The Moos Room™

[music]
Joe Armstrong: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. OG3 is here and we have a guest. It's another connection to the Dietzel family, Boss Lake Farm LLC in Iowa. Get some cheese, visit the website.
Emily: Buy their cheese.
Joe Armstrong: So good. Joe Lawrence is with us. Joe is from Cornell Extension. He's an extension associate there where he specializes in forage management. We're not talking about forage today, not really, which is crazy but thank you for being here, Joe.
Joe Lawrence: Yes, thanks for having me.
Joe Armstrong: Joe, give us a little bit of background on how you got into our topic today of land developments and land planning.
Emily: Joe, [crosstalk]--
Joe Armstrong: I'll get there. I'll get there. [laughs] Just, I want to get a little background first.
Joe: The county I live in, in the northern part of New York, I'm involved in some volunteer work with economic development. We started being approached the last few years about solar development based on some initiatives from New York State to increase renewable energy and so that topic and the idea of putting solar panels on agricultural land and the impact that was going to have on Ag industry overlapped with my extension job. I got interested in the topic and started trying to put some numbers to what kind of impact this might have for us.
Joe Armstrong: That's the topic today. We're going to be talking about land development, land planning, some of the other things that go along with how you figure out, is that a good idea? Is it a bad idea? Are we getting too far ahead of ourselves? That kind of thing. Before we get into the topic, we have our two questions that we ask every guest. Emily, take it away.
Emily: Yay, the super secret questions. I don't know which one to do first, but I'm just going to go for it. I should preface this by saying Bradley and Joe will tell you there is a right answer to these questions and I'm here to tell you they're liars. First question is, Joe, what is your favorite breed of beef cattle?
Joe: Beef cattle, I might get kicked off the podcast for saying this, but I already told Joe that I'm not much of a cow guy. I'm more of a crops guy, but I have to say, even though these aren't probably a real popular production animal as we had a dairy farm growing up and we had a couple of Scottish Highlanders as pets. They hold a special place to me, even though they're probably not the most desired beef breed.
Joe Armstrong: You're not the first person to say it.
Emily: I was going to say, we have gotten that answer before.
Joe Armstrong: Absolutely. It's a popular answer when I talk to people not on the podcast, but we really selectively choose who's on the podcast because we need to make sure the totals stay correct for Bradley and I. With that, the totals on the beef side, Angus at eight, Hereford at six, Black Baldy at four, Belted Galloway at two, Scottish Highlander now at two, and then all with one, Brahman, Stabilizer, Gelbvieh, Chianina, Charolais, Simmental, Nelore, Jersey, and Normande.
Emily: Next question, Joe, you may have guessed it. What is your favorite breed of dairy cattle?
Joe: Again, going back to the family farm, I'd probably just have to be boring here and say Holstein.
Bradley: I'd agree. That is just boring.
[laughter]
Joe: I will say the last few years, my dad milked cows before he retired. We rotational grazed and he started getting into some creative mixes as he pursued the grazing side of things. We ended up with some interesting animals on the farm towards the end there, but it was all based in a Holstein background.
Joe Armstrong: That's disappointing. The correct answer is Jersey, if you were wondering.
Emily: They're wrong. Holstein is a wonderful answer.
Joe Armstrong: All right, totals there. Holstein's at 12 now, unfortunately. Jersey's at nine, Brown Swiss at five, Montb�liarde at three, Dutch Belted at two, and Normande at two. All right, that's the totals. Those are important questions. Let's get back into the topic. Topic is land development, land use planning, mostly talking about solar farms and things like that today. At least when I was in practice, I started seeing them everywhere.
What brought Joe to the podcast, just for everyone a little background, is that Joe emailed me after listening to one of our early episodes. I think it was Episode 11. It was way back about a year ago, maybe more. We had briefly talked about on that podcast, is it the right thing to do? Why are we taking agricultural land and putting up solar farms and taking that away from pasture or corn ground or anything else? Joe was emailing because he had also had similar thoughts and had written an article about, is it the right thing to do?
The first question for me is, how do you even go about making that decision? I know that I'm probably biased that I'd love to see everything stay agricultural land if I had my option, but how do you know whether or not it's the right decision?
Joe: Yes. There's two answers to me because I think it's important to acknowledge the landowner side of this and certainly these renewable energy projects can be pretty lucrative to a landowner. If you're talking to a struggling farmer, setting aside a chunk of land and leasing it for something like this could certainly have significant financial benefits to the farm. I think that's important to recognize, too but on the flip side, when you look at the bigger picture of what agricultural contributes to the economy, I focused in on dairy. New York's pretty heavy dairy state and the county I live in is very heavy in dairy.
There's been a couple of different attempts over the years to quantify the economic impact of milk production. There's a study from Cornell that developed an economic multiplier of $2.29 circulated in the local economy for every $1 of gross milk sales so I used that as a starting point. That gives you an idea of the economic activity of one dairy cow. If you make some assumptions about her milk production and you know what the milk price is, you can figure out, all right, how much activity does she generate?
Then I took it a step further and tried to put it on an acreage basis by saying on our prime farmland, it takes about 2 acres to support a cow and her replacement. The numbers I used in the 2020 Cornell Dairy Farm Business Summary, I came out at the economic impact of $10,900 per cow, or if we do that over 2 acres, $5,400 per acre of economic activity for every cow that's supported in any area.
I made the argument that if we were going to convert any acre out of agriculture, we could look at that $5,400 value or adjust it accordingly for different quality land, soil types, and stuff and say, "Will this new use of the land generate more than $5,400 an acre in economic activity in the community?" That's where I started and then the focus has been solar. That's a hot topic right now, but to me, you could use that same logic for any land use conversion.
Joe Armstrong: That makes sense, because for every dollar going in, how many dollars come out of the dairy industry? How many jobs are provided by the dairy industry? It's an amazing number. It's a massive industry that we can't afford to diminish a whole lot because of how many jobs and how much it stimulates the economy. Seeing those numbers and seeing that-- personally, when I drive by I get this terrible gut feeling that I just saw, okay, there's this land that's now being used for something that's not agriculture, that very well could have benefited a lot of people.
I definitely understand the argument on the personal landowner side for sure. That's money in your pocket and just my question is always, is this the right way to do it? I like that you're using the numbers and you go straight to the numbers to figure out if that's the right way to go.
Joe: That's the thing that's really missing with a lot of this land use stuff. I'm sure somebody's looked at economic output or the financial aspects of it, probably not farmers or not others but that's what's missing in all of this is nobody ever tends to think about it from an economic standpoint and an economic driver. There's lots of other benefits that we think about environmental benefits, but nobody's thinking about it from also that economic advantage.
Joe Armstrong: Yes. We've talked about this in the past, too, and maybe just like a comment on the record but we talk about this, is that it feels like we're just rushing everything and saying, "Okay, there's money to be made. Let's do it." I totally understand that. I can't argue with that motivation but are we hampering ourselves down the road and we are worried about having enough agricultural land feeding this country and the world. Are we getting ahead of ourselves? Are we pushing it a little fast?
Joe: I'll start by saying I do support renewable energy in general, for sure. I don't want to come across as being negative, but I do think that we could be more strategic in planning this out. Right now there's almost a bit of a land rush because of the incentives out there, because of the goals set by different states and federally to move to renewable energy, which I'm all for, but it's created a bit of a land rush.
Unfortunately, our prime agricultural soils are also prime sites for something like solar because they're already clear, they're generally relatively flat land. It's the low-hanging fruit. It's the easy place to start, but I do fear that it's going to come back to bite us. Perhaps with the second generation of solar, we'll be much more prepared to incorporate more land uses and think more strategically, but I do think we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit right now.
Joe Armstrong: That's the feeling I get and like Joe said-- and I don't want to speak for Brad and Emily, but I think most of us are in favor of renewable energy. We just want it to be done in a strategic way. Don't think about today, but think 15, 20, 30 years down the road so that we're being as efficient as we can when we know that land and prime agricultural land is going to be, and is already at a premium. That's the hesitation, not that it's renewable energy, but that we might not be doing it as strategically as possible.
Before we get into the way to merge these things together, okay, let's talk about just alternatives to solar for a second. Especially when we're talking about wind and how we can use that, how that plays in, and what that looks like on the land use side because I think it's significantly different than the solar side.
Joe: Yes, that's a really good point. Actually, coincidentally, the county I live in hosts the largest wind farm that I'm aware of east of the Mississippi River. I've used that as a contrast because it has been interesting. Wind farms get some negative reactions too. There's a bit of that not in my backyard type attitude. You can see them from almost all vantage points of the county. They stick out for sure. They're quite tall but when we think about farming around those towers, you have the base of the tower and the access road is essentially what gets developed and you can continue to farm around them.
Based on some numbers I found, when you consider the footprint of a wind farm, it's about 1% to 2% of the land that actually is getting developed and it's no longer usable for agriculture. The math I did using the local project and the numbers I was comfortable with, we were looking at approximately 0.65 acres per megawatt produced of land being taken up by the wind towers and the other infrastructure. In contrast, most of the estimates that I found for solar is 5 to 7 acres per megawatt. It's about a 9-fold difference in the amount of acres that are actually inaccessible for production per megawatt.
Emily: Joe, I'm curious, have you also looked into or do you know the general cost comparison between putting up a wind turbine versus putting up solar panel?
Joe: No, sorry, I can't share or I don't have great numbers on that, and partially because when I have tried to look it up, the efficiencies vary so much depending on where you are in the country. A lot of people ask me like, "New York State, it's cloudy and snowy most of the time, will the solar even makes sense?" With the efficiency of the technology, the numbers do show that it does make some sense, but certainly, it's not as efficient as it would be in the plains or something like that. I haven't been able to nail that down real well because it's very geographically dependent.
Joe Armstrong: Bradley, you have, it's two turbines now up at Morris that you work around in your system. To me, it makes sense. They are loud, I'll tell you that. We've tried to record some stuff and make some videos underneath those wind turbines. They're loud, but other than that, they seem like they're not all that hard to work around.
Bradley: No, they're not at all. Not at all. Yes, sometimes, if you're outside, but I don't even really notice it anymore. I think once you're there and get used to it, you don't really notice the noise anymore unless it's really windy out and you're standing right underneath it.
Joe Armstrong: Not much else to say about it. They're not really in the way.
Bradley: Right, right. They're not in the way. If we're talking from a farmer perspective or from a land use perspective, those are power companies putting large wind farms up and stuff because those things are expensive. There are millions of dollars per one and they generate a lot of power, megawatts of power. Whereas solar is a little bit different, you need a lot of solar to compete with a 1-megawatt wind turbine. It would take a lot of land of solar panels to compete with a wind turbine. It just depends on where you're at in the country, whether the sun's going to shine, whether the wind's going to blow. There's just a lot of factors that go around with where those things are going to be at in the US.
Joe Armstrong: Joe, the thing that I think about with solar all the time is, okay, the reason we're using agricultural land is that it's relatively flat. It's already in prime locations for solar and it's just easy to access. I feel like we have all these other flat surfaces in our world that are not agricultural land that we're just not taking advantage of. You see solar on the roofs of barns all the time to help supplement the energy for that farm. Why does it have to be agricultural land? Is it just that much easier to get access as opposed to the roof of all these corporate buildings and/or grocery stores, Walmart's? Those are also flat areas that have no trees around them that could also be utilized, so why do we see it really encroaching on the agriculture side?
Joe: The two points that I've come back around to are, one, it is really simply low-hanging fruit. It's pretty easy. Two is scale, at least in our area, New York State has two programs. One is for smaller projects, which are usually in the neighborhood of 15 to 25 acres and then there's some large-scale projects, which could be hundreds or even thousands of acres. While I totally agree with you on all these roof surfaces and stuff, and some of these buildings are quite large, you're still maybe only talking a couple of acres of roof surface. You need quite a patchwork of those to come up with the 20 or 200 contiguous acres of farmland that can fairly easily come by in many agricultural areas.
Joe Armstrong: Now we have to talk about combining things. The compromise, what Bradley's been working on, finding ways to have solar panels be used in multiple ways and/or just be out of the way enough for agriculture to still happen. That's what we need to talk about is that I think this is probably one of our solutions. That's what gets me so fired up when I see some of these solar farms going up is that there is an opportunity to still use some of that land or maybe even most of that land as agricultural land or at least pasture if we were thinking far enough ahead. Joe, can you walk me through if we were going to do that, how would we have to set it up so that we could use this for both purposes?
Joe: I think to me the two questions we have to ask ourselves are, are the products we're going to get if we turn this agrovoltaics, are the products we're generating, can they produce the same revenue? No disrespect to sheep, but there's a fairly limited market to my knowledge unless we really develop that industry. While we could graze a lot of sheep under solar and we have plenty of talented farmers who could manage that, my question is what's the market of the product and how does that compare to what the dairy was generating in the economic activity per acre?
I know there's also been some work on vegetable production under them. A lot of it comes back to just trying to get agreements in place with the companies, other developers on, I think Emily already mentioned it, the height of the panels above the ground, the spacing. They do a lot of calculations of the slope of the panels and how far apart the rows of panels are to maximize the solar energy they're going to get from that footprint.
If they have to make compromises and put the panels further apart to accommodate agricultural activities, I think could be very well justified but we also have to recognize that it can potentially decrease the efficiency of the project for them. I just like to see more numbers on the markets side of it, honestly, because I tend to feel like we have plenty of talented farmers and extension folks and whatnot that can figure out how to make these systems work. We just need to make sure the products we're producing under the panels actually are marketable and can lead to a profitable farm.
Joe Armstrong: Yes, that's a good thought. I think that it brings up a good point. This used to be dairy land or it used to be beef land and you can't then raise sheep and call it equivalent, exactly the same thing and especially when we're talking about the economy. I'm really excited about some of the stuff that Brad's doing with the shade and being able to show that the solar panels are not only generating-- there's a benefit in both ways. They're generating power, but they're also helping the cows. Brad, I know we covered it in a past episode, but you guys are actually going to dig into it a little further, right?
Bradley: Yes. We're going to do some more exploring with that, looking at long-term effects of agrivoltaics, and also look at the wintertime. In northern New York in the upper Midwest, we have winter and can we use them as windbreaks? There's some new technology called bifacial solar panels. We won't get into all that where we can maybe utilize to get solar on both sides and use them as windbreak and out in the pasture. We're going to look at that.
I also think that we can get to the point where we can start growing crops under them. There's some exploring in Europe about doing that where can you grow small grains or can you grow corn if you raise them high enough above the ground to get a combine under? You can generate energy and still grow corn or soybeans or whatever crop that you want. I think there's lots of opportunity. We talk about land use, there's double land use. You can use it for solar and still farm it.
Joe Armstrong: Well, and I think that something that I've read recently, and this might be even be something one of your grad students said, Bradley, that they're in Europe some of the research is saying that it might actually benefit the crops growing underneath the solar panels because they aren't getting blistered by the sun 24/7 necessarily so it might actually be beneficial to the crops.
Bradley: That's right. I think there may be some benefits there to looking at that and exploring that.
Joe Armstrong: Not to be a downer or anything, and I feel like we're all doing a very good job of being an advocate right now, really gung ho for the agriculture industry. I think there is a point too, and Joe, I think you can talk to this, that there is some land that probably is better off as a solar farm, and there's not really a whole lot of argument there for some pieces of land.
Joe: Yes, for sure. I threw out that example of two acres to support a cow and her replacement. We certainly have some marginal land that's still used for dairy production where it can take upwards of four plus acres per cow to support that farm. When we get into those scenarios, in terms of the regional or community economics, it starts to be a wash or even can start to shift towards the solar actually generating more per acre than the cows can, if it's going to take you 4 or 5 acres per cow.
Then my other argument would be there's a higher environmental impact to using that land to support cows as well because we're running off over a lot more land for the same basically output on the milk side. So I do think that needs to be talked about. Again, it goes back to respecting the landowners too and if that's the land that's been in their family for several generations and they've made it work even though they probably know it's not the best quality land, then they have their interests there too but from a community economic standpoint, you can certainly start to make the argument that solar could actually be more advantageous for those locations.
Bradley: If you think about it from a practical standpoint, in New York, what are you seeing out there today? Are you seeing solar go up for grazing or other land use in an agricultural perspective? What's the landscape look like in New York?
Joe: Unfortunately, we're seeing very little of that right now. Outside of Cornell University actually has some solar panels on their land and we have a few researchers working with some agrovoltaics stuff, but in a commercial setting, unfortunately, we're just not seeing where the planning is being done or the developers are being forced to make accommodations to allow for that. I have talked to some towns and counties where they are looking at changing their zoning laws to make sure companies will accommodate that, but we haven't seen much of it yet.
We have a few companies where they're taking sheep around to different projects and contracting with the developers basically for vegetation control under the panels but I wouldn't call it a real robust agricultural production model. I think it's more of a service-oriented model where the developer is utilizing that for vegetation control instead of hiring someone with a lawn mower and a weed eater. [chuckles]
Joe Armstrong: That makes sense. I think the areas that I get most excited about for this, and especially agrovoltaics are those areas where it is kind of marginal land maybe marginal land on the dairy side, a lot of those marginal land areas where we are seeing maybe production isn't great for the dairy animal. Those are wonderful places that grow grass and that's where I bring in my beef producers.
There's a lot of areas of the country short on pasture, and New York and Minnesota are very similar states outside of New York City. I feel like that's probably an issue up there as well because marginal land is wonderful for grass, wonderful for grazing beef cows. I feel like there's still a way to incorporate cattle, at least, like I've said before, a lot of people forget that dairy and beef animals are the same species but yes, I think that's a wonderful place where I would love to see agrovoltaics because we also need shade for those animals. Like Bradley talked about windbreaks if they're going to be out there in the winter as well.
Joe: I think that's a great point. This is a bit of a tangent, but several years ago there was some work done here in New York at Cornell where a graduate student looked at your food footprint and having beef and meat proteins in your diet versus a vegetarian diet. One of the findings of that study was that beef could be, or meat in your diet can really be environmental, especially if you're utilizing marginal lands that aren't suited for crops that can be directly consumed by humans.
If we take that sort of approach and we say, "All right, we have these marginal lands where we can grow grass really well and cows can do a great job of converting that into the protein for humans, and then we combine the renewable energy part on top of that." I totally agree there's a lot of cool potential there. Again, it goes back to planning and not getting the cart ahead of the horse in terms of these projects being built before we have that kind of more strategically planned out.
Joe Armstrong: I don't know if we can end on a better note than that. We haven't really given you an answer. I don't know if there are right answers to a lot of these questions, but we've given you lots of things to think about. We really appreciate you being here, Joe, nice ahead. Talk to another extension person. We love talking to extension people in other states and making those connections, so thanks for being here.
Joe: Yes, thank you. I kind of feel the same way about the article that I wrote. It doesn't really give answers, but just tries to frame the discussion.
Joe Armstrong: With that, I think we're going to wrap it. Joe did write an article about this exact topic that we're talking about today. We will include that in the show notes, so look for that. We'll also include it wherever we post anything about it on social media as well so find that article. Wonderful, wonderful read. If you have comments, questions, scathing rebuttals about today's episode, please email themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe Armstrong: Please check out our website extension.umn.edu. Find us on Twitter @umnnewsroom and @umnfarmsafety. With that, we'll cut the plugs. Thank you for listening this week, everybody. We will catch you next week.
Emily: Goodbye.
[cow moos]
[00:29:33] [END OF AUDIO]

1