Solar Farms on Your Land: The End of Farming or a Billion-Dollar Lifeline?

There’s a picture many people have in their heads: massive solar projects spreading across the countryside, covering up valuable farmland. It’s a serious concern. As the owner of SolarEnergies.ca, I’ve spent over a decade helping people make sense of solar, and I hear this worry all the time. But that picture might be incomplete. What if we could have both energy and food from the same piece of land, and make farmers more money in the process?

This isn’t a futuristic dream. It’s happening right now in Canada, and it’s called “agrivoltaics.” The name might sound a bit technical, but the idea is simple: agriculture + photovoltaics (solar panels). It’s a system where farming continues under and around solar panels.

This article isn’t about selling you a fantasy. We’re going to look at the real numbers, the genuine benefits for farmers and communities, and the serious headaches that come with this new way of doing things. Let’s get into the hard facts.

What is Agrivoltaics?

At its core, agrivoltaics means using land for both solar energy generation and agriculture simultaneously. Think of it as double-dipping. Instead of a field being either for crops or for solar panels, it’s for both.

This usually plays out in two ways:

1. Grazing Livestock: This is the most common approach. Animals like sheep are perfect for this. They graze on the grass and vegetation under the panels, which keeps the plants from shading the solar arrays. The solar company gets natural, low-cost lawnmowers, and the farmer gets a place to raise their flock.
2. Growing Crops: This requires more planning. The solar panels are often installed higher off the ground or with wider spacing between rows. This allows enough sunlight to reach the crops below and gives tractors and other farm equipment room to maneuver. Everything from berries and vegetables to soybeans and grains are being tested in these systems.

The panels can even provide benefits to the agriculture happening below. They offer shade, which can reduce heat stress on animals and protect certain crops from scorching sun, reducing water evaporation from the soil.

The Money Talk for Farmers

Let’s be direct. For most farmers, this conversation starts and ends with the bottom line. Farming is a tough business with tight margins and unpredictable weather. Agrivoltaics offers a new, steady income stream that is hard to ignore.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The data coming out of Canadian projects is compelling. Solar developers lease land from farmers for long-term contracts, often 20-30 years.

• Lease Payments: Jason Bradley of Sun Cycle Farms, a consulting company in Alberta, states that farmers can expect at least $700 per acre per year just to lease the land. Eric Steeves, a farmer involved in the massive Travers Solar Project, reports earning $900 per acre or more.
• Management Fees: Many farmers also get paid for “vegetation management”—a fancy term for mowing or grazing. This can add another $200 or more per acre to their income.
• A New Baseline: Patrick Gossage of Agrivoltaics Canada puts it bluntly. For one Ontario project, he noted the lease alone provides four times the return per acre of most commodity crops.

When you do the math, a farmer could be looking at over $1,000 per acre per year before even selling a single animal or bushel of grain. That’s a powerful financial safety net.

More Than Just a Landlord

The beauty of agrivoltaics is that farmers aren’t just renting out their land; they are still actively farming it.

The Steeves family at Yetwood Farms in Alberta is a prime example. They leased part of their land to the Travers Solar Project. Now, they pasture about 2,000 ewes on that same land and plan to grow that number to 8,000. They get lease payments, management fees, and revenue from their sheep operation. It’s a diversification that turns one piece of land into multiple sources of income.

I spoke with a grain farmer in southern Alberta who called solar a ‘metal plague.’ His neighbour, however, signed a lease. Two years later, a severe drought cut his own yields by half, but his neighbour was still paying the bills because of those steady solar cheques. He told me, ‘It’s hard to argue with a guaranteed paycheque when the sky won’t give you one.’ That changed his perspective fast. It’s not about replacing farming; it’s about making it more resilient.

Community-Wide Payoffs

The benefits don’t stop at the farm gate. When a large-scale solar project comes to a rural area, the entire community can see a positive impact.

A Tax Base Transformation

Rural municipalities often have a limited tax base. Agrivoltaics projects change that overnight. The County of Vulcan in Alberta is the textbook case. The 3,400 acres used for the Travers Solar Project used to generate about $10,000 a year in tax revenue as cropland. Now, as a solar farm, that same land generates $3.5 to $4 million per year for the county.

That’s a staggering increase. It’s money that can be used for roads, schools, hospitals, and other essential services, taking the financial pressure off local residents.

Powering the Future

These projects also produce huge amounts of clean energy. As provinces look to attract new, power-hungry industries like AI data centres, having a reliable source of renewable energy is a major advantage. This creates jobs and economic growth, powered by energy generated right in their own backyard.

The Reality Check: Pains & Problems

This all sounds great, but it’s not a simple plug-and-play solution. Switching to agrivoltaics comes with significant challenges and a steep learning curve.

The “Valuable Farmland” Argument

The biggest hurdle is the concern about land use. In Ontario, the provincial government has ruled that large solar projects cannot be built on prime agricultural land. It’s a decision aimed at protecting the most productive food-growing areas.

Proponents argue this policy is shortsighted. Jason Bradley, for instance, advocates for using prime land because its high-quality soil can support more robust agricultural activity under the panels. The argument is that better land allows for higher-value crops or healthier livestock, making the ‘agri’ part of agrivoltaics more profitable and the dual-use model more successful.

A New Way of Farming

Working in an agrivoltaics system is completely different from traditional farming.

As Jason Bradley says, it requires a “paradigm shift.” Farmers have to operate within what is essentially a high-voltage industrial power plant. There are screw piles, cables, transformers, and inverters to work around. You can’t just drive a giant combine anywhere you want.

Coordination is everything. The solar panels might need to be tilted to a flat “table top” position or a steep “cathedral” position to let equipment pass or to give livestock more access. This means the farmer and the plant operator have to be in constant communication.

Tip for Farmers: If a solar company approaches you, get an agrivoltaics consultant involved from day one. The initial design of the solar array is make-or-break. The height of the panels and the width of the rows will determine if you can use your existing equipment or if you’ll be forced to invest in smaller, more specialized machinery.

Where It’s Happening in Canada

While there are projects popping up across the country, two provinces are clear leaders. A 2024 report showed nearly 100 large-scale solar projects were either operating or in development in Canada.

Alberta has been particularly proactive. As of 2024, the province mandated that any solar project over 10 megawatts (about 60 acres) on high-quality agricultural land must have a viable agrivoltaic plan. This “farm first” approach ensures that agriculture remains a central part of the land’s use. Other provinces, like Nova Scotia, are also exploring agrivoltaics, showing this trend is growing nationwide.

Can It Save the Family Farm?

Patrick Gossage made a bold claim: “agrivoltaics is a diversification opportunity that could be the saviour of many family farms in Canada.” Is that an exaggeration? Maybe not.

Family farms are under immense pressure from volatile crop prices, climate change, and the high cost of succession. Agrivoltaics offers a steady, predictable, multi-decade income stream that can insulate a farm from those market forces. It can provide the financial stability needed to weather a bad year, invest in new equipment, or make it possible for the next generation to take over the farm instead of being forced to sell.

This shift feels familiar to me. I saw the same hesitation 10 years ago with residential rooftop solar, a sector that has seen massive growth. Homeowners were focused on the change and the upfront logistics. Now, thousands of them are benefiting from lower electricity bills and a sense of energy independence. Agrivoltaics is the same principle, just on a much larger scale. It’s about seeing land not just as a source of crops, but as a powerful, multi-faceted asset.

So, are solar panels a threat to farmland? The evidence shows they don’t have to be. They are creating a new type of farm—one that harvests the sun twice. It requires a new way of thinking and operating, but the payoff—financial stability for farmers, increased tax revenue for towns, and clean energy for everyone—is a powerful incentive. For many Canadian farmers, this isn’t about replacing their legacy; it’s about securing its future.