Harvesting Sunshine More Lucrative Than Crops at Some U.S. Farms
- North Carolina added almost 1 gigawatt of farmland solar
- Projects offer stable income not affected by commodity markets
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System sits in the desert on March 10, 2014 in the Mojave Desert in California near Primm, Nevada.
Photographer: Jacob Kepler/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
For more than a century, Dawson Singletary’s family has grown tobacco, peanuts and cotton on a 530-acre farm amid the coastal flatlands of North Carolina. Now he’s making money from a different crop: solar panels.
Singletary has leased 34 acres of his Bladen County farm to Strata Solar LLC for a 7-megawatt array, part of a growing wave of solar deals that are transforming U.S. farmland and boosting income for farmers.