Day: September 24, 2025

One of my top concerns about buying a house and land is who are the neighbors. Will they complain about how I use my land, call the cops if I make a bit of noise or black smoke? Have smelly livestock, butcher food visible from the road?  Have junk tractors and equipment I’m taking part for parts? Have a burn barrel for my trash (gasp!) ? Nor do I want to enjoy my neigbors’ smoldering diapers, their sighting in their rifles or riding roaring dirt bikes into the night.

What neighbors make very little noise, have little smell, and honestly don’t care – and aren’t people at all? Well one option might be a farm field, which can be a bit stinky and bring in flies depending on the time of year. Or noisy with farming activities going well into the night. I guess a commercial forest wouldn’t be a bad neighbor either or even state land, though I don’t know if I’d want prying Game Wardens looking into my land. Farming and timber are definitely rural activities – lots of land and very few people involved.

But what about solar farms? Maybe they’re a bit ugly, especially from the roadside or the aerial view or from a hillside. But they don’t complain, don’t make a lot of noise – maybe a bit of sixty-hertz hum up close – don’t really smell. And they don’t call the cops or the town on you. They just soak up the sun, and send kilowatts down the line. Really they are very passive, and even the presence of utility workers on such sites after initial construction is likely quite minimal.

Does industrial solar consume a lot of land, taking out potential pasture and crop land from production? That is a real issue for beginning farmers and can even be an issue for long-standing farmers who rent the majority of their land. Less land means less for production. But it also keeps land from being developed, bringing more people out into the countryside. A solar farm is a very different kind of neighbor then the typical suburban house. You don’t generally have to hire additional cops or widen roads when a solar farm comes into town. It just quietly pumps kilowatts down the line. Solar farms don’t vote, they don’t have opinions nor do they change community character when they operate, beyond the visual impacts and tax revenue.