EATING SOLAR PANELS

            A wonderful young homesteading couple from Indiana visited us over the weekend with a first person disconcerting story.

            Two weeks after moving into their dream homestead on 40 acres, they learned that the surrounding 3,200 acres and another 5,000 acres just down the road were leased for solar farms.  Upon learning about this, they immediately asked the solar company if it would buy their land, but of course these outfits don’t buy land; they just lease it.

            After promising to not pound the 12 ft. pedestals (they go 8 feet in the ground) during off-hours, the very first week the pounding went on over Saturday and until midnight.  Now that the panels are up and functioning, all wildlife is gone.  It’s a completely sterile landscape.

            The solar company brought in sheep to mow and keep things tidy.  But the sheep gnawed the electric wires.  Now the company is trying to get rid of the sheep, which are not being cared for and turning into walking skeletons.

            The lease contracts are in 10-year increments and when they terminate, the landowner is responsible for the panel cleanup.  Materials in the panels turn them into hazardous material.  The solar company bears no responsibility for panels if it terminates the lease.

            Folks, this is prime Indiana farmland.  Regardless of whether this land is being farmed well or not, this is an historic lock-up of valuable food-producing land.  The last time I was in New Jersey everywhere I looked rich farmland was being covered with solar panels.

            We are sowing a wind that is going to release a whirlwind. For the love of Pete, what is our culture thinking when we solar panel over hundreds of thousands of prime soil with solar panels?  Are we planning to eat them sometime?  They destroy life, immerse the neighborhood in Electromagnetic Frequencies, require massive new mines, and offer a decommissioning problem that could easily bankrupt all these landowners eventually.  For sure, they are gutting and destroying farming communities.

            I’ve been excited about the aging American farmer and all the land that will become available to a new generation of homesteaders and composters, but if it all gets turned into solar panels instead, we haven’t made progress.  You can’t eat electricity.  Perhaps a better approach to our energy issues would be to eliminate all video games, all social media, all crypto-mining and all Artificial Intelligence, thereby reducing our energy needs to pre-1950s levels.

            As bad as all this is, probably the worst part of it is that none of this would make sense without government subsidies with worthless money, inflation, and increasing indebtedness to future generations.  On the face, it’s absurd.  Dig deeper, and it’s diabolical.  If solar panels are the solution, why not put them on roof tops?  

            What would you do if your homestead were suddenly surrounded by 8,000 acres of solar farm?