A herd of sheep takes a break from “solar grazing” at Chad Raines ranch near Searcy, Ark. Rains said the sheep fertilize the soil, leaving it healthier than it was originally. (Lucas Dufalla, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)
SEARCY, Ark. — On hundreds of acres of former farmland, the Raines family operates a type of farm that most Delta residents aren’t used to.
Herds of sheep, wrangled by Turkish sheepdogs, and rows of wide solar panels take up the same land that used to be covered in the rice and soybean fields typical of the Arkansas Delta, the rich alluvial plain along the Mississippi River.
Chad Raines doesn’t own the land. But he earns an income managing the property for Lightsource BP, a subsidiary of energy giant British Petroleum. Raines used to run his family row crop farm in Texas, but now he’s full-time “solar grazing,” in Arkansas and Texas. His hundreds of sheep graze around the solar panels, preventing grasses from growing too high and blocking the sun from powering the panels.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
“Agrivoltaics is the art of raising crops of some kind, whether it’s livestock or row crops, mixed in with solar production,” Raines said. Before partnerships like Raines and Lightsource BP, land was either for agriculture or solar – leading to unexpected land use tensions in many rural areas.
Arkansas, like many places in the United States, is in the middle of a solar boom, and projects are sprouting up on prime farmland across the Delta. While solar only makes up a small percentage of current energy production in Arkansas, industry groups project massive growth in coming years. The challenge? Whether the state can retain its agricultural character in the face of all this change.
Agrivoltaics projects like solar grazing have seen growth in the Midwest as a solution to tensions between rural communities and solar developers. But row crops, common to the Delta, are difficult to farm with solar panels, meaning Delta farmers would have to reinvision agriculture they’ve done for decades to make agrivoltaics work. Growth of solar installations on Arkansas farmland likely won’t slow down, but whether successful agrivoltaics projects like Raines’ will expand on those solar operations is uncertain.
Same land, new tricks
The landowners who used to farm the land outside Searcy retired and leased their land out to Lightsource BP to build a sprawling solar installation that sends its power to the central Arkansas town of Conway, population 64,000. The retired farmers earn money passively from their lease, the solar producer earns an income selling renewable power, and Raines earns an income managing the project with his sheep, which he butchers and sells for meat.
“There is a lot of conflict between agriculture land use and solar land use,” said Peggy Hall, director of the Agricultural and Resource Law Program at The Ohio State University. “It’s been a contentious issue in Ohio, and sometimes it pits farmers against farmers.”
She said, in Ohio, tensions between solar developers and rural communities have put agrivoltaics in the spotlight as a potential solution.
Hall explained that the rapid growth of solar installations led to unforeseen land use conflicts in the upper Mississippi River basin, where rural communities are larger. The 200 megawatt Duane Arnold Solar Project in Iowa — located on nearly 2,000 acres of former farmland — was challenged in court during its development process. Those opposing the project wanted to keep the land agricultural.
The Duane Arnold project is one of the around 7,230 “major” solar projects in the United States, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association — a trade group representing the solar industry.
Raines said the contract with Lightsource BP allows him to offset the cost of raising his herd of 800 sheep, making the business far more profitable than the cotton farming he used to do in Texas.
“This is becoming more and more an accepted practice. In the beginning, I was having to convince people,” he said. “[solar companies] now are calling us … we’re actually turning a few people down.”
(Lucas Dufalla, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)
Central Arkansas utility giant Entergy has four utility grade solar installations in the Delta, with four more on the way by the end of the year, generating a total of 811 megawatts of power for Arkansas consumers. Entergy’s solar facilities take up approximately 6,700 acres of land throughout the Delta.
Other prominent Arkansas solar companies like Scenic Hill Solar, Entegrity, Delta Solar, and Seal Solar are eagerly installing projects across the Delta.
“The solar market has exploded upwards in the last decade in the country and in Arkansas,” Bill Halter, CEO of Scenic Hill Solar, said at a press conference celebrating the launch of Arkansas’ largest solar project on Oct. 22. “We have large amounts of unencumbered land and vast water resources critical for economic development. These advantages of land, sunshine, and water for Arkansas are god-given and they cannot be taken away.”
Arkansas’ largest solar project to date is in development for the University of Arkansas, a sprawling 18-site project that will power several campuses across the state.
The SEIA projects a 3,946 megawatt growth in solar energy in Arkansas over the next five years. Currently, Arkansas’ solar industry is valued at $1.8 billion. The state ranks 27th in the nation for solar capacity. Nearby Mississippi ranks 31 on that list.
And large out-of-state companies are getting in on the action too, with Michigan-based NorthStar Clean Energy building a 2,000 acre solar installation in the small town of Newport to power General Motors facilities. The solar rush has been driven in part by massive federal spending on renewable energy projects, with the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 leading the way.
Despite the massive growth of solar in the Delta, Rusty Rumley, a senior staff attorney at the National Agricultural Law Center, said he hasn’t observed widespread tensions between solar developers and rural communities emerging in Arkansas. Rumley works on land use issues, and said the lack of conflict in the Arkansas Delta is due to how sparsely populated it is, compared to rural areas in the Midwest.
Rumley said he’s seen solar companies often offer over $1,000 per leased acre, far more than someone would make growing most crops on the same acre.
But the industry does face other challenges in the region.
An economic promise; a Delta challenge
Raines explained that herds of sheep work perfectly to maintain solar installations. But farmers throughout the Mississippi Delta aren’t sheep herders. They primarily grow commodity row crops, with vast fields of rice, soybeans, corn, cotton, and hay, according to the 2022 Department of Agriculture census.
“The soil tends to be wet, and you have aerial application of pesticides,” said Jesse Richardson, law professor and the lead land use attorney at West Virginia University. Wet soil and pesticides can damage solar panels. “There is potential, but right now there are a lot of questions,” Richardson said.
Richardson also works with farmers in the Delta. He said researchers haven’t figured out how to make row crops work on the same land as solar.
“Rice requires so much water out on the site and in the field that there’s just too much for the employees, solar technicians, to walk out there,” Raines said. Arkansas is the nation’s top rice producer, and most rice farmers flood their fields. “Corn can’t be done, I don’t know how you do cotton either….unless you had really wide rows between the panels.” Wide rows are necessary for access to the panels.
Raines said there’s more potential with soybeans because the crop is short enough to grow beneath panels and take advantage of the shade. Arkansas farmers grow three million acres of soybeans annually, but usually the fields are rotated with rice, corn, or other commodities, making it difficult to invest in solar on those fields.
It’s getting harder and harder to be a farmer in the Delta. The number of farmers has decreased, while the size of farms has increased, reflecting the necessity of increasing yields in order to make a profit. In 2023, Arkansas had 37,400 farms, with an average acreage of these farms being 366 acres. Just twelve years ago, the average size was 306 acres.
Farm income in the Delta is projected to decline for the second year in a row, largely because commodity prices have plummeted. But livestock prices improved this fall, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast.
For agrivoltaics operations like Raines’ to grow more commonplace, Delta farmers would have to dramatically change how they farm.
Richardson and Hall noted that solar developers bring some economic benefits to rural communities like increased property taxes and maintenance jobs. But, under solar grazing arrangements like Raines’, farmers don’t own their farmland, leading to concerns of the continuing loss of farms owned by farmers.
These solar farms also leave questions regarding the land’s farming feasibility if the panels are removed.
“Theoretically, you can [revert]. We haven’t had solar farms long enough to know, but the consensus is once you put these solar panels in, no more agriculture,” Richardson said.
But Raines said that his sheep fertilize the land and improve the soil.
“I talked to the landowners and I told them — I looked them in the eye — ‘I can promise you that in 20 years, when you get this land back, it’s going to be healthier than it was when you gave it,’” he said. “And I truly believe that.”
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. Support our independent reporting network with a donation. Your gift of up to $1,000 will be matched dollar-for-dollar through the end of the year.