farmhouses, and farms,” Fasulo said. “But [had I known] a commercial industrial complex would be able to come into this rural zoning, I would’ve bought land next to a Walmart [instead]. I didn’t sign up for this.”

This sentiment is shared by many neighbors of utility-scale solar projects, especially in states like New York where there are more small communities interspersed with farmland, making solar development a lot more noticeable than in a state like Texas, where hundreds of acres of contiguous land can be developed far from any town. 

“When solar comes into a place like that, it can feel like, ‘oh my gosh, it’s taking over all of our land,’” Risley said. He tries to encourage the communities he works with to see solar projects as an opportunity rather than a threat to rural lifestyles. Risley recommends the use of a community benefit agreement, which is a contract between the solar developer and the town that can guarantee the building of a new grocery store or community center. 

“On top of taxes that they might earn locally, you can also think about what does our community need, and could this development help us achieve it?” Risley said. 

Solar development on farmland could also help mitigate rural America’s carbon footprint. A 2025 report by the philanthropy organization called the Rural Climate Partnership found that 38% of the country’s total carbon emissions come from rural America, despite being home to less than 20% of the total population. 

That’s because carbon-intensive industries are located in rural places, like agriculture, which accounts for 10.5% of the total U.S. emissions. One way to shrink this footprint is through the widescale deployment of renewable energy projects, which the report said could create more rural jobs, provide tax revenue to local communities, and diversify farmers’ incomes. 

“If you are used to looking at farmland that’s been growing corn or soybeans, I will not deny that replacing those crops with solar panels is a significant aesthetic change,” said Scott Laeser, senior working lands advisor for the Rural Climate Partnership. 

“It’s a concern that we see raised, but I think that also assumes that our farmland has always been used the way that it’s used today, even though we used to have much more pasture and crop diversity in our agricultural landscape.”

To Laeser, introducing solar panels into the mix is just the latest in an ever-changing farm landscape. 

“I think that as we build more solar projects and as developers incorporate design efforts… like trees and bushes along the edges of the projects to reduce the abrupt visual change, and people design projects based on topography as well, it can help minimize some of those concerns,” Laeser said. 

But progress could be slow for at least the next three years because of the Trump administration’s attempts to limit solar development on farmland. This includes halting funding to the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP), which provides grants to farmers and rural small business owners to install solar panels and make energy efficiency improvements to their operations. 

“It’s really unfortunate because many of those [REAP] projects are not large, and so they’re not being built on prime farmland generally,” said Alex Delworth, senior clean energy policy associate at the Center for Rural Affairs. “They’re taking up a pretty small project size.” 

The current status of REAP funding is unclear. In the same August announcement about ending funding to renewable energy loan programs, the USDA said it would ensure that “American farmers, ranchers and producers utilizing wind and solar energy sources” could install units that are “right-sized for their facilities.” No explanation was provided for how the USDA decides what is “right-sized” or not, and as of January 19, 2026, there’s been no announcement for a new REAP grant cycle. 

Regardless of what happens at the federal level, solar development is still underway in many parts of the country. Texas, where Chad Raines grazes his sheep, is projected to overtake California in solar production by 2030, according to research from the Solar Energy Industries Association. Much of this development will happen on farmland if current trends continue — and it could be one of the only ways farmers can make a living.

“If you want farmers or landowners to stop taking farmland out of agriculture and putting it into renewable energy, then the first thing that needs to be fixed is the farming landscape,” he said. Competing with large agribusiness has become a nearly impossible venture for most small and mid-size producers. 

“It needs to be more profitable for farmers to be able to make it,” Raines said.