Op-Ed | Trump Administration’s War on Solar—and the Strange Convergence of Right-Wing Agrarianism and Left-NIMBY Urbanism

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In an increasingly surreal political moment, the Trump administration has found itself echoing the logic of progressive urban NIMBYs—not in city housing debates, but in rural farmland policy. 

In a new USDA report and policy agenda titled Farmers First: Small Family Farms Policy Agenda, Secretary Brooke Rollins outlines a crackdown on solar development on farmland, citing it as a “considerable barrier” to land access for small farmers. 

The justification? Solar drives up land values and makes it harder for aspiring farmers to buy land.

This is the same argument used by anti-housing activists in cities: development leads to rising land costs, so the solution is to stop development. Whether it’s an apartment building in a growing city or a solar array on the edge of a cornfield, the logic is now identical: abundance is the enemy.

Chris Elmendorf, a UC Davis law professor, captured the irony perfectly: “Incredible to watch the Trump Administration repurpose the worst ideas of urban left-NIMBYs for their war on green-energy abundance.” 

And journalist Matt Zeitlin summed it up even more pointedly: “The USDA is going to try to discourage turning farmland into solar power developments precisely because it increases the value of the land.”

What we are seeing is a convergence of ideological extremes: a right-wing cultural backlash against green energy couched in the language of agrarian populism, borrowing tools from progressive critiques of gentrification and displacement. 

The USDA now argues that solar installations are not just environmentally suspect (a baseless claim), but economically unjust because they create a competitive market for farmland.

We need to recognize that solar power is not being forced on farmers; indeed, these are voluntary land-use decisions by private property owners, often leasing underused land to solar developers for predictable revenue. 

Many farmers want this option. 

It provides financial stability in a volatile agricultural economy and doesn’t necessarily preclude continued food production—especially in the case of dual-use “agrivoltaics,” which combine solar generation with grazing or shade-tolerant crops.

But in the Trump USDA’s new vision, productive land must be protected from such diversification.

“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” stated USDA spokesperson Emily Cannon—an unmistakable cultural posture that portrays solar panels as invasive rather than innovative.

It’s a deeply flawed and shortsighted framework. 

Framing solar and agriculture as mutually exclusive is not only inaccurate—it’s harmful. Across the country, numerous states and universities have piloted successful agrivoltaic systems, where solar panels are raised to allow for crop growth or animal grazing beneath them. These projects improve soil moisture retention, reduce water needs, and provide shade for livestock. They are not a threat to farming—they’re an evolution of it.

Moreover, farmland is not being swallowed wholesale by solar development. As of 2023, solar installations occupy a tiny fraction of U.S. agricultural land—less than 0.5% by most estimates. The idea that solar is outcompeting food production is a straw man. In reality, solar leases often make farming viable on parcels that might otherwise be abandoned or foreclosed.

So why the panic?

Part of it stems from political opportunism. 

By opposing solar, the Trump administration can appeal to fossil fuel donors, tap into the culture war against environmentalists, and claim to stand with “real Americans” in rural communities. 

It’s an old playbook but it also reflects a deeper philosophical resistance to abundance. 

In this worldview, if something becomes more valuable—whether it’s housing or farmland—the solution is not to expand access, build institutions, or create public investment. It’s to stop the change from happening at all.

If the USDA were serious about helping small farmers access land, it wouldn’t focus on suppressing land values. 

It would invest in the mechanisms that make land acquisition and retention viable, such as land banks, cooperative ownership models, long-term lease arrangements, and expanded credit access. In fact, the USDA already has programs like the Farm Service Agency’s (FSA) Ownership Loans and Guaranteed Loans, which offer up to 100% financing for farmland purchases. 

Instead of modernizing and expanding those efforts, the Trump plan includes a provision to disincentivize solar development by altering federal funding priorities. This includes changes to the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP), which historically supported renewable energy installations for farmers looking to reduce operating costs and diversify income. 

Under the Trump USDA, REAP will be reconfigured to exclude solar projects on “productive” farmland—replacing innovation with ideology.

It’s hard not to see the broader contradiction here. On one hand, the administration claims to champion small family farms—acknowledging that they make up 86% of U.S. farms but only 17% of total production. 

On the other hand, it undermines one of the few income streams that could help those same farmers stay on the land. The problem isn’t that solar makes farmland more valuable. It’s that we’ve failed to ensure that land value gains don’t lock out new entrants. That’s a solvable problem. 

But it requires policy imagination—and a belief in abundance—that this administration lacks.

If the USDA were acting in good faith to help small farmers, it could support agrivoltaics, create farmland access funds, strengthen the Agricultural Land Easement (ALE) program, and modernize farm succession planning. None of these require suppressing clean energy development. 

They require political will—and a commitment to systems thinking rather than wedge politics.

What’s happening here is about more than farmland. It sets a precedent: if land-use change raises values and threatens the status quo, then the solution is to restrict change. That same logic could be (and often is) used to block housing, transit, public infrastructure, and industrial policy. 

In the long run, this kind of scarcity mindset undermines both rural and urban prosperity. It entrenches inequality by locking out new entrants. It favors existing owners—whether of land, homes, or permits—and penalizes newcomers who could bring innovation and resilience to struggling systems. And, worst of all, it jeopardizes our ability to meet the climate crisis with the urgency and scale required.

America needs more clean energy, not less. We need more farmers, more flexible land use, more tools to help people thrive in the face of change—not fewer.

Treating solar power as a threat to agriculture is not just a policy error, but a philosophical retreat from the idea that progress can be shared. 

We don’t need to choose between feeding our families and powering our future. We can do both—if we stop letting bad-faith scarcity politics set the terms of debate.

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