Op-ed: Agrivoltaics isn’t one thing. Our policy shouldn’t be either.

This is a policy debate piece, not something that changes what you can do with your own home right now, but it touches on solar and land use in ways worth knowing. "Agrivoltaics" is the practice of combining solar panels with farming — grazing animals under panels, growing shade-tolerant crops between rows, or planting pollinator habitat on solar land. The opinion piece argues that treating all of these as one thing under a single policy misses how different they are: sheep grazing is cheap and well-established, crop farming under panels costs 20 to 50 percent more per watt than standard installations and needs years of planning, and restoring abandoned farmland with solar needs the most financial support of all.

The piece also pushes back on the idea that solar is eating up farmland, citing data that suburban development and golf courses take far more prime farmland than solar does. It points to Virginia's new legal definition of agrivoltaics, enacted this June, and a proposal (delayed to 2027) to give agrivoltaics projects the same legal protections as other farming. Maryland has already created a process letting solar-farm land keep its agricultural tax status permanently.

None of this requires anything of you directly. But if you live near farmland or are weighing a solar lease on rural property, it's a sign that states are still sorting out the rules on how solar and farming can share land, and those rules vary widely depending on where you live.