Add Solar and Keep Farming

Ethan Winter '92

When Ethan Winter ’92 looks out on vast tracts of American farmland, he sees potential for more than crops and livestock. He sees millions of acres that are needed to capture solar power for electricity — and do so without displacing agriculture.

It’s a vision backed by the US Department of Energy’s 2021 Solar Futures Study, which calls for a massive boost in solar production from less than 3 percent of grid power today to 40 percent by 2035.

But in his role as Northeast Solar Specialist at American Farmland Trust, Ethan isn’t just championing what’s needed to help slow climate change. He’s also working to ensure that agricultural land remains productive, even alongside solar panels, to meet the needs of a world stressed by climate change’s worsening effects.

Solar “can cut either way,” Ethan says. “It can really displace agriculture and displace opportunities for farmers to access land. Or it can be developed in a way that is potentially additive and provide a source of revenue for farmers.”

The stakes are high, and the time is short. Solar is urgently needed on 10 million acres of farmland, Ethan says, but incentives must be designed right. History is riddled with examples of legislation that sought to encourage better land or business practices but incurred unintended consequences.

Part of Ethan’s job is to make sure farmers aren’t incentivized to stop farming if they plant solar panels. That’s especially important in this time when droughts, floods, and geopolitical instability, (in Ukraine, for example), are exacerbating food shortages around the world. Add solar and keep farming is Ethan’s mantra.

But getting there means cultivating rural support for solar. Ethan works to help farmers, their neighbors, and their state representatives see the benefits of integrating solar and not dismiss panels as unwanted landscape blight or encroachments on their way of life.

“Large-scale solar is really running into opposition in these rural communities,” Ethan says, largely because they don’t want to lose farming. The more they regard solar as enhancing traditional land use rather than replacing it, the more it can be scaled up where the land and sun are plentiful.

Discovering what’s actually doable in terms of what science, economics, public policy, and rural culture will allow makes Ethan’s work endlessly challenging. It also keeps him coming back to interdisciplinary approaches he first learned at Choate and has been perfecting ever since.

Choate was where Ethan showed himself that he could tackle big challenges by acting resourcefully. Leaving home in Illinois with his sister, Sylvia Winter ’93, for boarding school in Wallingford was a confidence-building adventure, he recalls. In the classroom, a history course on the Vietnam War showed him, as he puts it, “there’s always more to the story than we might assume.”

“It taught me to ask questions and think about different angles,” Ethan says. “It’s one of the reasons why I’m doing what I’m doing now. It’s thinking about different approaches to our climate challenge, thinking across disciplines and not accepting the conventional thinking on this. Because we’re going to have to reimagine our energy and our food systems.”

Across 25 years in the conservation field, Ethan has drawn consistently on that interdisciplinary playbook. He’s found no shortage of problems to tackle. The work has taken him west to save Wyoming farms and ranchlands from development; to graduate school in forestry at Yale; to statehouses and local zoning boards where decisions can make or break proposals for big solar projects on farmland.

Now raising a family in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Ethan is no less passionate than when he began in the mid-1990s. For a taste, just get him talking about agrivoltaics, a cutting-edge field that combines agricultural science and solar engineering.

“Agricultural output along with energy generation — we’re going to need both,” Ethan says. “Solar can be better than permanent conversion [of agricultural land] to housing and urban development. But it will be even better if it can integrate things like sheep grazing and even cattle grazing” within the solar installations.

At American Farmland Trust, Ethan is laying groundwork for states to make sure farmers get paid higher rates for solar when their installations don’t displace agricultural enterprises. Massachusetts has led the way in incentivizing so-called “dual use.” Legislatures in Maine, New York, and New Jersey have shown interest, too, according to Ethan.

For now, it’s fair to say the solarization of American farmland is gaining momentum with help from a tireless advocate who’s always ready to see complexity from a fresh angle.

“If we are going to move to a carbon-free energy system in the next 25 years, it starts with some really radical ideas about how we get there,” Ethan says. “This is a real challenge: how we’re going to transition to this clean energy economy in a way that people accept. One approach is to integrate more agricultural activity [into solar installations] so at least the farm owners and the agricultural sector see more of a win-win there.”

By G. Jeffrey MacDonald ’87