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Solar Farm Summit opens lines of communication

American Farmland Trust says the recent Solar Farm Summit in Chicago allowed farmers and developers to have candid conversations about what future integration into agriculture might look like.

Midwest Solar Specialist Alan Bailey tells Brownfield solar projects on agricultural lands are very much still in the infancy phase.

“Everybody’s trying to figure this out and unfortunately the research and everything else doesn’t come at the same rate as what development comes,” he says. “We’re hoping that developers kind of take that into consideration as they were learning from these conversations.”

Senior Manager for Smart Solar Outreach Greg Plotkin says exhaustive communication from developers is a marketing strategy to get landowners to sign onto leases, but there’s no rush.

“If you’ve got the land and you’ve got the transmission capacity, you really have the opportunity to drive a lot of those conversations,” he says. “And so it’s really an empowerment factor that we want to give to these folks.”

Plotkin says solar can provide producers an opportunity to become more economically viable and their organization offers guidance to those exploring different options.

AUDIO: Greg Plotkin and Alan Bailey, American Farmland Trust