USDA
Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins alongside Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, Senator Marsha Blackburn, Senator Bill Hagerty, Representative John Rose, and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden, announced USDA will no longer fund taxpayer dollars for solar panels on productive farmland or allow solar panels manufactured by foreign adversaries to be used in USDA projects. Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available. Within the last 30 years, Tennessee alone has lost over 1.2 million acres of farmland and is expected to lose 2 million acres by 2027. This problem is not just in Tennessee, since 2012, solar panels on farmland nationwide have increased by nearly 50%. That is why the Department is taking action. More
Oh! I see
smellit now! Trump is attacking the farmers now!Harry, you can’t eat electrons. Wait. 🤔
GM – Did you leave the bag of Electrons open again??
grifters, put yo so-lar where the sun don’t shine
I don’t know much of anything about the economics of solar panel “farms” (sound more like “blight” to me). Anyone here is free to correct me, but it would seem that if something is economically viable and can make money on its own, then it shouldn’t need tax-paid subsidies. Further, we are learning more and more each day that many of these kinds of ventures have been subsidized, only to find out there was no real company behind the enterprise and the money has simply vanished into thin air.
AA – From what I have looked into, by the time you get done buying enough solar cells, batteries, inverter, etc. it will take ten years of electricity savings to pay it off and by then the solar cells and batteries are ready to take a hike!
Thanks, Harry! Sounds about right, too. And this is happening also to so-called “wind farms”. The things are falling apart all over the place. Now, apparently, they don’t know how or if the failed parts can be recycled or if they just have to bury them somewhere.
For personal use, the damn battery are cost prohibitive. They have a fairly new wind turbine design out. It doesn’t use a big ass bird killing prop. I thing the call it the petal design. They don’t take up much space and they are affordable. But you still need to store the electricity. And that where things start getting expensive. If they stop subsidizing this crap the prices should drop.
I’ve watch for a few years now a farm field slowly get taken over by row upon row of solar panels. This wouldn’t have happened without those subsidies. I’ve been waiting for a good hailstorm to take the whole array out; it will happen one day. Until then more taxpayer money was being diverted to pay for the dreams of idiots with no connection to the land they are usurping.
Brad – You don’t need batteries if you take the approach of defraying or reducing your electricity costs. You simply reduce commercial power needs and/of feed excess power back into the grid. Of course that doesn’t work too well at night with no wind.
Personally I prefer a system with batteries (power wall) for independence when commercial power is lost, but it just isn’t cost effective yet.
and/of = and/or
Furthermore, the licenses are not for the networks. They are for the local broadcasters so it comes down to a question of how many local broadcast licenses need to be pulled before the networks start cooperating.
Oops – wrong thread
@ 250:dindu
There are a bunch of these ugly solar collector systems near where I live – occupying great farmland. What nobody tells you is each field has a team of groundskeepers who continually trim the weeds around the collector frames using riding mowers, push mowers and string trimmers. I don’t know the cost per acre but I imagine 20 acres would keep one person busy non-stop. I’m sure there are thousands of illegals doing that work right now all across the country.
Harry
I’m toying with the idea of getting off the grid. I live in California where our utility bills are more expensive than normal states average mortgage payment run. A couple just built about a 6 mill home up the hill from us. PG&E wanted about the same amount to run power to their home. (Seems like something you might have wanted to check out before you started construction). Anyway they installed enough solar panels to power their home and at a lot less than PG&E wanted just to run the cables.
@ Bad_Brad MONDAY, 25 AUGUST 2025, 16:22 AT 4:22 PM
Hung out with a family at Omak Stampede a couple weeks ago that is off grid up by Tonasket. They have an old Maytag gasoline engine washing machine (works just as well as it ever did and it’s north of 75 years old) and don’t store any electricity other than a bit to charge their phones at night if there is an emergency.
They have been up there for the ten years we have known them. They live pretty comfortably.