SKANEATELES, New York — Mark Tucker farms eight minutes from the town of Skaneateles. His operation has shifted through crops, silage for dairy, a five-year orchard experiment, and now a herd of Hereford cattle.
Tucker has also farmed energy. For years, a 133-foot wind turbine generated 85 kilowatts annually, a landmark visible from Skaneateles Lake. Since 2019, over 300 feet of backyard solar panels have cut $10,000 dollars from his power bills, covering eight months of electricity in his now-retired milking barn.
He calls himself both a farmer and a land steward. A longtime member of the Skaneateles Town Board and the Onondaga Farmland Protection Board, Tucker embraces renewable energy in principle — but he draws a hard line on where it belongs.
“I like solar, but I don’t want them [utility and commercial solar development] in my backyard. They’re being put on good, productive farmland,” he said. “However, I don’t think we have authority to say you can’t do it.”
In farm country, it is only certain types of solar that draw controversy. But it is the thin line between profitability and principle that has divided neighbors over how land changes hands.
In barns, boardrooms and backyard fence lines, the same arguments play out. Solar can cut energy bills, stabilize farm family finances, and expand clean power. It can also displace productive soil, alter landscapes, and stir resentment between neighbors.
A state on the solar map
New York ranks eighth in the nation for total installed solar capacity. Guillermo Metz, solar and agriculture senior resource educator at Tompkins County Cornell Cooperative Extension, says the state’s growth stems from strong town planning, high energy demand, and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) incentives.
“We’re growing in our energy demand,” Metz said. “We could either continue to replace that demand with gas and nuclear, which is more expensive than solar, or we could do solar and wind.”
California, Texas, Florida, and Arizona all hold the top places in solar production around the country. The south and west coasts have intense sunshine, supportive state policies, and incentives that attract solar business to the region.
Since NYSERDA’s launch in 2011, New York has installed six gigawatts of distributed solar, making it fifth nationwide in residential installations.
Small-scale projects, under 25 kilowatts, power homes and farms with rooftop or backyard arrays. They draw little protest. Commercial projects, like Cornell’s Cascadilla Community Solar Farm, span rooftops or fields and feed into the local grid.
But utility-scale solar, the kind requiring hundreds of acres, sparks the fiercest disputes.
“We are losing agricultural land at a pretty alarming rate to development,” Metz said, noting New York lost 364,000 acres in five years, according to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Census of Agriculture.
The reasons for lost farmland are mounting around the country. Owners of marginal farmland must constantly weigh selling against maintaining commodity market profits, loans, lost milk, and a struggling farm economy. Then land transitions occur due to aging farmers passing on the operation and generational transfers.
In New York, only a fraction of that loss is directly tied to solar development, despite federal political attempts to victimize themselves against renewable energy. An estimated 8 percent of New York farmland taken out of production in the past five years was for utility solar, based on calculations by AGDAILY.
Industry estimates it takes five to seven acres to generate one megawatt of solar power. Between 2019 and October 2024, New York added roughly 4,200 MW of capacity, about 21,000 acres. Nationally, 1.25 million acres, or 0.14 percent of farmland, have been used for solar since 2020, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.
While solar accounts for less than one-tenth of farmland conversion, low-density residential development is responsible for 78 percent.
“Development tends to happen adjacent to where development already is,” Metz said. “But solar farms defy that.” American Farmland Trust reports 58 percent of solar projects have been built on prime farmland.
Mitigation payments require developers of NY-Sun projects in state-certified districts to pay fees based on the percentage of prime farmland. While municipal rulemaking seeks to slow progress, construction continues.
“Decisions ultimately rest with the landowner,” Metz explained. “It becomes an issue of, do you really want to tell your local farmers what they can and can’t do with their land?”
Pressure on farmland
The pressure for valuable farmland north and south of the Finger Lakes is also mounting.
Hudson Egg Farm in Camillus raises 250,000 laying hens and rents 500 acres of cropland to neighbors. That land sits amid expanding pressure from multiple fronts: a Micron factory to the north, Chobani’s planned milk plant in Rome, and Fairlife’s beverage facility in Rochester, New York.
“Micron will bring pressure for development of housing and other infrastructure, where on the opposite side of that, Chobani and Fairlife will be building out cowherds for milk production and then also nutrient and manure management,” said Christina Hudson Kohler, the farm’s general manager.
The Hudson operation also sits near a commercial solar substation run by New York State Electric & Gas. Their flatland has been under steady pressure for development and grid expansion.
“When there’s pressure for solar, a lot of the farmers are calling, ‘Hey, did you get the letter too?’ ” Hudson Kohler said. There is a loud conversation about who received letters, but little discussion about decisions.
She noted, “If it wasn’t prime land, you might not want to crop it or have it in ag production.” But she believes there is a good dialogue among farmers in the area to keep farmland as farmland.
Her father, Lee Hudson, co-operator of the farm and a member of the Onondaga Farmland Protection Board, explained how it’s not the idea of farmland being used for anything else than crops rather than the land’ environmental future after solar.
“I don’t think there’s enough money there to clean it all up,” he said. “And people have told me this … it’s probably going to be one of the largest environmental disasters that people are going to walk away from it.”
Supporting Neighbors, Strategically
The fall of agribusiness productivity and the sale of farmland often present opportunities for developers. Metz said the timing can be striking.
“Somebody just got a forfeiture letter and the next day the developer shows up,” she said.
Neighbors around the Hudsons’ land take varying approaches.
“Our neighbor to the east, that’s all been preserved in Farmland Protection, so it’s forever green and they are an organic farm,” Hudson Kohler said. Another neighbor with 200 acres chose to sell recently. He wanted to leave his children a financial legacy when they were not directly tied to returning to farming, but he didn’t see farming as viable long-term. Selling farmland for solar would give his family the security he had always wished for.
“You can’t blame a family for being in that position,” Hudson Kohler said.
Her father recalled speaking with that neighbor at a town meeting last year.
“Hey, I would like to give you another option. I would be willing to purchase your farm where you could keep a smaller portion of it for your children to pass on, but instead of putting solar on it, would you consider?,” he said. The neighbor accepted, and solar was avoided.
“I think it’s just knowing your neighbors, or even opening those doors, because if they don’t know what their options are and they think solar is their only option,” Hudson said.
Some farmers find solar solicitations annoying or threatening. But Hudson Kohler has developed a firm response. “Your project doesn’t align with our values,” she tells developers. “It is a good way to say no thank you, where they are not coming back or even just responding to them. They just appreciate the closure, right?”
The state works to incentivize the use of lower-quality land for development. However, utility-scale and commercial solar projects can still net landowners an estimated 5 percent to 20 percent off their energy bill, according to NY Sun Program.
The long process of developing
It’s a common story. “Oh yeah, we get letters all the time, almost one a year. People want land” to o build housing developments, Tucker said.
But even when there’s an opportunity to use “bad farmland” for solar, administrative burdens arise. Tucker has land with shallow soil and shale beneath it. Yet the land is under a conservation easement from the city of Syracuse that forbids the construction of buildings.
The irony frustrates him. Syracuse itself wants more electric power but shows no interest in making such farmland available.
Tucker knows the sting of being pushed out. He was forced to quit dairy farming in 2019 after repeatedly being denied buyers for his milk due to herd size, leaving him with no options. That was on top of labor shortages.
The process of converting farmland to a solar field begins with a farmer saying yes. Then come county or municipal approvals. When proposals reach a zoning or planning commission, the details become public and residents question how it will affect them. No federal or state legislation directly restricts housing development or solar on farmland. A switch can occur without a zoning change. And despite farmland protection agreements, conservation properties have still been sold for development.
“I know they [farmers] don’t think it’s the right thing to do, because these panels — what are you going to do with them 20 years down the road?” Tucker asked. That skepticism lingers across rural New York.
But for every farmer wary of panels, there’s another who sees them as a lifeline. And it is in that divide between farmer against farmer that solar energy has exposed agriculture’s fiercest new conflict: the battle within.
Jake Zajkowski is a freelance agriculture journalist covering farm policy, global food systems and the rural Midwest. Raised on vegetable farms in northern Ohio, he now studies at Cornell University.
