This piece from TWW’s Greg Brophy originally was published by RealClear Energy on October 9, 2025 and can be accessed here.
In Debate Over Solar Energy, Don’t Cancel Property Rights for Farmers
By Greg Brophy
October 09, 2025
When you’re a farmer, you get a lot of free “advice” from people about how to work the land. The loudest voices are usually from big cities or – even better – Washington, D.C., where political beliefs are usually taken more seriously than real-world experience.
Most of the time, there’s no harm done. Everyone has a right to express their opinion, even when it’s totally misguided.
But when misguided opinions are used to rob farmers of their property rights, so they cannot decide for themselves how to use their own land, that crosses a line.
Usually, the threat comes from the political left. Remember when the Obama administration tried to use the Clean Water Act to seize control of agricultural land? Or when anti-fracking groups attempted to ban oil and natural gas development in farming and ranching communities?
But as a farmer and a conservative, it pains me to say there’s a new threat to our property rights, and this time it’s coming from elements of the political right.
For decades, almost all Republicans were supporters of an “all of the above” energy policy that embraces fossil fuels, nuclear, geothermal, nuclear, hydropower, battery storage and renewable sources like wind and solar where they make sense.
To be sure, during the Biden administration, the level of tax subsidies for wind and solar went too far for most Republicans – which was why President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act created an orderly phase out of these subsidies.
But now GOP members of Congress are going even further, trying to block the development of solar energy facilities on agricultural land, according to E&E News.
Ironically, this new wave of opposition is based on the belief that solar energy is taking up too much land – an argument advanced by researchers at Zhejiang University in China and questionable coverage in the news media.
It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now.
Outside of farming, I work with a conservative non-profit called The Western Way, which published an analysis on the land-use claims surrounding solar energy on agricultural lands earlier this year.
Here are the facts: Current solar-energy land use is about the same as the land taken up by golf courses, i.e. 0.1% of total U.S. land mass. Even under the most aggressive growth projections,
future solar-energy land use will not surpass 0.5% of total U.S. land mass.
To put this in a wider perspective, the land-use needs of solar energy – both today and decades from now – will be 100 times smaller than the needs of farmers and ranchers.
If there’s a threat to agricultural land, it’s the expansion of cities, suburbs and towns, which have a projected land-use footprint that is more than 10 times the size of solar energy.
And when farming land is converted into new housing subdivisions or shopping malls, it’s usually because the owner can no longer make enough money growing crops and raising livestock to stay in business.
This is why respecting the private property rights of farmers and ranchers is so critical to keeping as much land in agricultural production as possible.
Any farmer will tell you it takes multiple streams of income to keep working the land, and energy production is one of the most reliable options available.
In some cases, that means oil and gas. In other cases, wind turbines or growing crops for biofuels make more sense. More recently, producing solar power and selling that electricity to the local utility or rural cooperative has also emerged as an attractive option.
In fact, depending on the farm and its available resources, it’s possible to generate income from all these sources at the same time – improving margins and keeping the land in active crop or livestock production.
Not only that, there have been major improvements in the design of solar facilities to allow energy production and agricultural production to occur on the same area of land at the same time.
Here in Colorado, for example, we are pioneering the practice of building solar panels several feet off the ground to allow crops to grow and livestock to graze underneath. It’s not as widespread as it could be, but the concept is definitely gaining steam.
It makes no more sense to tell farmers they shouldn’t be producing solar power than it does telling farmers they shouldn’t be producing oil and gas. In fact, shutting down potential income streams for farmers is going to make it more likely they have to sell to real estate developers, hastening the loss of agricultural land rather than slowing it down.
This isn’t about whether you love, hate or don’t have a strong opinion about solar energy. It’s about respecting the private property rights of farmers, so they are free to decide the best ways to make a living on their land.
Farmers who see value in solar projects will pursue them. Those who don’t, won’t.
Whether it comes from the left or the right, any attempt to micromanage or second-guess these decisions is just a play for control over farmers and farming communities. However well-intentioned, this kind of interference makes the loss of agricultural land more likely, not less, by limiting the number of ways in which farmers generate income.
On this question, like so many others, the answer is clear and simple: Respect property rights.
Greg Brophy is a former Republican state senator from Colorado and a fourth-generation corn and melon farmer. He serves as the Rural Energy Network Director of The Western Way.