New York state farmers who signed large-scale solar leases were three times more likely to say they'll use the revenue from solar to invest in their farms than to reduce operations, according to a new study.
Nearly half of the farmers with leases said they did not plan to change their agricultural practices at all.
The study, published Feb. 21 in Rural Sociology, dispels the myth that farmers will give up farming, with its unpredictable returns, when offered lucrative solar leases for their land
"People have been talking about this for a long time, but nobody had asked quantitatively: For farmers, if you sign a lease, what do you intend to do?" said principal investigator Richard Stedman, professor and interim director of the Cornell CALS Ashley School in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "It's a reasonable conclusion from this study: Large-scale solar does not appear to be the death of farming."
The findings were based on the survey responses of 584 landowners in three New York state counties most likely to have large-scale solar development. Landowners owned 30 or more acres that were classified as rural, agricultural or vacant and were adjacent to transmission lines or substations. The researchers found that nearly half of the respondents had been approached by large-scale solar developers; farmers were twice as likely than non-farmers to be solicited but were less likely to sign leases.
New York state will need large-scale solar facilities, which can be as small as an acre or as large as thousands, to reach its decarbonization goals, but much of the land in the state is privately owned; researchers said the study sheds light on a crucial social component of the solar rollout.
"If we don't do the social science and take into account the social factors, estimates of where these facilities can be sited lack feasibility," said first author Kathryn Walsh, research associate and lab supervisor for the Center for Conservation Social Sciences in CALS. "It's individual landowners making decisions that collectively can scale up and have local and regional implications, and implications for the state meeting its climate targets."
The team - including David Kay, emeritus senior extension associate in global development - found continued evidence of resistance to solar in agriculture: Farmers had less favorable views about solar than general landowners.
Stedman noted that much of the general resistance, which he also identified in some of his previous work, is based on threats to a regional sense of place that's rooted in agricultural landscapes and communities.
Walsh added, "Farming is an identity, it's not just a land use. The threat of conversion to solar taps into that threat to farming identity, along with livelihood."
But the researchers said it's hugely encouraging that, of the more than 70 farmers who had signed solar leases, most plan to continue farming.
"This will help policymakers, developers and farm associations who are trying to determine the best way for solar to be built out on the landscape so that it is not a threat to farmland and instead an opportunity," Walsh said.
The relevance of the topic came through in the response rate: more than 40% of the nearly 1,500 landowners who received the mail-in survey responded, an "unheard of" rate, Walsh said.
"People are really passionate about this," Stedman said. "This is not a trivial issue in rural New York state."
The study is part of a larger, long-standing research program that seeks to examine landowner behavior, community attitudes and the impacts around renewable energy in the state. As a direct follow-up to this study, Stedman's group is conducting research about landowner attitudes around agrivoltaics, the practice of combining solar and agricultural practices.
"I'm a social scientist who's really interested in rural community well-being," Stedman said. "And energy is the dominant thing that's happening right now in a lot of rural places, both in terms of land use and community."
Stedman said his group's work embodies the mission of both the Center for Conservation Social Sciences, where he serves as executive director, and the new Ashley School.
"We do empirical, boots-on-the-ground work on topics that are core to the land-grant mission," he said. "For the Ashley School, this kind of work is center of the plate."
Funding for the study came from the United States Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
