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Sociology of Agriculture and Food (SAFRIG)

(Re-)assembling land for solar development: deconstructing prime and marginal farmland Kaitlyn Spangler*, Kaitlyn Spangler, Zachary Goldberg, Jennifer Baka, Kristin Schoenecker, James McCarthy,

Rural communities in the US often prefer new solar development on agricultural lands to be sited on ‘marginal’ rather than ‘prime’ or ‘productive’ farmland, as concerns and opposition around the loss of the latter grow. Meanwhile, agricultural landowners who lease their land see solar projects as means of protecting farmland from industrial development – a “thirty-year crop.” Herein lies a tension of where solar development is most efficient versus most preferred. Rather than taking the categories of prime and marginal farmlands as given, we draw on scholarship of land assemblages to ask how they are defined and constructed and how processes and decisions around solar energy development are reshaping them. Situated in the US state of Pennsylvania (PA) and between the years of 2023 and 2025, we conducted a survey with 35 farmland preservation experts, a follow-up focus group discussion, and in-depth interviews with 20 solar stakeholders and agricultural landowners to better understand how farmland preservation and solar development are in competition, and how farmland is discursively (re-)made in the process. We find that there are important resource gaps in PA’s farmland preservation programs; only about 30% of preservation applications are approved annually. Further, prime farmland is often broadly categorized by soil class, and marginal land is defined, by default, as ‘everything else.’ Yet, soil maps are highly variegated, and logics of place-based productivity are highly contextual. Therefore, these logics do little to preclude certain kinds of development, such as solar. At the same time, experts are hesitant to extend preservation programs to solar on farmland. This research aims to understand how solar development is becoming a new, profitable ‘productive use’ for farmland, often hierarchized over incumbent historical, cultural, and social values and, therein, what is worth protecting for agriculture.