California farmers identify a hot new cash crop: Solar power

Jacob Stid, Michigan State University; Annick Anctil, Michigan State University, and Anthony Kendall, Michigan State University

Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 8:31 AM 6 min read

Imagine that you own a small, 20-acre farm in California’s Central Valley. You and your family have cultivated this land for decades, but drought, increasing costs and decreasing water availability are making each year more difficult.

Now imagine that a solar-electricity developer approaches you and presents three options:

• You can lease the developer 10 acres of otherwise productive cropland, on which the developer will build an array of solar panels and sell electricity to the local power company.

• You can select 1 or 2 acres of your land on which to build and operate your own solar array, using some electricity for your farm and selling the rest to the utility.

• Or you can keep going as you have been, hoping your farm can somehow survive.

Thousands of farmers across the country, including in the Central Valley, are choosing one of the first two options. A 2022 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that roughly 117,000 U.S. farm operations have some type of solar device. Our own work has identified over 6,500 solar arrays currently located on U.S. farmland.

Our study of nearly 1,000 solar arrays built on 10,000 acres of the Central Valley over the past two decades found that solar power and farming are complementing each other in farmers’ business operations. As a result, farmers are making and saving more money while using less water – helping them keep their land and livelihood.

Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. is farmland more valuable or more productive than California’s Central Valley. The region grows a vast array of crops, including nearly all of the nation’s production of almonds, olives and sweet rice. Using less than 1% of all farmland in the country, the Central Valley supplies a quarter of the nation’s food, including 40% of its fruits, nuts and other fresh foods.

The food, fuel and fiber that these farms produce are a bedrock of the nation’s economy, food system and way of life.

But decades of intense cultivation, urban development and climate change are squeezing farmers. Water is limited, and getting more so: A state law passed in 2014 requires farmers to further reduce their water usage by the mid-2040s.

When the solar arrays we studied were installed, California state solar energy policy and incentives gave farm landowners new ways to diversify their income by either leasing their land for solar arrays or building their own.

There was an obvious trade-off: Turning land used for crops to land used for solar usually means losing agricultural production. We estimated that over the 25-year life of the solar arrays, this land would have produced enough food to feed 86,000 people a year, assuming they eat 2,000 calories a day.