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The enthusiasm of the land owner is irrelevant to the reality that 13,000 acres will only contain 2500 acres of solar panels.

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Are.
…

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A terrible waste of land. Much better to go the natural gas and nuclear route to electricity production.

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I suspect the real objective is to remove a significant quantity of the land from agricultural production.

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“I find it funny that the signs say ‘No solar on our farmland,’” Houser says. “I’ve asked a couple of [opponents] if they’d like to come help make hay in June, and none of them have volunteered to come help with their farmland.”

The farmer who sweats on the ground, defeated by busybodies who never moved a cup of dirt on that land.

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Pfft. I’d help for decent pay, so would almost anyone. It’s not 1950, making hay means driving modern equipment with air conditioned cabins these days. You should see how plush my farmer buddies half million dollar tractors are. And it’s almost to the point where they can watch netflix while they do it. It’s not kids hucking bales into trucks any more.

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Anything to harm the country. You are probably right.

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To what point and purpose?

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Nah just plain short sighted idiocy explains it just fine. You probably want to eat too.

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To reduce the carbon footprint of modern agriculture. The article made reference to the carbon footprint of the area. No indrustry to speak of, other than modern farming.

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Solar panel farms destroy habitats for animals. It’s space and site pollution.

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It was only a few years ago that the same people who want to cover the ground with solar panels were all defending the government telling people they couldn’t use the land as they wanted because if might affect the life cycle of some minnow, or that you couldn’t build a cabin on your land if it had a certain amount of wetness. Now that has all dropped off as solar panels and windmills take precedence.
Not surprising. just like trans athletes take precedence over womens sports, which used to be all the thing.

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It all comes down to where you are building. I suspect there are far more choices as to where you can locate a solar farm as opposed to building houses, businesses, roads, pipelines etc.

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As the founder of Michigan Citizens for the Protection of Farmland, Hamilton spearheaded a ballot initiative to try and get the issue on the statewide ballot in 2024 for voters to decide.

Voters would decide whether utility companies like DTE and Consumers Energy can approach private land owners to install solar panels en masse.

Every landowner in the state of Michigan has to concern themselves with what Erin Hamilton from Livingston County wants. Doesn’t seem right.

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The initial draft of Hamilton’s proposal would have asked voters to create a law banning installation or operation of “utility-scale solar” on land zoned for agriculture. Violating the act would come with a fine of up to $10,000 per day.

But the proposal did not clearly define “utility-scale,” and made no distinction between existing solar arrays and new developments.

Mark Brewer, an attorney representing Our Water Our Democracy, the Michigan League of Conservation Voters’ ballot committee, warned that if such a measure were to pass, farmers who already lease their land for solar would be forced to rip arrays out of the ground.

Another opponent, Brenden Miller of the Land & Liberty Coalition, claimed the petition would infringe upon farmers’ private property rights and take away a source of income “to help stabilize farms” amid economic struggles.

Hamilton clarified that she has no intent of punishing farmers with existing solar arrays. And she said she supports allowing landowners to install solar panels to power their homes, farms or businesses. But solar arrays that exist solely to generate power for the grid, she said, belong on industrial land.

Erin Hamilton is having a hard time writing her busybody tyranny into legal text. The landowners aren’t having it.

Good on them for being aware and pushing back.

Where does this lady get to right to look over someone’s fence and decide that they have too many solar panels?

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Muddy Creek would be the state’s first large-scale commercial “agrovoltaic” or “solar grazing” project — meaning it is both producing solar energy for electricity and being used for agricultural purposes

About 100 people tried to disrupt the first public meeting over the project in Brownsville July 25, according to a report in the Bend Bulletin.

The proposed site of Muddy Creek is privately owned farmland covered in non-irrigated ryegrass. It would be leased for 40 years to Qcells, the U.S. subsidiary of South Korean solar company Hanwha Q. The lease information is not publicly available

This one is interesting because it’s an agrovoltaics project. Those 100 outsiders have no excuse to make someone else’s land their business.

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Agreed. Certainly not in this case. I don’t see any legitimate standing by those opposed to the project.

Looks like the project even morphed a bit to include sheep grazing among the solar panels to accommodate those who say the land should be reserved for farming.

If the owners had tried to use the land for apartment buildings or retail complex, I could see the adjacent owners raising legitimate concerns. Traffic. Skyline alteration. Stuff like that. No such impact will occur from a solar farm.

My son’s in-laws own a cattle farm. They were offered the opportunity to put a solar farm on their land. They turned it down out of concern that if the company ever folded, they would be stuck with the panels (and all the foundations for them in the ground) to be removed at their expense. But they wouldn’t see it as their prerogative to impede a neighboring farm from doing it. Property rights.

My opinion is that if someone doesn’t want a property owner to do something like this, their option to stop it is to buy the land themselves and do with it what they want. Otherwise, shut up.

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A lot of crops don’t actually need full sun either. Being in the shade for half the day under a solar panel might not be such a bad idea if people can figure out how to get the harvest equipment in and out.

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We can’t build an energy future of just wind/solar/hydro.

Nuclear has to be a big part of it, so environmentalists’ resistance to that is simply self-defeating.

What really could be helpful is geothermal…but we will need the continued breakthroughs in energy storage to fully exploit this (huge reserves of geothermal energy in the Rockies…but civilization can’t be concentrated in the mountains).

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