A 35-acre solar farm proposed for Fluvanna Townline Road in Ellicott highlights the ongoing struggle to create a fossil fuel-free electric grid.

John and Laura Knight, along with Travis and Julia Olmstead, penned a letter on behalf of Mid-Knight Dairy LLC to the Chautauqua County Agricultural Farmland Protection Board saying they stand to lose well-drained, valuable ground that borders their farm that they’ve rented for 35 years. The landowners are looking to lease the property for a solar farm. The farmers rent some of the land, and losing access to it would force the farmers to find different land, possibly reduce the number of cows on the farm or even sell the farm. Finding replacement land will increase transportation, labor and equipment costs.

There is only so much land and, given New York’s stated legislative goals in the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, solar and wind developers are going to be in pretty constant conflict with the state’s farmers — and that’s a problem in Chautauqua County, where even a decreasing number of farms still comprise a formidable segment of the county economy. According to a 2021 paper written by Max Zhang, a Cornell University professor, 40% of current solar energy capacity in New York state has been developed on agricultural land, with researchers finding 84% of land identified as suitable for future solar development — about 140 gigawatts — is agricultural. This kind of concentration leads to agricultural land conversion and then initiates a negative, economic chain reaction for businesses that depend on farming, according to the paper.

Money talks, and right now wind and solar companies have much more of it than small family farms. But counties and the state have to do something to level the playing field between wind and solar developers and the farmers’ whose land they need — or the state’s agricultural industry could go the way of so many other businesses and find greener pastures in other states.