Imagine that you own a small, 20-acre farm in California’s Central Valley. You and your family have cultivated this land for decades, but drought, increasing costs and decreasing water availability are making each year more difficult.

Now imagine that a solar-electricity developer approaches you and presents three options:

Thousands of farmers across the country, including in the Central Valley, are choosing one of the first two options. A 2022 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that roughly 117,000 U.S. farm operations have some type of solar device. Our own work has identified over 6,500 solar arrays currently located on U.S. farmland.

Our study of nearly 1,000 solar arrays built on 10,000 acres of the Central Valley over the past two decades found that solar power and farming are complementing each other in farmers’ business operations. As a result, farmers are making and saving more money while using less water – helping them keep their land and livelihood.

Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. is farmland more valuable or more productive than California’s Central Valley. The region grows a vast array of crops, including nearly all of the nation’s production of almonds, olives and sweet rice. Using less than 1% of all farmland in the country, the Central Valley supplies

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