The U.S. Department of Agriculture has banned the use of farmland for the construction of solar installations, effective immediately.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the decision on X, saying, “Millions of acres of prime farmland is left unusable so Green New Deal subsidized solar panels can be built. This destruction of our farms and prime soil is taking away the futures of the next generation of farmers and the future of our country.”
“Starting today, @USDA will no longer deploy programs to fund solar or wind projects on productive farmland, ending massive taxpayer handouts. Also ENDING the use of panels made by foreign adversaries like China.”
Building solar installations on farmland has become a popular practice in the U.S. and, more recently, in the UK as well, as in other parts of Europe. Solar developers can offer farmers more money to lease their land for solar than they would make from farming it, which has motivated many to accept such deals. Yet concern about this trend has been growing as well, since farmland is used to literally produce food, and replacing food production with electricity production has sparked concerns about food security.
Reuters reports that the Department of Agriculture had previously funded over $2 billion worth of wind and energy projects via its Rural Energy for America program. The publication also cited figures from 2020 as showing the amount of farmland “affected” by wind and solar stood at a total of 424,000 acres, which was less than 0.05% of the nation’s total farmland, which in turn stood at close to 900 million acres, again per Department of Agriculture data. However, chances are that the amount affected by wind and solar has grown since 2020, with the Biden administration’s complete support for all forms of alternative energy with a special focus on wind and solar.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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