California farms use low-yield land for solar arrays and year-round electricity income
Between the strawberry rows and the solar panels, California farmers found a financial lifeline — selling electricity back to the grid from arrays placed on their lowest-yield land.
Across California, farmland is disappearing under solar panels as growers face what looks like an impossible choice: keep producing food or pivot to clean energy. Neither option has offered much relief from unpredictable harvests, rising input costs, and deepening water stress. Now, a 25-year analysis of satellite imagery suggests some farmers quietly found a third way — and the financial results weren’t what researchers expected.
A landscape pulled in two directions
California sits at the center of two urgent national priorities that don’t always cooperate. Its farmland feeds a significant share of the country, while its solar installations lead the nation in clean energy output. As pressure to cut carbon emissions grows, more agricultural fields are being converted to solar farms — and that’s making a lot of people nervous.
A mixed-use landscape distributes benefits more widely — to farmers who need income stability, to communities that need food, and to a grid that needs clean power.
The concern isn’t abstract. A growing population needs more food, not less, and converting productive cropland to energy generation feels like robbing one crisis to pay for another. Those fears have pushed some farmers toward a middle path called colocation — installing solar arrays alongside active crops rather than replacing them entirely.
California is the logical place to study this tension. No other state combines such high agricultural productivity with such aggressive solar expansion, and whatever patterns emerge there will likely shape how the rest of the country thinks about the same tradeoffs.
Twenty-five years of fields, mapped from space
Michigan State University graduate student Jake Stid didn’t set out to reframe the solar-versus-farming debate. He started by teaching himself to identify solar panels from satellite imagery using Google Earth Engine — a public database of aerial and satellite images combined with cloud computing tools. A casual suggestion from his advisor, MSU assistant professor Anthony Kendall, turned into a years-long investigation.
Stid narrowed his focus to California and tracked land-use changes across the state over 25 years. He had already published a solar panel footprint dataset for California in 2022, and that earlier work formed the backbone of this study. From that data, the team calculated that the land now occupied by solar arrays could have fed roughly 86,000 people — a figure that puts the scale of conversion in concrete terms.
To understand the financial picture, the team drew from multiple data sources: crop cost studies from UC Davis, annual U.S. crop prices, California Water Rights Fee data, and solar electricity production models. The goal was a balanced accounting — not just the costs of solar, and not just the benefits, but both together.
The financial case for doing both
The results confirmed what the team suspected, though the clarity of the finding still stands out. Farmers who dedicated a small percentage of their land to solar arrays showed greater financial stability per acre than those who went all-solar or kept farming with no solar at all.
The math worked in several directions at once. Fewer acres under cultivation meant lower spending on fertilizer, water, and other inputs — a reduction that partially offset the modest drop in crop output. Income from selling electricity back to the grid provided something no harvest has ever reliably offered: a stable, weather-independent revenue stream that arrives year-round regardless of what the season brings.
“If I’m a farmer, these two acres of solar arrays are going to pay me a certain amount of money throughout the year,” Stid said. “I don’t have to worry about yield instability, or whether it’s going to be a wet or dry year.”
There’s also a water dimension. Farmers with colocated arrays were likely to save water by reducing irrigation on those parcels. In California’s chronically water-stressed agricultural regions, that’s not a minor footnote — it’s a meaningful operational benefit.
Strategic placement, not wholesale conversion
Stid is careful about what his research actually recommends. The finding isn’t that farmers should rush to cover their fields with panels. It’s that deliberate, targeted placement of arrays on lower-yield spots within existing fields can unlock energy revenue without gutting food production.
That distinction matters. Wholesale conversion of productive cropland to solar farms is what drives the food-versus-energy conflict in the first place. Strategic colocation sidesteps that conflict by treating the two uses as compatible rather than competing — a reframing with real consequences for how land gets used.
“The conversation shouldn’t be as much about solar or agriculture, but solar and agriculture,” Stid said. “They can work together, and it can be a collaboration rather than a conflict.”
The research, published in Nature Sustainability, could inform both individual farmer decisions and broader land-use planning. Instead of forcing a binary choice, it offers a model where the same landscape serves multiple purposes at once.
What comes next for agrisolar research
Stid’s next step is to scale the analysis beyond California. He plans to examine solar and food production patterns across the entire continental United States — a move that would test whether California’s findings hold across different climates, crop types, and energy markets. He’s also continuing to work with Kendall on the broader environmental impacts of solar arrays on surrounding ecosystems, including how panels affect soil, water, and local biodiversity.
Both lines of research could feed directly into policy conversations about sustainable land use and rural economic resilience. Farmers, local governments, and energy planners are all making decisions right now with incomplete information. Studies like this one begin to fill that gap.
The broader argument Stid makes is worth watching as that conversation evolves. A mixed-use landscape distributes benefits more widely — to farmers who need income stability, to communities that need food, and to a grid that needs clean power. “There are arguments to be made that that’s a more resilient landscape,” he said. “You have more benefits being distributed to more people, which we think is impactful.”
Discover more about the study here: Jacob T. Stid, Siddharth Shukla, Anthony D. Kendall, Annick Anctil, David W. Hyndman, Jeremy Rapp, Robert P. Anex. Impacts of agrisolar co-location on the food–energy–water nexus and economic security. Nature Sustainability, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41893-025-01546-4
Daniel García is an Editor-in-Chief with strong expertise in structural work and engineering principles. He combines this technical foundation with deep knowledge of energy, spatial design, and emerging technologies, bringing a forward-thinking and analytical approach to editorial leadership.
