Posted on 04/27/2024 12:48:26 PM PDT by karpov
JASPER COUNTY, INDIANA - Dave Duttlinger's first thought when he saw a dense band of yellowish-brown dust smearing the sky above his Indiana farm was: I warned them this would happen.
About 445 acres of his fields near Wheatfield, Indiana, are covered in solar panels and related machinery – land that in April 2019 Duttlinger leased to Dunns Bridge Solar LLC, for one of the largest solar developments in the Midwest.
On that blustery spring afternoon in 2022, Duttlinger said, his phone rang with questions from frustrated neighbors: Why is dust from your farm inside my truck? Inside my house? Who should I call to clean it up? According to Duttlinger's solar lease, reviewed by Reuters, Dunns Bridge said it would use "commercially reasonable efforts to minimize any damage to and disturbance of growing crops and crop land caused by its construction activities" outside the project site and "not remove topsoil" from the property itself. Still, sub-contractors graded Duttlinger's fields to assist the building of roads and installation of posts and panels, he said, despite his warnings that it could make the land more vulnerable to erosion.
Crews reshaped the landscape, spreading fine sand across large stretches of rich topsoil, Duttlinger said. When Reuters visited his farm last year and this spring, much of the land beneath the panels was covered in yellow-brown sand, where no plants grew.
"I'll never be able to grow anything on that field again," the farmer said. About one-third of his approximately 1,200-acre farm – where his family grows corn, soybeans and alfalfa for cattle – has been leased. The Dunns Bridge Solar project is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources LLC, the world's largest generator of renewable energy from wind and solar.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Sorry, but sellouts should just take their money and shut up. Of course the land is ruined. Any dam fool could see that one coming.
If he “warned them this would happen” why did he lease the land to these idiots so they could intentionally destroy it? I don’t understand why he’s complaining when it’s his fault
Jasper County? Oh man, here I was looking at that as another possible retirement location. Wonder how much of the county that solar farm affects?
Wow-
We are getting 3.9% of our electricity from solar (nationally), after DECADES of subsidies, that’s impressive. (sarc)
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
***If we subsidise it until we’re all poor, up the level to where we all starve, maybe we can get 8%!!!***
Reuters lies routinely. Probably an LLC whose urban partners just want some cash regardless. Same going on in my family. No thought beyond the next vehicle write-off.
Once land is covered with solar panels and when those panels break, the chemicals that enter the soil make it unfit to grow food ever again.
HOW LONG IS THE LEASE???
HE should be telling this story to every single farm bureau & co-op in the USA.
The dirty screech is that when farm land is leased out for Solar they pretty much kill the soil so that nothing will grow under the panels and you ruin the land for years to come. There was a huge lawsuit on this I think in Georgia and the damages ran into about $200 Million.
Solar arrays should cover parking lots and commercial property roofs—like shopping malls.
Grazing land as a last resort.
Cropland: NEVER!
Why in the world would they spread fine sand on the soil?
I hope you meant hill slopes on the south side of valleys (facing north). Their opposites (north side of valleys facing south) are really good farm land in middle to northern climates because of the favorable sun angle.
Just another poor utilization of resources. Perhaps there may be high-rises built in urban locations to replace the farmland destroyed, but the cost of production of the food produced will vastly exceed what can be grown on fertile soil under individual ownership using the technology currently available.
The land is not “ruined”, it is merely being made unavailable for other purposes. You want CHEAP, highly reliable supply of electrical energy? Go nuclear, using the most recent designs of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, now available from a number of different sources, and already being operated in a number of locations outside the US.
And you STILL won’t have power at night.
Well, maybe they will find some kind of bugs that will thrive in the dust and shade of the panels, and we can eat them instead.
1200 acres? That’s barely a drop in the bucket for farmland production. What a non-issue.
“possible retirement location”
These days, you have to look very carefully at what might happen to the land during your retirement. The town and surrounding countryside around Colfax, WA is covered in “No Wind Farms” signs. The wind farms are covering the gorgeous and productive agricultural land of the Palouse region in eastern Washington and they are headed toward Colfax. The people have seen these horrendous blights on the landscape, seen the flickering shadows, and heard the thrump-thrump-thrump infrasound from the blades. They don’t want it.
The most ridiculous statement on a thread full of them
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