The US Department of Agriculture Bans Support for Renewables
176 comments
·August 22, 2025adabyron
Many things can be true at once:
* Most crops have shifted to corn which 1/3-1/2 of what the US produces is for energy
* China is all in on solar and renewables because the amount of energy & how they import is a weakness the US threatens. It also makes a great export & influence for them over other countries.
* Many Republican donors, voters and politicians have invested a lot in corn, oil, coal and ethanol infrastructure which solar/wind threaten if they grow to fast. Some of their towns may depend on that as the main reason anyone lives there.
* Corn is really easy to grow for most farmers in the midwest, easy to store for long periods & farmers have invested a lot in machinery (which creates lobbyists from John Deere & others)
* Corn farms are an incredible waste of land by almost all measures compared to other crops or solar & wind, especially when you do a mixed land of solar/wind with small animals, bees & battery storage.
* The US has a lot of land available
* Most people care little about what's good for everyone or what's good for the planet, even if they claim to. This one is just my opinion based on how people actually behave.
jackschultz
Go to usda.gov and two recent press releases are
1 - Secretary Rollins Blocks Taxpayer Dollars for Solar Panels on Prime Farmland
2- Secretary Rollins Prioritizes American Energy on National Forest Land
Both have quotes about putting "America first" to confuse people to make them think this is better for all. We think the USDA is about getting healthy food to people, but really they're about maximizing the money for farmers and people who own the land. Terrible.
[1] - https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/08/... [2] - https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/08/...
Loughla
Farmers also want solar panels is the thing. It brings their costs down.
pfannkuchen
Presumably they are still free to purchase solar panels?
trenchpilgrim
The US already banned the import of affordable solar technology from china
jackschultz
I'm in Wisconsin and if I drive on a county road, I see signs near the road that say "Save our S̶o̶l̶a̶r̶ Farms". Maybe some are fine with them, but seems like lots of internal pressure to say no or unfortunate reasons.
wnevets
> Farmers also want solar panels is the thing. It brings their costs down.
I am a little curious to know what percentage voted for this.
Jtsummers
Depending on the state, not enough to matter. Farmers are not a major voting block in most of the US anymore. Farmers are a bit over 1% of the US population. I'm trying to find better sources than listicle type things, but the best I can find is that in the states with the highest percentage of farmers, it's still only 5-6% of their state population.
That can be enough to swing things, but it's not enough to be the deciding block that many think they are. A century ago things were much different.
some-guy
Most polls hover around 75% [1]
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/g-s1-52362/tariffs-farmers-tr...
Hilift
Another wrinkle is funding for Secure Rural Schools under the 1908 25% fund act hasn't been renewed. Counties that have a national forest presence have a federal government offset to compensate for lost logging.
https://krcrtv.com/news/local/trinity-county-urges-congress-...
stockresearcher
It’s not the answer anyone wants to hear, but at some point in the near future you’ve got to start thinking about county consolidation or redrawing county lines or something like that.
In the 1800s and early 1900s this sort of thing happened with relative frequency, but for some reason it seems we just stopped changing.
I live in Illinois so no worries about national land ownership issues, but there are plenty of counties with less than 5000 people and they have more government than they can afford, and right next door is another county that also has few people and more government than they can afford and both of them are geographically smaller than the average Illinois county. And you just wonder what (besides pride) is keeping them from doing what they need to do and cutting their cost of government by at least 40%?
deathanatos
> Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available. Within the last 30 years, Tennessee alone has lost over 1.2 million acres of farmland and is expected to lose 2 million acres by 2027.
A quick Google says that solar generates ~20 W/sq ft., so the amount of farmland lost here, by implication, to solar generation, is enough to power the entire United State with solar power alone, twice over.
Obviously, not all 1.2 million acres of land here is lost to solar generation as the government is implying. They don't cite their source, but AFAICT, this is all land that is no longer farmland for any reason at all.
megaman821
Serious question. Why do farmers need the USDA's help on this? Is it a financial issue, banks don't believe there is a positive ROI on farmland solar so the wont lend? Is it health related, the USDA needs to approve solar panel usage in close proximity to crops? Is it infrastructure related, someone has to approve and build transmission lines to the farm?
xnx
Came here looking for information on the same. I would be upset if restrictions were put on installation of renewables, but this looks like its ending giveaways to farmers.
troyvit
My partner works directly with farmers and USDA folks. Farmers have long, established relationships with USDA people and field offices. It's not always perfect and the relationships aren't always great but it's people they know and farmers being out in the middle of nowhere and very busy people those relationships are rare and valuable. That's how I understand it anyway.
null
alangibson
So they're worried about (easily removable) solar eating up farm land, but not (impossible to remove) suburbs. OK.
thinkcontext
The land argument is terrible. 40% of US corn acreage is already used for a form of solar energy, ethanol. Its over 20x less efficient than PV, so it's a huge waste of land.
Wind power on farmland only results in a tiny drop in acreage. And a hot area of study is mixing solar PV with various ag uses. In some cases yield is improved.
Finally, farmland that is used for solar is almost always not the best yielding land. Maybe the farmer is facing a water shortage or is just not that competitive. Solar could be a lifeline in situations like that.
astrange
Solar doesn't eat up land anyway; it improves it. You can put things under the panels, you can use solar panels as fencing, you can put it over water to reduce its evaporation, etc. Farmland doesn't need burning hot direct sunlight.
UncleMeat
They are not actually worried about that.
They just think that solar and wind is woke shit that liberals like and since they hate liberals they need to hate solar and wind.
nico
It was pretty shocking to me, learning that the White House had solar panels in the 70s!, and Reagan removed them when he came into office
jeffbee
While this is true, it's also true that they were pretty awful early thermal solar panels and Reagan removed them not to own the libs but because the roof was leaking. I doubt that this was politically motivated by Reagan, or that Reagan was generally cognizant of anything in 1986.
thomascountz
It's not that either. It's money.
UncleMeat
We'd see different behavior if they were motivated by money.
metalman
truth. I have been off grid for a long time, my motivation to do so was founded in a grade school science project with the wreckage of a camera light meter, conclusion sunlight=electricity, blink, blink, blink! and one day after getting my first decent silcone pv panel leaned up against my no power hook up farm house, a guy pulls in on his harley, and after a bit starts raving about banning solar about 15 years ago, and now I have a realy visible array, and there is solar everywhere you care to look they tryin to turn back the tide, and have zero chance with that. the first pannel still runs and cost me more than $2.50 /watt, current prices hover around $0.20/watt......retail
also that first panel provided minimum lights and water for a house, then was installed on.the hood of a truck that got destroyed by bieng rear ended, and is now moumted on.another building providing lighting and power for small tools, chargers, etc. ie: the stuff is tough
zywoo
China is working on it: whether hydropower, solar, onshore wind, or offshore wind, it ranks first in the world — and the cost of generation has already fallen below coal. If the world’s fastest-growing industrial nation can rely on renewable electricity, I can’t see any reason why other countries wouldn’t.
dabinat
This is the part I don’t understand. Trump goes on and on about the threat of China but doesn’t appear to be positioning the US to actually compete with them. An energy revolution is coming and China looks poised to take most of the spoils while the US buries its head in the sand and clings to the past.
anigbrowl
Trump wants to be king of America and make Washington DC and the White House in particular look like his vision of how America should have been. He is not that interested in the outside world or how people live, which is why he puts a non-negligible share of his mental energy into things like remodeling the Rose Garden to look more like a hotel patio, eg
AngryData
I mean I don't think him or most other politicians care. They will be long dead before anyone wealthy feels the consequences. In the meantime they are making money, have power to wield, and the propaganda they spew gives them a decent chunk of public support.
baby_souffle
It's a talking point. His base can't think beyond "China bad" and "Trump is us". If he says $action is good for the US, and bad for China then the only question they'll have is how many of those pesky elites will be sad because of this.
If you stop thinking so critically and logically, it'll all start to make a lot more sense.
BLKNSLVR
Trump doesn't understand that it's a new fight. He's trying to win the old fight again.
In the exact same way that "back in my day" stories don't matter to the lives of the grandchildren being told.
null
rapsacnz
Doesn't matter. At this point renewables are going to win, it's just an economic fact. This will only serve to delay this by a small amount.
Robotbeat
You underestimate how making something illegal can stop the thing in that country. Look at a place like Germany, blocking fracking and nuclear power and now reliant on Russian gas.
toomuchtodo
Germany has historical low usage of gas for generation and is adding 14-17GW of solar per year. Germany will need ~57 GWh of batteries by 2030 to sunset coal generation, scaling to 271 GWh by 2050. Current storage is just ~19 GWh (mostly in homes).
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/12mo/monthly
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/germany/
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/eu-battery-storage-...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/03/germany-hits-62-7-ren...
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/negativ...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Power-generation-from-renewable...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-27/how-germa... | https://archive.today/4Vk52
cyberax
Germany needs north of 10TWh of batteries to sunset _gas_ generation.
If you're looking for a renewables success story, Germany ain't it.
wagwang
Who's making anything illegal here
programmertote
Short-sighted actions. Sad to see that the US is taking all these backward approaches while China is charging heads down toward renewal future....
Waterluvian
If you made a graph of the amount of land area being used for wind and solar, you’d have a hard time finding a way to actually visualize how little land that is…
bluGill
That graph would be misleading - wind may only have a tiny footprint, they cover a lot more area. In some parts of iowa there are wind turbines in all directionsas far as the eye can see. That is how my iowa utility can claim I'm 103% wind - they generated more wind power than all customers used. (But there are other utilities in iowa so state wide and official numbers are not as good - though iowa is number 2 in the us for windpower)
avianlyric
When people talk about land usage for wind, they normally include the entire clear area of land around each turbine.
Nobody is claiming a huge wind farm technically has a tiny footprint because only the base of each tower touches the ground. The US if fucking huge, seeing “as far as the eye can see” is only about 28 sq miles, even if we assume we’re looking for wind turbines only (so can see 100m tall turbines with their bases over the horizon), you’re looking at 1500 sq miles. The U.S. is 3.5 million square miles. That’s three orders of magnitude greater than the area with wind turbines are far as the eye can see in every direction covers.
Or put another way, if you stood in the middle of a wind farm filled with the worlds largest onshore wind turbine stretching in every direction as far as the eye can see, that would be a land area about equivalent to 0.042% of the U.S. I don’t think there are wind farms even remotely close to that size.
Another way of looking at that number, is wind turbines evenly distributed across the US, so that a turbine as always just visible over the horizon from anywhere, would only consume 0.042% of the U.S. So yeah, it would be very hard to visualise show just how little land the U.S. wind turbines currently cover.
Waterluvian
Yeah. And I’m not sure how America does it but all the wind turbines I’ve seen in Ontario are just sitting in farmers’ fields. No fences. Spread out. The footprint is really quite small. I could see it being larger if one stuffed them so close together that the incorporated land really couldn’t be utilized well, but even then, it’s such a tiny amount of land. Especially compared to basically every other land use.
reactordev
Idiocracy. It’s all just a move to protect vested interests in fossil fuels.
Tesla has the right idea with solar roofs but we need better options than shingles or giant panels mounted. Wind gen is amazingly good if you have a consistent supply.
When I was sailing, the sun and wind would recharge my batteries during the day. At night, wind would keep the batteries charging so I could run lights, laptops, VHF, and NMea2000 equipment.
The future isn’t this. Banning renewable energy is like banning breathing.
EDIT
Coming back after a walk, I can't stop thinking about this. When I worked at an energy tech company, me and a couple data scientists actually worked out that if, theoretically you had solar panels capable of capturing sun energy with 99% efficiency - you could power all of humanity on 1 day's worth of sunlight. (granted you had the storage capacity, we did fun things like "You saved 254,143 trees by reducing your water use" kind of stuff).
The wind farms off the coasts in the EU countries are producing massive amounts of energy at fractions of the cost. Yes, the engineering is hard. Yes, the big tall windmills are ugly (paint them, put LED lights on them, who cares). You don't need the giant big ones, a field of smaller ones works too at the same altitude (key part... wind is faster at altitude). Make a wind mill kite and send it up. There's so much energy around us. We just need to find a way to trap those electrons.
andrewjf
> Idiocracy.
At least President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho cared about things enough to make things better for his people, hired the smartest person he knew and genuinely tried to fix things.
AngryData
To be fair there is a considerable amount of power used in creating products that isn't directly accounted for by someones home energy needs. And that number gets a good bit bigger if we want those production processes to be clean themselves. The energy we pay for directly through electricity and fuel is only a part of our energy consumption pie.
softwaredoug
It's not really good for those vested interests. If the rest of the world moves away from fossil fuels, they'll be stuck, in a market with shrinking growth. Instead they could invest in a different, growth market. If they get mixed signals from the US govt, they risk making poor strategic decisions
It may be short term good for them but long term fairly idiotic (for them and the US).
Jtsummers
Long term isn't even that far away. Much of the developing world will be happy to adopt renewables and battery storage, just as they've been happy to adopt mobile networks over fixed lines. It's a leapfrog moment and the US is not supplying the materials nor participating in the improvements gained from it.
softwaredoug
The current moment is a bit like seeing the internet take off and investing in print. Sure it’ll be around still in some form, but it’s the wrong time to double down.
null
https://archive.md/Qsxhj