I was recently made aware by one of our staunchly conservative county council members Amy Drake that one can plant solar panels in just about any farm field you want in Indiana without any permitting or rezoning whatsoever. A solar field suddenly showed up near my shop in St. Joseph County, Indiana. I made an erroneous assumption this required permitting to convert valuable farmland to a worthless solar field.

Amy writes:

“Our current rules are wide open for solar. I wrote a few months ago how we received a special gold solar designation from a lobbyist organization, because our rules are so lax. We are highlighted on SolSmart's page here: St. Joseph County | SolSmart.

We currently have measly set-back rules, shockingly less than even state standards (and remember the state also considers itself open for solar). Most disturbingly, no extra step is needed to go from agriculture to solar. So, for instance, an agriculturally zoned property can go straight to solar without any zoning change or special permitting use required. Even though solar farming has nothing to do with agriculture, and if anything, is more of an industrial use.”

Across the street from this blight, Microsoft is in the process of purchasing 900 acres of the most historic and prime farmland in this region to construct a data center right smack in the middle of a very rural and peaceful residential community. Zoning to “industrial” for this was just approved by the county council this week (6-3, three proper Republicans voting “no” but two “Republicans” joining all the Democrats in approval) despite a majority of local property owners objecting to it.

Surrounding these two developments are several thousand more acres of prime farmland that the county has decided is “best used” for industrial purpose. Of course, they didn’t ask anyone who actually lives here -- they made this decision from their offices in downtown South Bend. With the enormous power needs of this data center, availability of massive amounts of neighboring farmland easily convertible to glass panel fields and no requirement for permitting to install these panels on farmland, we fear this will forever change the landscape of the community.

While some are working feverishly here to hold the construction of solar fields accountable to the public by zoning or at least permitting, the proliferation of these useless eyesores will march forward everywhere there are no boundaries.

Elsewhere in Indiana, farmers who lease their land to these highly responsible </s> solar companies can destroy the potential of the land to return to farming with impunity.

"Dave Duttlinger's first thought when he saw a dense band of yellowish-brown dust smearing the sky above his Indiana farm was: I warned them this would happen. About 445 acres of his fields near Wheatfield, Indiana, are covered in solar panels and related machinery -- land that in April 2019 Duttlinger leased to Dunns Bridge Solar LLC, for one of the largest solar developments in the Midwest. On that blustery spring afternoon in 2022, Duttlinger said, his phone rang with questions from frustrated neighbors: Why is dust from your farm inside my truck? Inside my house? Who should I call to clean it up? ...Crews reshaped the landscape, spreading fine sand across large stretches of rich topsoil, Duttlinger said. When Reuters visited his farm last year and this spring, much of the land beneath the panels was covered in yellow-brown sand, where no plants grew. 'I'll never be able to grow anything on that field again,' the farmer said. About one-third of his approximately 1,200-acre farm -- where his family grows corn, soybeans and alfalfa for cattle -- has been leased."

"...(W)hen he approached NextEra about the damage to his land, the company said it would review any remedial work needed at the end of its contract in 2073, as per the terms of the agreement." Repeat: 2073.

Within the linked Reuters article lies a gloomy statistic: “Researchers at American Farmland Trust, a non-profit farmland protection organization which champions what it calls Smart Solar, forecast last year that 83% of new solar energy development in the U.S. will be on farm and ranchland, unless current government policies changed. Nearly half would be on the nation's best land for producing food, fiber, and other crops, they warned.”

Solar power generation is not agricultural. It is industrial. Period. These are not solar “farms,” and using that language is both an insult to real farming and facilitates the notion that rezoning or permitting isn’t required to convert farmland to solar fields. I implore you all to reach out to your lawmakers to create boundaries in your own communities before a solar field pops up in your backyard, and you had nothing to say about it.

Image: National Archives