Will solar panels overrun farmland? The two are more likely to coexist

It’s now clear that solar panels are an irrevocable part of the world’s future. Solar power will account for 80% of new renewable electricity connected to the grid between 2024 and 2030, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects. Solar panels are cheaper than ever, and for several years now, generating solar electricity has been less expensive than generating the same with fossil fuels. So, it’s an obvious question to ask: where will we build those solar panels?

We can and do build solar panels in sparsely inhabited deserts or on rooftops in cities, but it’s often cheaper and easier to site them on arable land that could otherwise be used for agriculture. Although polling shows that most of the world’s people support solar power, the idea of placing solar panels on farmland is often controversial. Many solar projects in the rural U.S. face fierce resistance from locals. Around the world, even politicians who support other types of renewable energy have spoken out against what they see as the potential for solar panels to ‘industrialize’ rural areas.

Certainly, some opposition comes from aesthetic fears about solar panels potentially reshaping rural landscapes. But other opponents back their criticism with claims: that solar panels are a wasteful use of space, needing hundreds of times more land to generate the same amount of electricity as other sources; that solar panels will reduce the food supply by eating up land that could be used for crops or livestock; and that solar panels contain toxic heavy metals or will damage the soil.

But do these claims stand up to evidence? Below, we’ll take a closer look.

Today’s solar installations don’t use a lot of farmland

Claims that solar panels are industrializing farmland might leave readers with the impression that vast swathes of cropland are vanishing under creeping masses of silicon. But the data tells a very different story. As we show below, in developed countries, solar panels only take up a small fraction of the land that agriculture does, even if we were to build many more of them.

In 2021, around one-third of U.S. counties hosted existing solar projects or projects in the development queue, according to the pro-net-zero non-profit Great Plains Institute. Together, active and proposed solar took 0.23% of each county’s land area on average. Indeed, more than nine in ten solar-holding counties used less than 0.5% of their land for solar, and in no county did solar cover more than 4%. Meanwhile, the average amount of each county’s land used for cultivated agriculture is several times higher, ranging from 2.83% in the relatively arid Southwest to 42.3% in the breadbasket Midwest (Figure 1).

There’s little evidence that building solar panels has hurt the agricultural economy, according to Brian Ross, Vice President of Renewable Energy at the Great Plains Institute. Ross told Science Feedback that the Great Plains Institute’s work has found “the risk of solar development to agricultural land production at the county scale is actually fairly small, except in a few places […] Usually, in those places, it’s a problem only because it’s also where housing development is happening, which is a bigger risk to farmland than solar is.”

A similar story is unfolding in other developed countries. An analysis of German land used for ground-mounted solar installed by 2018 showed that, while 51% of solar panel land was agricultural land, solar panels did not use more than 0.5% of agricultural land in any region of the country. In the UK, both current and future solar projects accounted for about 0.3% of the country’s total land area in 2022 – less than the UK currently uses for airports or for golf courses. Carbon Brief estimated that, even if all of the UK’s existing and planned solar panels were built on land used to grow wheat – a wildly unrealistic scenario – they would affect, at most, 4% of the UK’s wheat production.

Of course, these are today’s numbers – solar panels generated 4% of U.S. electricity in 2021. What about a world where solar energy accounts for an order of magnitude more electricity? From a resource perspective, the numbers seem to indicate plenty of room for building solar without overrunning agriculture. A 2021 U.S. Department of Energy report estimated that, in a net-zero scenario where solar energy provided 45% of U.S. electricity in 2050, solar panels would take up a maximum of 0.5% of U.S. land area: in comparison, golf courses take up 0.1% today and agriculture takes up 43%. However, solar may use more area in some locations; the report estimated that solar panels would take up 6.5% of (tiny) Rhode Island’s land area, though no more than 5% in any other state.

Building solar panels on agricultural land is more practical and more sustainable than alternatives

Critics of building solar panels on farmland often ask why those solar panels can’t be built elsewhere: on rooftops in urbanized areas, for example, or on ‘barren’ land such as deserts or once-developed land now no longer in use. 

First, many researchers believe that this is a false choice – that, in order to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, we should be trying to build as much solar as possible, wherever possible. And it isn’t as if we aren’t building solar in other places. The world’s largest solar farms, with capacities that rival large dams or nuclear power plants, tend to be located in deserts. The IEA estimates that 30 million households around the world drew electricity from rooftop solar panels in 2022, growing to 100 million by 2030. 

But researchers say that building all our solar panels on rooftops or desert sands isn’t the easiest or most ideal option. Dr. Seeta Sistla, Soil Ecologist at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, told Science Feedback:

“Arrays in very arid systems may have greater ecosystem impacts relative to more mesic [wetter] regions because of the relative shift with the sun-shade mosaic created by the array rows. Urban arrays—like parking lot canopies and on rooftops—are an excellent choice for reducing the carbon footprint of energy use, but cannot currently meet our society’s growing energy demands.”

From the solar energy builder’s perspective, agricultural land has quite a few advantages over those alternatives. If you want to build a large solar farm, it’s simply easier to do on unbuilt, arable land. More space also gives you more flexibility in the kinds of solar panels you can install. Dr. Dirk-Jan Van de Ven, Fellow in Energy & Environmental Economics at the Basque Centre for Climate Change, told Science Feedback:

“Compared to urban areas, lower limitations regarding space and steepness in arable land allow producers to place solar panels more efficiently at the best possible tilt and increasingly often also with sun-tracking technology, increasing the electricity output both per unit of land and per unit of capital input.”

Barren lands like deserts have the opposite problem – they’re often too far from built-up areas, making it more difficult and more costly to build and maintain a solar farm there. Van de Ven told Science Feedback:

“Compared to barren deserts, arable land tends to have advantages during the construction period, being traditionally better connected by road and grid infrastructure, and closer to municipalities for potential housing and supplies for workers. Arable land also tends to be privately owned, making it easier from a legal point of view to construct solar panels.”

And, as Sistla says, even seemingly ‘barren’ landscapes like deserts are often anything but. “They are diverse and sensitive ecosystems that host many rare and endemic species”, Sistla told Science Feedback. On the other hand, the results of human activities often mean the same can’t be said for farmland. “Many farmed landscapes are already degraded due to intensive land use (e.g., from tilling, high intensity grazing, etc.)”, Sistla told Science Feedback.

Likewise, solar panel construction can degrade land. Building a solar farm often involves leveling the terrain and clearing vegetation under the panels. When improperly done – for instance, if builders remove topsoil or damage the land between solar panels – this construction can degrade the underlying soil. But agriculture can have similar effects: a 2021 study found that the effects of building solar panels on soil in the Mediterranean were comparable to those from abandoning a vineyard^[1]. As we’ll show below, more careful construction methods, coupled with vegetation growing between the panels, can ensure that farmland is still usable after the solar panels are removed^[2].

Solar panels can benefit farmland

Claims that solar panels are overrunning farmland often assume that land for solar panels is land that can’t be used for anything else. Although there are many examples of land used solely for solar panels, this isn’t always true. Ross told Science Feedback:

“One of the things we say about solar farms is that over 50% of the land on a solar farm is open space. People talk about it as a sea of solar panels – no, it’s not, it’s mostly open space. And you as a community can actually make some choices about what happens on that open space.”

‘What happens on that open space’ can, in fact, still include agriculture. This can take several forms, such as letting livestock graze under solar panels, growing crops beneath them, or placing them on the roofs of greenhouses (Figure 2). This type of multi-purpose land use is known as agrivoltaics. 

Agrivoltaics still accounts for a relatively small portion of the world’s solar supply, but it isn’t limited to the lab. The first country to embrace agrivoltaics was Japan; as of 2022, 1% of the country’s solar power came from approximately 2,000 agrivoltaic installations scattered throughout the country, responsible for more than 120 crops. In the U.S., its most successful version has been allowing sheep to graze on the land beneath solar panels.

In addition to providing low-emissions electricity, agrivoltaic installations can benefit both the farmers and the land. A 2018 study found that meat from agrivoltaic U.S. sheep had a 25% smaller CO2 footprint than conventionally raised sheep^[3]. It may seem like the solar panels block valuable sunlight, but many plants actually benefit from the shade: studies around the world have found that partial shading with solar panels boosts the yield of certain crops, like potatoes and peppers, and reduces the water needs of other crops, such as lettuce^[4].  Moreover, research has shown that placing solar panels on degraded land can help the soil recover^[5,6]. Sistla, who studies agrivoltaics, told Science Feedback:

“Projects that are placed in already degraded landscapes, incorporate support for revegetation, and use grazing as the primary means of vegetation maintenance are the most promising to me – they seem like the most practical combination of supporting ecosystem services and clean energy production.”

The success of agrivoltaics also rebuts claims that solar panels toxify the soil with heavy metals like lead, silver, and cadmium. Commercial solar panels only contain heavy metals in very small amounts that, as scientific analyses have demonstrated, are generally too low to cause harm^[7]. Moreover, solar panels are sealed with layers of encapsulation and glass, designed for the precise purpose of preventing leaching. Experiments have demonstrated that the encapsulation remains intact even under damage^[8]. Even if solar panels are crushed and go to the landfill, they’re unlikely to leach toxins, as we’ve covered in a past review.

We already use a lot of agricultural land to produce energy, relatively inefficiently

Many solar critics argue that ground-mounted solar panels take up egregious amounts of land. Michael Shellenberger, for example, has claimed that solar panels require ‘300-600’ times more land than ‘other energy sources’. It is true that solar is one of the more land-intensive electricity sources, but the data doesn’t support Shellenberger’s claim. 

Data from the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe suggests that, when we account for land throughout an electrical source’s life cycle – including, for example, land that must be mined for raw materials or fuel – solar panels on the ground have similar land footprints per unit of electricity to coal power or hydropower (Figure 3). Ground-mounted solar panels are more land-intensive than gas or nuclear power plants or offshore wind, but only by around 10 to 60 times, depending on the exact comparison – far less than ‘300-600 times’.

And not all solar cells are equally efficient. Instead of silicon, many large solar farms instead use cells made from cadmium-telluride (CdTe) thin films, which need less land to generate the same amount of electricity (Figure 3). Moreover, researchers expect that as materials science advances, solar panels will become more efficient at turning sunlight into electricity, and they’ll become less land-intensive too.

Of course, these stats don’t separate agricultural land from other types. But we should note that many countries already use large amounts of agricultural land to generate energy – by growing crops to refine into biofuels like ethanol. This is most prominent in the U.S. and Brazil, who generate ethanol from corn and sugarcane, respectively. 

Research clearly shows growing biofuel crops produces significantly less energy per land area than any electricity source^[9]. In other words, replacing biofuel cropland with solar panels would produce considerably more energy. One estimate even suggests that converting all of the U.S. land dedicated to ethanol, which thanks to regulation generates 10% of U.S. gasoline, would generate enough electricity to power the entire country three times over – more than making up for any expected increase if the entire U.S. vehicle fleet were electrified.

Van de Ven told Science Feedback:

“The amount of energy output per unit of land is significantly greater for solar energy than bio-energy […] and the balance is even worse for biofuels which suffer more losses and emissions in the refinery process, hence for e.g. cars, the balance of consequences is much better for solar powered electric vehicles than biofuel powered vehicles, the difference being likely over 10-fold.”

Often, local economic conditions making biofuel crops appealing – the U.S. ethanol market is a product of government agricultural policy. But, from a purely energy-based perspective, biofuel crops are a very inefficient use of land. There’s also evidence that the land use changes that come with clearing land for growing biofuel crops have actually increased emissions from agriculture^[10]. 

Fossil fuel interests spread anti-solar messaging

So, there’s little evidence that solar panels are toxic or that they’ll take significant amounts of land away from agricultural production. At the same time, there’s evidence that solar panels can actually enhance farmland if built well, and that switching is an effective way to reduce the greenhouse gas footprint from burning fossil fuels. Those greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for climate change^[11].

Why, then, do these claims continue to circulate? In some cases, one reason may be that fossil fuel interests actively spread anti-solar messaging. The investigative journalism outlet ProPublica found that a group linked to a gas company purchased a local newspaper and used it to spread messages opposing a proposed solar farm in Ohio. ProPublica also highlighted other examples around the U.S. of fossil fuel companies, or utilities that rely on fossil fuels, opposing solar projects by passing anti-solar claims as news. These are conflicts of interest.

So, when you see a claim that solar panels ‘aren’t so green after all’, it’s wise to check if the claim offers support. If the claim doesn’t cite scientific evidence, it may be misinformation. There are reasons for solar developers to tread carefully on farmland – for instance, as we’ve said, poorly built solar farms can indeed degrade the soil beneath them. But many other claims, such as the assertions that solar panels are toxic, have no basis in scientific evidence.

Conclusion

Evidence suggests that solar energy can co-exist with agricultural activities, such as farming and grazing. The data we have gives little evidence that solar panels will overrun farmland and put a damper on growing food. Even if solar capacity continues to grow at unprecedented rates in the next several years, data suggests that the land used for solar panels will account for a small portion of the land used for agriculture.

Furthermore, claims that solar panels damage the soil beneath them have little support. It is true that poorly constructed solar panels can degrade the land, but solar panels are not inherently toxic – experimental evidence has shown that they do not leach heavy metals into the soil. Moreover, the field of agrivoltaics shows that it’s possible – and even beneficial – for solar panels and farming to co-exist.

References

• 1 – Lambert et al. (2021) Effects of solar park construction and solar panels on soil quality, microclimate, CO 2 effluxes, and vegetation under a Mediterranean climate. Land Degradation and Development.
• 2 – Choi et al. (2020) Effects of Revegetation on Soil Physical and Chemical Properties in Solar Photovoltaic Infrastructure. Frontiers in Environmental Science.
• 3 – Handler and Pearce. (2022) Greener sheep: Life cycle analysis of integrated sheep agrivoltaic systems. Cleaner Energy Systems.
• 4 – Widmer et al. (2024) Agrivoltaics, a promising new tool for electricity and food production: A systematic review. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.
• 5 – Krasner et al. (2025) Impacts of photovoltaic solar energy on soil carbon: A global systematic review and framework. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.
• 6 – Liu et al. (2019) Solar photovoltaic panels significantly promote vegetation recovery by modifying the soil surface microhabitats in an arid sandy ecosystem. Land Degradation & Development.
• 7 – International Energy Agency (IEA) PVPS Task 12. (2019) Human Health Risk Assessment Methods for PV Part 2: Breakage Risks.
• 8 – International Energy Agency (IEA) PVPS Task 12. (2020) Human Health Risk Assessment Methods for PV Part 3: Module Disposal Risks.
• 9 – Van de Ven et al. (2021) The potential land requirements and related land use change emissions of solar energy. Scientific Reports.
• 10 – Searchinger et al. (2008) Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change. Science.
• 11 – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2021) Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.