This opinion piece from TWW’s Greg Brophy was first published by The Fence Post on April 1, 2026 and can be accessed here.
Critics of rural energy investment are forgetting how agriculture works
By Greg Brophy
As a former Republican state lawmaker and a farmer from northeast Colorado, I love talking politics. Especially over the past few years, seeing conservative rural values triumph over urban liberal elitism on the national political stage has brought me a lot of joy.
But I have also learned in my professional and personal life that politics isn’t everything. If you start to obsess over it, you can quickly forget who you are, where you’re from, and how to be a good neighbor to those around you.
I bring up this lesson because I’ve seen some disturbing opposition to energy projects in some corners of rural America — opposition fueled by misguided politics rather than facts.
You see, in recent years, a growing number of farmers, ranchers and other property owners in rural America have started adding solar, wind and battery storage projects as a new source of income.
Thanks to these projects, rural landowners can receive lease payments from the generation and sale of electricity while still growing crops, raising livestock, producing oil and natural gas, or pursuing other lines of business.
It’s another way for these landowners to make a living by exercising their private property rights. But even so, pockets of political opposition have started to emerge, with outside parties trying to block permits or otherwise strangle these energy projects in red tape.
One of the leading political arguments against these projects: The electricity that’s being generated here is being consumed in major cities, or someplace else that’s hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
Well, yes, that’s probably true. But the same thing can be said for just about every product grown, raised or produced in a farming or ranching community.
Like I said, when you take politics too far, you can quickly forget who you are, where you come from, and how to be a good neighbor to those around you.
Consider just a few facts from my corner of the country in northeast Colorado.
Colorado is one of the top 10 states for producing wheat. On average, 80% of each year’s crop is exported to the world.
In fact, across the board, Colorado exports roughly $2 billion worth of wheat, beef, dairy and other agricultural products around the world each year, according to the Trump administration.
How about all the oil and gas that’s produced on farms and ranches in Colorado?
Our state produces roughly twice as much oil as it consumes. For natural gas, production is four times greater than state consumption, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Therefore, if farmers and ranchers couldn’t ship their oil and gas outside of our state, their income from oil would collapse by half and their income from natural gas would plummet even further.
These are just a few examples of the reality of life in rural America. We grow agricultural products and we produce energy that will be consumed elsewhere, in big cities or by other countries.
It makes no sense to treat the electricity produced in rural communities any differently. If that standard makes no sense for wheat or beef or oil or gas, then it makes no sense for anything else, plain and simple.
I understand that the national debate over energy has gotten hyper-political. The national media and social media influencers love to portray some energy sources as pro-Republican and other energy sources as pro-Democrat.
To be honest, I believe it started during the Biden administration when fringe environmental groups ramped up their campaign to demonize and eliminate fossil fuels and make renewables holier-than-thou.
But injecting polarized national politics into local permitting decisions — and shredding the private property rights of farmers and ranchers in the process — is badly misguided.
If it was wrong when anti-fracking groups used those tactics against landowners with oil and gas production on their land, then it’s wrong today, too.
Editor’s Note: Brophy is a farmer and former state senator from Wray, Colo.