TODAY’S FARM
Before you seal a deal, learn everything under the sun
As more farmers are approached by solar companies to plant panels in their land, it’s important to know the pros and cons
By PHYLLIS COULTER FarmWeek
Allan Delphi, a LaSalle County farmer and landowner, felt like he was in the spotlight when making decisions that would affect him, his children, grandchildren and possibly others who work his land in the future — and that light was coming from the sun.
“I had five solar companies approach me; each one told me what they would do for me. I even had one more today,” he said while attending a recent farmland owners conference in Oglesby.
At the event, sponsored by the University of Illinois Extension at Illinois Valley Community College, Delphi gathered more information. He’s also involved family, a lawyer and a support team to help make the decision.
Delphi told FarmWeek he’s learned a lot during the process, studying the easements, learning about equipment and construction and decommissioning details.
“I’m in my 70s. This project will last at least 40 years,” he said of the care he is taking for his three sons and five grandchildren.
The company they have chosen practices agrivoltaics, the dual use of land for solar energy production and agriculture. They will likely graze sheep initially, but
more research is being done on short corn varieties and other crops that might be compatible with the solar system, said Delphi, who likes the idea of the contracted land still being used for farming.
During his presentation, Garrett Thalgott, assistant general counsel for Illinois Farm Bureau, emphasized the importance of asking questions and having a good team when considering signing a solar project contract.
Some things to consider ...
Insurance — It’s important to discuss a solar contract with your insurance company and attorney and see what is covered by the energy company and what changes might need to be made to the farmer’s or landowner’s policy.
Acreage guarantees — It’s important to know how many acres are guaranteed to be involved in the contract.
Compensation — It’s important for landowners to have an escalation provision, so the rental price keeps up with rising rates of rent over the next 50 years, the IFB attorney told FarmWeek.
Decommissioning — Thalgott agreed it’s important to be clear on the details of decommissioning when in some cases it won’t happen for as many as 60 years. The
energy company might be sold by then and other generations might be farming.
Eminent domain — It’s not available to solar developers. Landowners have the right to choose what is right for their farming operation, Thalgott told FarmWeek.
Mary Ludwig, an attorney and partner with Johnson & Taylor in Pontiac, compared property rights to a “bundle of sticks,” a bundle that includes air, water and mineral rights in the present and future, she told landowners at the conference.
As for solar and wind contracts, Ludwig offered many of the same cautions as the IFB counsel. She said to make sure attorney fees are considered in the contract costs to understand the contract length and provisions of decommissioning.
“About one-third of landowners receive a letter from an energy company,” Elizabeth Strom, an Accredited Farm Manager and vice president of Murray Wise Associates in Champaign told landowners in attendance.
“Before you sign, make sure you fully understand the contract,” Strom said.
This story was distributed through a cooperative project between Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois Press Association. For more food and farming news, visit FarmWeekNow.com.
TODAY’S FARM
Schools are getting in vocation mode
belief, vocational/CTE courses were eliminated one by one. As they say, hindsight is 20-20, and looking back, we all know that was a monumental mistake,” Twomey said.
By PHYLLIS COULTER FarmWeek
The long-held idea that a four-year university education was best for everyone is now recognized as flawed by many education advocates. Today, rural schools are bringing back displaced programs — but it will take time and resources.
“Career and Technical (CTE) programs, once called vocational programs, were a significant part of the fabric of rural schools across Illinois and the nation. Several decades ago, a huge pendulum swing took place across the country that all but wiped out this valuable CTE programming,” said Patrick Twomey, superintendent of Macomb School District 185, and a longtime rural school advocate.
“The push was that every child needs a four-year college education and in the process of addressing that
John Dunlap always saw the value of technical education. Directly after high school, he worked as an ag equipment technician and earned his certification, which eventually led him to the position of director of the AGCO Service Technician Program at Parkland Community College.
“Earn-while-you-learn programs are a perfect option for somebody who has to pay for their education. Most of the time they are guaranteed a job placement,” Dunlap said. “Business and industry have jobs they need to fill, and schools have a pool of students to draw from,” he said.
However, rural schools struggle to gather resources to bring CTE programming back. “They lack the financial resources as well as the human capital necessary to tackle this issue and yet we all agree it is paramount that we find a way,” said Twomey, who is on the executive board of the Association of Illinois Rural and Small Schools (AIRSS), one of the organizations leading the comeback.
John Glasgow, AIRSS program director, is spearheading the Rural Illinois Career and Technical Education Project, a joint effort between the Illinois State Board of Education and AIRSS, founded in 2023, to revive and advance Career and Tech Education for Illinois students.
High school tech classes were once viewed as something for “kids who have nothing better to do.” Attitudes are changing. “College is only one route to success today,” Glasgow said, noting that college grads often earn less today than those in “the trades.”
He and the team spent the first year of the Rural Illinois CTE mostly on research. Their study quickly revealed a priority: the need for direct and specific support for rural CTE programs. Glasgow and his colleagues created a web-based portal to share resources including webinars, newsletters and materials. Now, the site, airssedu.org/cte is live and provides centralized information from a respected source for rural districts, Glasgow said.
“We’re slowly playing catch-up but there is still really a long way to go,” said Glasglow of the team’s effort to get more resources and funding for CTE.
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Among other things, the Illinois Rural CTE Project is looking for ways to improve options for regional career and tech schools, which have long been underfunded.
In 2024, the CTE Project team identified the highest-need rural school districts, noting their challenges and strengths. The biggest pocket of highneeds schools is in the south, including Jefferson, Clinton, Marion, and Franklin counties. Other areas are scattered throughout the state including LaSalle and Bureau counties in the north, and parts of Champaign and Vermilion in the east.
The next step is to create pilot projects.
Some new pilot projects will come from adapting innovations in urban centers. One such idea is a pharmacy tech program that allows students to work in a hospital pharmacy. It is offered by a high school in Elgin, in a school district of more than 33,000 students in Kane County. “It offers a foundational knowledge base for every student wanting to go into a medical area. In rural areas that kind of medical experience may be hard to get,” Glasgow said.
Glasgow is already working with schools in Tazewell and Peoria counties in central Illinois to see how they could use Elgin’s idea as a model to get a pathway for medical careers in their rural schools.
In southern Illinois, Brooke May, co-director of the Southern Illinois Future Teachers Coalition
(SIFTC) and Leslie Bradley, director of student career services and co-director of SIFTC at Vienna High School District in Johnson County, are leading a 25-school network of more than 400 high school students in technical programs.
CTE pathways have traditionally been seen as lacking in value, especially when compared to academic pathways that lead to perceived higher wages and benefits, said May, also a member of the AIRSS Rural CTE Advisory Council.
“It is challenging to showcase the value of high school CTE pathways when funding for required equipment is limited, an insufficient instructor pool exists and inequities in the access to programs is a hurdle that many students are unable to overcome,” May said.
Yet, even with the glaring challenges, groups such as SIFTC has at its helm two qualified CTE instructors, dual credit education programs in 14 of their schools, and a large budget to support high school students who wish to enter the CTE field of education, which continues to face a shortage,” May said.
As the Illinois CTE Project and other efforts enter a new year, Glasgow said he hopes that all these actions will “help all rural districts enrich and grow their programming.”
This story was distributed through a cooperative project between Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois Press Association. For more food and farming news, visit FarmWeekNow.com.
Districts are going the distance so their students don’t have to Vocational education gaining traction thanks to schools that have found the way to educate is to innovate
PHYLLIS COULTER | FarmWeek
Geography poses challenges for rural schools, including limited resource sharing, and difficulty for students participating in programs, clubs and sports. However, Illinois schools are finding ways to offer opportunities for their students despite distances.
Take Bureau Valley High School, for instance.
“Our geography is tough,” principal Duane Price, told FarmWeek — but it’s just a challenge, not a barrier. He highlighted options for students, including dual credits taught by high school teachers to avoid travel time.
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TODAY’S FARM
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“It builds a climate and a culture,” Price said of the students advancing at their own school rather than traveling at least 40 minutes to the closest college. The incentives for teachers to teach college classes also helps recruit and retain teachers.
Another opportunity for students to help with college costs is applying for Sauk Valley Community College’s Impact program, which incentivizes students by offering tuition coverage for eligible participants who complete requirements, including community service and maintaining good grades.
John Glasgow, the Association of Illinois Rural and Small Schools’ program director, praised Bureau Valley’s school district for its innovative programs.
“It’s rather unique in Illinois,” he said of the opportunity.
Career and Technical Education “has gained a lot of traction” at BVHS because of its co-op programs, said Price.
“We keep growing every year,” said Jeff Harris, who leads the co-op program.
Along with classes, students participate in paid internships they set up themselves with electricians, veterinarians, dentists, in construction or whatever meets their career interests.
“It teaches them to be responsible,” Harris said. Such programs also connect the school to the community. In turn, the community approved infrastructure funding for improvements for Bureau Valley
School District 340’s four schools, two schools in Manlius and one each in Walnut and Wyanet, including improvements to its ag facilities.
Like they encourage their students to do, ag teacher
Caseelynn Shimmin, the 2024 National Association of Agricultural Educators’ Outstanding Early Career Teacher Award winner, explored other career ideas before finding that teaching agriculture was the best fit for her. “It fills my cup,” she said.
The district also offers career readiness courses starting with seventh- and eighth-grade students; col-
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of Illinois Rural and Small Schools program director; Duane Price, Bureau Valley High School principal; and Jeff Harris, who heads the cooperative program at the school, discuss career training options for students.
lege, career and military fairs; and software to help students explore career options
And, through the Whiteside Area Career Center in Sterling, students have access to programs including health occupation, building trade, culinary arts and criminal justice.
Glasgow acknowledged that distance is a big challenge for rural schools, but innovative programs, like BVHS’s, give students a variety of options.
For more food and farming news, visit FarmWeekNow.com.
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TODAY’S FARM
Company cracks culling conundrum
Machine could help prevent hundreds of millions of chicks from being ground up alive
By SCOTT MCFETRIDGE Associated Press
WILTON, Iowa (AP) — Every year, the U.S. egg industry kills about 350 million male chicks because they will never lay eggs, so have little monetary value.
That longtime practice is changing, thanks to new technology that enables hatcheries to quickly peer into millions of fertilized eggs and spot male embryos, then grind them up for other uses before they mature into chicks.
The system began operating last month at a Hy-Line hatchery in Wilton, Iowa, at the nation’s largest chick hatchery, which handles about 387,000 eggs each day.
“We now have ethically produced eggs we can really feel good about,” said Jörg Hurlin, managing director of Agri Advanced Technologies, the German company that spent more than a decade developing the SUV-sized machine that can separate eggs by sex.
Even Americans who are careful to buy cage-free or free-range eggs typically aren’t aware that hundreds of millions of male chicks are killed each year, usually when they are only a day old.
Most of the animals are culled through a process called maceration that uses whirling blades to nearly instantly kill the baby birds — something that seems horrifying, but that the industry has long claimed is the most humane alternative.
“Does the animal suffer? No, because it’s instantaneous death. But it’s not pretty because it’s a series of rotating blades,” said Suzanne Millman, a professor at Iowa State University who focuses on animal welfare.
Chick culling is an outgrowth of a poultry industry that for decades has raised one kind of chicken for eggs and another for meat.
Egg-laying chickens are too scrawny to profitably be sold for meat, so the male chicks are ground up and used as addi-
tives for other products.
It wasn’t until European governments began passing laws that outlawed maceration that companies started puzzling out how to determine chicken sex before the chicks can hatch.
Several companies can now do that, but unlike most competitors, AAT’s machine doesn’t need to pierce the shell and instead uses a bright light and sensitive cameras to detect an embryo’s sex by noting feather shading. Males are white, and females are dark.
The machine, called Cheggy, can process up to 25,000 eggs an hour, a pace that can accommodate the massive volume seen at hatcheries in the United States.
Besides the Cheggy machine in Wilton, an identical system has been installed in Texas, both at hatcheries owned by Hy-Line North America.
The process has one key limitation: It works only on brown eggs because male and female chicks in white eggs have similar-colored feathers.
That’s not a huge hindrance in Europe, where most eggs sold at groceries are brown. But in the United States, white shell eggs make up about 81% of sales, according to the American Egg Board.
Brown shell eggs are especially sought by people who buy cage-free, free-range and organic varieties.
Hurlin said he thinks his company will develop a system to tell the sex of embryos in white eggs within five years, and other companies also are working to meet what’s expected to be a growing demand.
Eggs from hens that were screened through the new system will supply NestFresh Eggs, a Southern California-based business that distributes organic eggs produced by small operations across the country.
The eggs will begin showing up on store shelves in mid-July and NestFresh executive vice president Jasen Urena said his company will begin touting the new chick-friendly process on cartons and with a larger marketing effort.
Urena said the new system was more expensive, but any price increase on store shelves would be minimal.
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FARM Farming in America: By the numbers
By TAMMIE SLOUP FarmWeek
If you’re one of those people who thinks the idea of family farms has been put out to pasture, think again. Farming continues to be a family business, with 97% of U.S. farms family-owned, accounting for 90% of farm
Farms, production and farmland
Large-scale family farms (gross cash farm income of $1 million or more) accounted for 52% of the total value of production and 25% of agricultural land in 2022. Midsize family farms (farm income between $350,000 and $999,999) accounted for 21% of agricultural land and 19% of the total value of production.
“We can see large-scale family farms dominate the production of most commodities, including beef, hogs, cash grains and soybeans, cotton, dairy and specialty crops. With the remaining commodities, poultry and eggs and hay, small family farms and mid-sized family farms dominate the production,” co-author and ERS Agricultural Economist Katherine Lacy said during a webinar.
Nonfamily farms accounted for the remaining 3% of farms, with 16% generating income of $1 million or more.
Financial performance
Most small family farms have an operating profit margin (OPM), or share of gross income that is profit, of less than 10%, indicating potentially more financial vulnerability, while most midsize, large and very large family farms reported OPMs above 10% in 2022.
“Compared with 2021, the percentage of small family farms in the low-risk zone increased or remained the same in 2022” — depending on the farm type (retirement, off-farm occupation, low sales, moderate sales), according to the report. “All other farm types showed a decline in the percentage of farms in the low-risk zone in 2022 relative to 2021.
production. Most of these farms are classified as small family farms (gross cash farm income less than $350,000), and they operate on 46% of U.S. agricultural land, accounting for 19% of the total value of production. Statistics like these were outlined in the USDA’s 2023 America’s Farms and Ranches at a Glance report
“This could be due in part to the large increase in prices received compared to the smaller increase in input costs in 2022, resulting in record-high net farm income,” according to the report. “However, these returns were not equally distributed across all commodities.”
Income and expenses
Farm households, in general, were not considered low income or low wealth. In 2022, median farm household income (including both farm and off-farm income sources) exceeded that for all U.S. households but was lower than the median income of all U.S. households with self-employment income.
As in previous years, the median total income of all U.S. family farm households ($95,418) was greater in 2022 than the median income of all U.S. households ($74,580). The median total household income for all family farms in 2022 increased from $92,239 in 2021.
released Dec. 12. The annual report dives into U.S. farm characteristics using data collected from 19,100 farms in 2022, compiled from the results of a survey conducted by the National Agricultural Statistics Service and Economic Research Service (ERS). Here’s a look at some of the highlights ...
are the primary sources of off-farm income for farm households, unearned off-farm income sources (public and private pensions, interest and dividend payments, asset sales, Social Security payments, and other income sources) provide a significant share of off-farm income relative to total off-farm income.”
Government payments and crop insurance
Overall, 13% of farms participated in federal crop insurance in 2022, with participation varying by commodity. About 62% of row crop farms purchased federal crop insurance. In contrast, 9% of farms growing specialty crops purchased federal crop insurance.
Want to read “America’s Farms and Ranches at a Glance: 2023 Edition?” Find the full report at bit.ly/41iDLK3.
“About 84% of all U.S. farm households earn the majority of their total household income from off-farm sources and often use off-farm income to cover some portion of farm expenses,” the report states. “As farm size increases, the percentage of households relying on off-farm income decreases.”
And while self-employment and wage/salary jobs
LEE COUNTY FARM BUREAU
Small family farms received 78% of all payments from USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program, which removes environmentally sensitive cropland from production and increasingly enrolls grasslands in support of grazing operations. In contrast, 62% of all Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) working-land program payments were received by midsize family farms, large-scale family farms, and nonfamily farms. These programs include NRCS’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program and Conservation Stewardship Program, both of which incentivize adopting certain
agricultural production practices.
Overall, 25% of all farms reported receiving some type of government payment in 2022, a decline from 34% in 2021 and 40% in 2020. The decline is largely due to the tapering of COVID-19-related assistance payments, according to the report.
New sections
The report also contains two new sections: usage of credit by lender type and farm size, and the differences in farm operations by race and ethnicity of the operators.
With credit usage, about 26% of all U.S. farms held any debt in 2022, and the majority of farms with debt used one lender. Over half of these farms reported loans owed to a commercial bank, compared to 8 to 10% with loans serviced by USDA, Farm Service Agency, and 31 to 43% with loans serviced by the Farm Credit System.
Among socially disadvantaged farms, non-Hispanic Black farms differ most compared to non-Hispanic White farms in terms of size, specialization and financial outcomes. Non-Hispanic Black farms are more likely to specialize in cattle production and be classified as intermediate rather than residence or commercial farms. They also are more likely to have an operating profit margin in the high- or medium-risk zones and are less likely to report the use of debt.
This story was distributed through a cooperative project between Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois Press Association. For more food and farming news, visit FarmWeekNow.com.
