Renewable energy developers say local opposition is one of the biggest impediments to building wind and solar projects in the U.S. Besides the impact of large-scale industrial projects littering the view of the countryside, opponents are also concerned about the impact on their land values and the destruction of precious limited farmland.
In 2023, Alexandra Fusalo bought 6.74 acres of land near Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, and she set out to create a pollinator farm. That’s a type of farm that produces a productive habitat for pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, with diverse native plants, water sources and nesting areas. She documents her farming efforts in her “House of Green” Substack.
“My goal this year was to see how many rare, endangered and common pollinators I could attract,” Fusalo told Just the News. She said she counted a couple dozen monarch butterflies on her land on one day in September.
Her involvement with solar opposition began one day when she was working in her garden and a neighbor told her that he’s often approached by solar developers looking to buy his land. “It kind of sent shivers down my spine. All these pollinators I’ve attracted to my farm, what would happen to them? What would happen to my investment?” she said.
Vanishing farmland: 24 million acres fewer than we had 2017
The neighbor assured her that he wasn’t going to sell his land to solar developers, but Fasulo said the developers are aggressive and many farmers do end up selling. Between 2017 and 2024, the U.S. saw a decline of 24 million acres of farmland, a trend that worries Fasulo.
The average age of farmers is rising, and few young people aren’t pursuing careers in agriculture, making it attractive to sell off unused farmland to developers.
Farmland is being sold for other types of development than renewable energy. But renewable energy takes up large amounts of land, and unlike other types of energy, rural land is an attractive location to site wind and solar projects.
Fusalo said on various social media platforms that young farmers will become rarer if farmland continues disappearing. To help protect farmland, she established the nonprofit American Land Rescue Fund, which pays for “environmental attorneys who take on industrial and governmental projects that threaten rural communities, ecological integrity, and agricultural sustainability.”
She posted a video about what her neighbor had told her, and soon after that, she went to Schuylerville, a small village near her farm, to speak to the Saratoga Town Board about a law placing more restrictions on solar development.
At this meeting, a representative of Cypress Creek Renewables came out from Santa Monica, California, to argue that the law was “excessively restrictive,” according to the minutes of the meeting.
“We’re in the boonies up here. It’s freezing. There’s more trees than humans. It’s not New York City. So I was sitting there thinking, ‘why is there a person from California in our little town board meeting?’” Fasulo said.
Hellbound and Down 