The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it was trying to protect American farmland from solar development by putting new restrictions on a popular rural energy program.
Those changes are unlikely to stem losses to U.S. farmland, and they could hurt existing farm businesses that are barely staying afloat by restricting their ability to save on costs, experts warned.
The Department of Agriculture Rural Energy for America Program will no longer give guaranteed loans to solar farms on the ground that are over 50 kilowatts — which are a little bit larger than a tennis court, enough to power anywhere from a handful to a few dozen homes. The administration also won’t consider those projects as competitive in grant applications.
In addition, the USDA program that guarantees loans for business and industry will no longer offer loans for wind and solar.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the new restrictions on solar and wind at an event in Tennessee on Tuesday, accompanied by Tennessee Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty. The USDA justified the new restrictions by decrying shrinking farmland access in the state specifically.
“Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available. Within the last 30 years, Tennessee alone has lost over 1.2 million acres of farmland and is expected to lose 2 million acres by 2027,” the agency wrote in the press release.
Tennessee is in fact losing farms — and good farmland — at an increasing rate, but the primary culprit is not solar panels.
It’s development, mainly for housing, said Charles Martinez, a researcher at the University of Tennessee’s Institute of Agriculture who led the effort to gather the statistics used in USDA’s statement.
Although Martinez was not credited in the press release, his team researched and collected the data cited by the USDA about farmland loss in Tennessee.
“Our stats are our stats, how people use those numbers, and however they want to talk about what is happening, is up to them,” he said. “But the majority of the land conversion is going to be residential, that’s the lion’s share. What has happened over time and where it is headed, solar farms being a reason is just not on the top of the list.”
Farmland loss in Tennessee has been accelerating over the past five to 10 years, Martinez said, for a number of reasons. Existing farmers are selling their lands as retirement plans, and a large number of people moved to more rural areas of Tennessee during the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing demand for new housing. Farmers are also frequently operating at a loss or barely making a profit, making it hard to justify continuing to farm, he said.
While solar panels are not the driving reason for farmland loss across the country, there are specific parts of Tennessee, Ohio and other farm-heavy states that are seeing increasing utility-scale solar development on land that is very good for farming. This is especially true for communities near transmission lines, where the farmland is suitable for placing solar panels and where it’s easy to connect those panels to the electric grid.
But the changes that the USDA made to the REAP program likely can’t do much to change that, researchers said.
“Is utility scale solar taking up a lot of good farmland in Ohio? Yes,” said Eric Romich, a researcher and energy development specialist at Ohio State University’s extension service. “But I don’t see a connection between REAP and large farmland acres. In Ohio, most of the REAP program grants are a lot of times on rooftops or under 50 kilowatts.”
Farmers and farm businesses often rely on USDA grant and loan funding for projects designed to reduce energy costs, not to get out of farming altogether. The REAP program is especially popular in more Republican areas of the country and is consistently oversubscribed to by farmers.
More than two-thirds of the program’s awards have gone to locations in Republican-held districts, according to an April Brookings Institution analysis. And the highest total funding awards have gone mainly to projects in the Midwest.
A NOTUS review of about 300 awards from a 2024 funding cycle and about 700 awards from a 2023 cycle found that the restrictions USDA placed Tuesday on REAP would not have affected many of the grants that farmers have won from the program before now. In many states, most of the REAP grant awards have been given for rooftop solar or for projects under 50 kilowatts, neither of which will be affected by the new restrictions.
In Tennessee, for example, there is only one project over those two funding cycles that would be impacted by the new restrictions: A solar system on a poultry farm that would save the business more than $21,000 a year. Of the nine grants awarded to projects in Louisiana in the 2024 cycle, only one is a solar project on the ground over 50 kilowatts. In Oklahoma, the four grants awarded in the 2023 cycle would all still meet USDA criteria today. In Ohio, only two of the more than 50 grants awarded between the two cycles would meet that criteria, and only one of those two is on a farm.
“To choose REAP, which is popular with farmers, it feels a little bit like using the wrong source to try to make an overall point,” said Richa Patel, a policy expert at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “It feels like they are targeting popular farmer programs instead of actually addressing the underlying issues.”
And doing so could backfire, Patel warned. “They could potentially hurt farmers in their efforts to save on costs, which fundamentally is going to hurt them in their efforts to keep their businesses surviving,” she said.