At some farms, it's more lucrative to harvest sunshine than crops | Alternative Energy | Forums

ever think of renting out your land for something like this?

For more than a century, Dawson Singletary's family has grown tobacco, peanuts and cotton on a 530-acre farm amid the coastal flatlands of North Carolina. Now he's making money from a different crop: solar panels.

Singletary has leased 34 acres of his Bladen County farm to Strata Solar for a 7-megawatt array, part of a growing wave of solar deals that are transforming U.S. farmland and boosting income for farmers.

Farmland has become fertile territory for clean energy, as solar and wind developers in North America, Europe and Asia seek more flat, treeless expanses to build. That's also been a boon for struggling U.S. family farms contending with floundering commodity prices.

"There is not a single crop that we could have grown on that land that would generate the income that we get from the solar farm," said Singletary, 65.

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