California sits at the center of two urgent pressures: feed a growing population, or power a cleaner grid. For years, farmers across the state have faced a version of that question every time a solar developer knocked on their door.
A Michigan State University researcher spent years combing through satellite imagery and 25 years of land-use records across California’s most productive fields—looking for what actually happens when agriculture and solar share the same ground. What he found may quietly reshape how farmers think about their land.
A 25-year map of California’s fields
Jake Stid, a graduate researcher at Michigan State University’s College of Natural Science Hydrogeology Lab, built his study on remote sensing, aerial imagery, and Google Earth Engine—a public satellite-image database paired with cloud computing tools. His goal was to track how California farmland had actually been used across a quarter century of change.
California made sense as the study region for two reasons. It leads the United States in agricultural value and in solar energy production and installation. That combination made it the ideal place to examine what happens when those two industries compete—or cooperate—on the same land.
Stid’s current research grew directly from earlier work. In 2022, he published a detailed map of the solar panel footprint across California, and that dataset became the foundation for this 2025 study, published in Nature Sustainability.
The food-versus-energy trade-off that isn’t
The solar boom hasn’t arrived quietly. As installations spread across California’s Central Valley and beyond, concerns have grown about what that expansion means for food production — especially as a larger global population places greater strain on agriculture.
The numbers Stid’s team calculated make the stakes concrete. Land in California now fully occupied by solar arrays could have fed approximately 86,000 people. Yet some farmers had already begun experimenting with a middle path. Called “colocation,” the approach involves deliberately placing solar arrays alongside crops rather than replacing them—using the same ground for both purposes at once. Stid wanted to know whether that approach actually held up financially, so his team compared three scenarios: full solar conversion, crop-only farming, and partial colocation.
What the numbers revealed
To estimate real costs and revenues, the team drew from several databases—crop cost studies from the University of California, Davis; U.S. annual crop prices; California Water Rights Fee data; and models of solar electricity production from each type of installation.
The results confirmed what the team had hypothesized. Farmers who devoted a small portion of their land to solar arrays showed greater financial stability per acre than those who went all-solar or no-solar. Income from selling electricity back to the grid offset the reduction in crop output, while spending on fertilizer, water, and farming supplies declined. Colocated farms were also likely to save water by reducing irrigation needs—a meaningful advantage in a state where water scarcity is a persistent and growing concern.
Stability over yield: A new kind of farm security
One of the clearest findings in the study is what solar income actually does for a farmer’s financial footing. Crop yields fluctuate with weather, drought, and market prices. Solar output doesn’t.
“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.”
That predictability is the core argument for strategic colocation. By placing arrays on lower-yield spots within a field, farmers can protect food production while building a steadier financial base — one that doesn’t hinge on a single good season.
Stid is careful about how he frames the goal. The research isn’t meant to accelerate farmland conversion to energy use; it’s meant to help more farmers stay in farming. The framing he returns to is straightforward: not solar or agriculture, but solar and agriculture working together.
What comes next for agrisolar research
The California findings are a starting point, not a conclusion. Stid plans to expand the research to cover the entire continental United States, which would give policymakers and farmers a much broader picture of where colocation could be most effective.
He’s also continuing to work with co-author Anthony Kendall to explore the wider environmental impacts of solar arrays on farmland—questions that reach beyond finances and into ecology, hydrology, and land health.
The researchers hope their work enters the conversation wherever farmers, planners, and communities are weighing land-use decisions at the intersection of food, energy, and water. A landscape where solar and agriculture coexist, Stid argues, distributes benefits more widely and builds resilience into the system. As extreme weather events grow more frequent, that kind of resilience may matter more than any single season’s yield.
Kelly is an experienced writer with 15 years of experience exploring the big stories that shape our world, from tech breakthroughs and space exploration to climate, energy, and the fascinating quirks of science. She has a talent for turning complex ideas into sharp, memorable insights that stay with readers long after they’ve finished reading.
