By Rachel Becker, CalMatters
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Ross Franson stood on the road between two fields, where nothing grows under the Fresno County sun.
As a teen, Franson hauled a water tank to spray down the dust on roads like this — rolling past rows of almond and pistachio trees, the CD on his Discman skipping with every bump.
A quarter of a century later, with water supplies squeezed by climate change and regulation, the dust has spread beyond the sunbaked track to barren fields. Now, on one side of the road, a field sits empty — fallowed, tire-tracked and dry. On the other stands a new crop: solar panels, in glassy black rows behind a chain-link fence.
“We’re farmers. We’d rather farm,” Franson said. Still, he added, “This is the only way I think people are going to survive out here, if they’re able to find out other uses for some of the ground like this.”
The valley that was once a refuge for people fleeing the Dust Bowl is facing its own reckoning with dust and water scarcity. And it has prompted scientists and policy experts to wonder what to do with land left behind. Why not solar? they ask.
It’s an existential question for the most agriculturally productive state in the nation.Now, California lawmakers are wading in, with a bill that aims to clear away a financial hurdle for energy developers and landowners eager to plant solar farms with battery storage on fallowed fields.
Authored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, a Democrat from Oakland, the bill tackles the Williamson Act, 60-year-old law designed to fend off the creep of suburbia.
Under the law, farmers and ranchers can enter into 10- or 20-year agreements with local governments to keep their land in farming. In exchange, they receive cuts in their property tax assessments that can range from 20% to 75%. But cancelling the contract before the term ends incurs fees that can reach millions of dollars.
Wicks’ bill would allow farmers and ranchers to suspend their Williamson Act contracts if they plant solar and storage on water-stressed farmland. Property taxes would go back up, but they would avoid the cancellation fees.
“In general, I think that this is probably a good way to help grease the wheels for more solar development,” said Andrew Ayres, an economics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno and an author of a 2022 report on solar and groundwater in the San Joaquin Valley.
But there are so many opposing forces pushing and pulling at efforts to develop renewable energy, Ayres said, “All of these things do come along with caveats and tradeoffs.”
Fallow fields, energy opportunities
California’s ambitious climate laws call for the state’s grid to run entirely on renewable energy by 2045.
Hitting that target will require hundreds of thousands of acres of new solar generation near communities that need it, with enough transmission and battery storage that the electricity doesn’t go to waste.
The question is where to put the panels. Solar farms on public lands with valuable wildlife habitats and ecosystems are deeply controversial.
“‘Put it on agriculture!’ is one of the solutions to that,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a Professor of Environmental Studies at San José State University. “California needs a lot more solar, and it needs solar closer to its population centers.”
The Central Valley — California’s agricultural heartland — is in a prime location, Mulvaney said.
Already, about half of the almost 100,000 acres of large-scale solar developed in California is in the San Joaquin Valley, California Energy Commission staff told CalMatters based on their analysis of a federal database.
The San Joaquin Valley is also at the heart of California’s water crises. The state’s landmark groundwater law, enacted more than 10 years ago after thousands of wells in the valley went dry during drought, is now tightening its grip on growers pumping from some of California’s most critically overdrawn aquifers.
With no new water supplies, up to 900,000 acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley could go out of production over the next 15 years, according to estimates from the Public Policy Institute of California.
“An uncomfortable truth California must reckon with is that we are facing a significant lack of access to water across many of our rural counties,” Wicks said at a Senate hearing in July. “Whether this bill passes or not, up to one million acres of farmland is soon going to be fallowed.” Wicks’ office did not respond to a request for an interview.
About half of California’s 30 million acres of farm and ranchland is covered by Williamson Act contracts. Renewable advocates say it’s a no-brainer to seed solar farms onto fallowed ground, and the proposal has precedent.
In 2011, California lawmakers enabled landowners to cancel Williamson Act agreements in order to use their land for solar energy projects, as long as the soil was already in poor condition.
Wicks’ bill would expand this little-used provision to allow landowners to suspend Williamson Act contracts on land facing water scarcity, and to include solar energy storage and other related facilities as well.
“I can’t find a downside here, and that’s why it’s always fascinating to me when I hear people saying, ‘Well, solar is going to cause a loss of farmland.’ It’s mind boggling,” said Shannon Eddy, executive director of the Large-Scale Solar Association. “If folks are concerned about solar occupying those fallowed lands, what are they saying they’d prefer?”
Even if Williamson Act penalties are cleared away, other roadblocks remain, Ayres said.
There are permitting lags and supply chain slowdowns and bottlenecks in transmission that can stop solar energy from reaching population centers. The Trump administration has upended tax credits for renewable energy projects. And the Moss Landing Vistra Power Plant Fire is stoking local concerns about building battery storage facilities near homes.
For some projects, the Williamson Act “could be a very significant impediment,” Ayres said. “For other projects, it could be minimal.”
Farmers, divided
Whether to further loosen state policies protecting open farmland is a question dividing the farming industry.
By the end of August, big-spending labor interests had aligned with solar companies, the Kern County Farm Bureau, the Almond Alliance, wine grape growers and others in support. They say that if farmers can’t readily plant solar panels, all they’ll grow is dust.
Franson’s company, Woolf Farming and Processing, farms 20,000 acres near the Fresno County town of Huron. Water shortages, he said, have forced the company to fallow about a quarter of that land — sometimes more.
Leasing some to a solar developer helps offset the costs of holding onto it, and allowed him to consolidate limited water supplies for fields still growing crops.
“I got three little kids that I would hope would want to be involved in the family business of farming,” Franson said. “This is basically the only way they’re going to have any kind of chance of that.”
On the other side are the California Farm Bureau, organic and family farm organizations, and other farmland conservation groups listed in opposition at the end of August. They are far outgunned and outspent by supporters, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy.
Opponents warn that pulling at the threads of the Williamson Act’s protections could fray the fabric of farming regions, unraveling the economies of scale that help agriculture to operate efficiently. They want to see the definition of water-stressed farmland narrowed, and the bill scaled back to only the driest parts of the state.
“If you start taking … agriculture out of an area, you don’t have to remove all of it for agriculture in that place to die,” said Peter Ansel, the California Farm Bureau’s director of policy advocacy. “The trucks that come to pick up produce from fields, the contract laborers that come to bring people to the fields — all of that requires your neighbors still farming.”
He points to Imperial County, which does not have an active Williamson Act program, as a glimpse of the future. In July, the powerful Imperial Irrigation District board condemned siting solar farms on active farmland, which they said have already consumed 13,000 acres — “providing little to no benefit for local communities.”
Ryan Jacobsen, chief executive of the Fresno County Farm Bureau, said undermining the Williamson Actis a slippery slope.
“You’re doing it for solar — why aren’t you doing it for affordable housing?” Jacobsen asked. “You’re doing it for housing; why aren’t you doing it for a racetrack facility? I mean, it just goes (on). Where do you stop?”
Leaping ahead, or leaving farm towns behind
Whether Wicks’ bill passes or fails, it exposes fears about losing farmland in regions long dependent on agriculture to drive employment and local economies. And it raises concerns that farmworker communities already burdened by poverty and pollution will face new threats from whatever industry takes its place.
María Dolores Díaz, a widowed grandmother who lives in the tiny town of Cantua Creek, once worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley — even while pregnant, even with her children beside her. She can still picture her son’s little hands covered in tape, to protect them while he picked garlic.
In Spanish, she remembered how she’d warn him. “‘Well, this is how things will go if you don’t study,’” she would say. “But thanks to God, my kids studied. That’s the dream one has, that they have a better job than we do.”
Her son went on to become an engineer, Díaz said proudly, and moved away from Cantua Creek. Still, she wonders what a future with fewer agricultural jobs holds for tiny towns like hers, that are woven into the fabric of farm country.
Even as the Trump administration’s immigration raids and an aging population constrict the agricultural workforce, economists project that land fallowing from water shortages could cost up to 50,000 agricultural jobs in the San Joaquin Valley.
Gretchen Newsom, a spokesperson for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Ninth District, said that the union offers apprenticeship programs to help train future electrical workers — including a pilot Spanish language program in San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
But Federico Castillo, a project scientist with UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, said even with training opportunities, it’s an open question whether there will be enough jobs to fill gaps left by lost agriculture.
“There is no reason to believe that farmworkers displaced by solar farms have, in any way, shape, or form, the ability — even when trained — to get into the jobs,” he said.
Wicks’ bill would require renewable energy developers to make community benefits agreements with local governments. Such agreements could include job creation and training programs and funding to benefit workers displaced by water scarcity.
Environmental justice organizations that work with Díaz’s town and others like it have not taken an official position on the bill, but say they want to see enforceable benefits such as reduced electricity bills that are tailored to the local communities.
“There is going to need to be some oversight to make sure that happens,” said Michael Claiborne, an attorney with the environmental justice group Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability. “We shouldn’t just leave existing communities that have long histories behind them with no legitimate future.”
Stuart Woolf, chair of Western Growers — and Ross Franson’s uncle — told CalMatters he’s concerned that piling too many requirements on solar developers undermines bill’s power to help landowners put water-stressed farmland to use. As of the end of August, the association was not listed as supporting the bill, and did not respond to CalMatters’ inquiries.
“I, for one, am a little anxious that if you try to squeeze too much out of these things, then it’s not really going to accomplish the benefit for the grower that wants to do it,” Woolf said in August.
But Díaz said communities like hers will bear the risk. She worries about battery fires near a town with no fire station. And she fears that the landscape where she owns a home and raised her family will never be the same, not if neighboring landowners decide to participate in massive solar and storage projects planned nearby.
For her, the orchards around Cantua Creek are part of her town. They’re where she takes walks, and sees her neighbors and their children biking and playing outside.
“It’s a beautiful thing to be able to walk between the trees. It’s like a garden. We live in an area where there are no parks,” Díaz said. “Where will we walk, what shade will we have, with all the solar panels? … Maybe we’ll have to walk on the edge of the road.”
Alejandra Reyes-Velarde provided translation support.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
