Why are farmers so concerned about solar legislation passed in Maryland this year?

The Lime Kiln community solar project in Howard County, pictured after a ribbon cutting ceremony on July 8, 2025. The 3.2 megawatt project was developed by Chaberton Energy, which has said that the state’s new solar law is likely to ease solar development. (Photo by Christine Condon/Maryland Matters)

For some Maryland farmers and rural landowners, the mailers seem to come in habitually, promising thousands of dollars per acre to lease their land so it can become a solar array.

“Lease for Solar, Harvest Profits,” one company writes. “You can help power the future of our country,” writes another.

The letters offer $4,500 per acre, $5,000 or even $7,000, sometimes with lucrative sign-on bonuses, too.

Some farmers worry it’s a pressure that Maryland’s agricultural communities cannot withstand. They fear that thousands of acres of Maryland farmland could soon be producing solar energy, rather than corn, wheat and soybeans — potentially disrupting a delicate agro-economy in places like the Eastern Shore, where it’s built around feeding the poultry industry.

And they think that the law passed by the General Assembly this year — setting uniform standards for solar facilities and limiting counties’ ability to set solar zoning rules — will only make matters worse.

“I got three, four solar invitations yesterday in the mail. I’ve had telephone calls. I’ve had different companies come see me,” said Howard Dean, a Queen Anne’s County farmer, during an interview in late May. “I’m not interested. I want the farmland to stay as it is, and for our families in the future to have this beautiful county — and this Eastern Shore.”

In particular, they worry about a provision in the bill, which sets a ceiling on solar projects at 5% of any one county’s agricultural “priority preservation areas.” But some farmers worry the limit is set far too high.

If you ask the solar industry, farmers’ fears are unfounded.

“We’re not taking over — as an industry — all the farmland,” said John Finnerty, the director of business development for Standard Solar, a Rockville-based solar energy company.

They believe the Maryland bill could ease solar project development in Maryland, in part by undoing restrictive county codes. But plenty of roadblocks still remain. For one thing, they’re watching federal tax incentives for solar projects disappear, thanks to congressional approval of President Donald Trump’s (R) “big, beautiful bill.”

And there are still the logistical challenges: Finding an optimal site with a willing landowner, and — if needed — hooking up to an electric grid clogged with proposals for new power generation.

“There is already natural, technical and practical limitations to where solar can be sited, and those limitations still exist,” said Leah Meredith, director of state affairs in the Mid-Atlantic region for the Solar Energy Industries Association. “But in terms of the speed at which projects can be designed, approved and deployed — and cutting inefficiencies and costs — that’s the value of the legislation.”

The law, named the Renewable Energy Certainty Act, passed Maryland’s legislature as part of a three-bill energy package championed by Democratic leadership, focused on bolstering in-state power generation amid soaring utility bills across the state.

It advanced largely without the backing of Republican legislators, who took to the floor one after another with concerns about how the bill would impact agricultural lands. Democrats fought back, arguing that all property owners have a right to decide what to do with their land — including by welcoming solar.

The issue has united residents of rural areas across the state, who mounted an ill-fated attempt to bring the bill to referendum after it was signed by Gov. Wes Moore (D) — from the Eastern Shore to Montgomery County, which is Maryland’s most populous county, but also hosts plenty of farmland of its own.

Caroline Taylor, executive director of the Montgomery Countryside Alliance, said the issue has prompted farmers sometimes at odds with one another to unite. Eastern Shore farmers are ditching the notion that Montgomery County agriculture is merely a “hobby,” Taylor said, and Montgomery farmers are acknowledging that “voices from well-connected, well-populated, Montgomery County” are often heard first.

“For us to be able to come together and understand each other — and understand the commonalities and the challenges that are somewhat the same — and for us to acknowledge that they’ve been more in the crosshairs than we have been to date, I think has been important,” Taylor said.

A zoning puzzle

Before RECA, developing solar in Maryland felt like something of a minefield, said John Miller, vice president of development at Chaberton Energy, a solar developer also headquartered in Rockville.

Maryland may have 24 jurisdictions , but the list of counties where large-scale projects are likely to succeed dwindles to fewer than 10, Miller said.

To start with, utility-scale solar projects are already less common in Maryland, difficult as they are to execute without massive swaths of available land, Miller said. So the favored option for developers like Chaberton is “community solar,” smaller scale projects under 5 megawatts with a network of local subscribers, who receive credits on their energy bills.

The General Assembly made community solar a permanent option in Maryland in 2023, after seven years as a pilot program, during which time 139 projects were greenlit.

But community solar can only be developed in communities served by Baltimore Gas & Electric, Pepco, Potomac Edison or Delmarva Power, cutting out the Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative, for instance.

Then came the patchwork of local zoning regulations, some of which functioned as “de facto prohibitions,” Miller said.

Anne Arundel, for instance, set a limit requiring rural solar projects to be 10 miles apart, shrinking the available land. Queen Anne’s County created a district for utility-scale solar within a few miles of an existing power transmission line. Montgomery County fenced off certain prime soil types. And the list goes on from there.

By Miller’s count, about seven friendly counties are left over. Meanwhile, Maryland has a climate pollution reduction goal of generating 14.5% of its energy from solar, whether in-state or out of state.

“We have to fit our entire state goal in these seven counties, and that’s where the equitable distribution comes into play,” Miller said. “Now, you’re asking only a small number of counties to carry the entire burden for the entire State.”

He hopes the new law will open the playing field, forcing the restrictive counties to adopt the state’s new rules for solar farms, which set requirements for fencing, forested buffers and more.

“One standard is much easier to navigate than 24 different standards,” said Meredith, of SEIA, the trade association representing about 1,200 member companies.

Dominic Butchko, director of intergovernmental relations at the Maryland Association of Counties, said he starts the story in 2019. That’s when a precedent-setting Washington County court ruling said the Maryland Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities and power plant projects in the state, has the authority to pre-empt county zoning rules for any power project in its purview — essentially any project over 2 megawatts, including solar.

The court ruling granted the PSC “broad authority,” Butchko said. But the PSC seemed to be wielding it on a case-by-case basis, he said. It created something of a gray area.

Now, they all have the same rulebook to follow. There’s some “heartburn” about the General Assembly undoing the work of local governments, Butchko said, but the counties are hurriedly updating their codes to match the legislation.

MACo was initially opposed to the RECA, but reached a compromise with legislators, including the 5% cap.

Where before, solar developers might seek to bring  projects to the PSC, by making them more sizable, now they may prefer to keep projects below the PSC’s threshold and take it up with local government, with the promise of a potentially shorter review, and a uniform set of standards from place to place, Miller said.

“The state process is great, right? But it’s the state, and it’s long and it’s arduous and it’s expensive,” Miller said. “If we can go to the county and have a reasonable, understandable framework in front of us, we are more incentivized to keep the projects going through the county.”

There may still be battles yet to come, however, Miller said.

“I’m hearing about counties adding some more on to it, like incorporating it into their ordinance, but taking the RECA standards and saying: And you also have to do this,” Miller said. “So, I think there’s going to be a little bit of growing pain, but ultimately, I’m seeing more and more counties starting to integrate the policies.”

Butchko said there is a “high likelihood” of a “fix-it” bill moving through the General Assembly next year to tinker with RECA.

MACo, for its part, would like to see the language on “priority preservation areas” change, letting the handful of counties that didn’t previously have such areas designate acreage and be included in the solar cap. But legislators resisted similar amendments during this past session.

“I would be shocked if we’re not back in 2026 with something very small,” Butchko said. “We don’t want to rehash stuff. This was a good faith effort by everybody.”

‘It means more to us’

One by one, the farmers trickled into the cafeteria at the Queen Anne’s County 4-H Park on a rainy May afternoon. They came — nine in all — solely because they heard a journalist wanted to talk about solar.

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Bobby Hutchison, who grows corn, soybeans, wheat, barley and vegetables on his farms in Talbot and Caroline counties, said he’s driven by his reverence for the land.

“My grandfather, my father, four brothers, myself, and son and nephew. We’ve got a lot invested in that land. It means more to us than what a normal person would think,” he said.

The thought of beloved farmland becoming rows upon rows of metal panels tilted skyward, marring the largely rural landscape of the Eastern Shore, is more than just unsettling, the farmers said. Why not rooftops? Or parking lots?

But solar developers are looking for something more: Miles of flat land with minimal flood risk, where hooking into the power grid is possible.

They’re missing the bigger picture, farmers argue. A significant chunk of the grains grown on the Eastern Shore head to the poultry houses to feed chickens for Perdue, Mountaire and the like. If farm fields are taken out of production, and these companies aren’t able to obtain as much chicken feed locally, they could head elsewhere.

“It would be a sea change if poultry ever left the Eastern Shore,” said Jamie Raley, president of the Maryland Farm Bureau.

He worries that a loss of available agricultural acreage to solar development could also make it more difficult for young farmers to enter the industry, stymieing its growth further.

“We respect people’s private property rights — let them do what they want to do. But we still continue to communicate and remind folks that we have to preserve our farms for the next generation,” Raley said.

Mark Sultenfuss, who farms just outside of Centreville, acknowledges a poultry industry departure may still be years away.

“That’s probably not going to happen in five years, but it’s going to happen to the next generation,” said Sultenfuss, whose daughter traveled to Annapolis this year to be a legislative page. “I don’t want the next generation saying: ‘Why didn’t they do more? Why did they leave the gate open for this to happen?’”

Farmers also doubt claims from the solar industry that land could return to farming after spending decades as a solar farm. Some said they’ve seen solar companies remove natural topsoil, with its unique balance of nutrients and microorganisms, to install their panels, and leave it in a pile elsewhere on the land.

“No matter which way you want to believe it happened, it happened either [by] a glacier or God, and that’s the way it was laid out. And when you improperly move topsoils, you can never put them back the way they were,” said Matthew Jones, a Caroline County grain farmer.

Finnerty of Standard Solar said that removing topsoil is no longer a common practice in the industry.

“There may have been some projects within the industry that had done that, and it didn’t really prove out to be a good thing,” Finnerty said.

The solar debacle has left farmers feeling scorned by Annapolis.

“We’re very tired of the government in the state … our delegates, senators, whoever — a majority of them will not listen to the public the way they should, and they just take it on their own self to vote how they think,” Dean said.

Jay Falstad, a founder of Farmers Alliance for Rural Maryland, or FARM, led an unsuccessful petition drive to bring RECA to the ballot, after Moore signed it into law during his last signing session of the year. He said he was inspired by the determination of farmers, who met up with him at locations around the Eastern Shore during his roughly ten-day sprint to collect as many signatures as possible.

“I’ve sat around their kitchen table. I’ve heard their stories,” Falstad said. “They’re not doing it for the money. They’re doing it for the love of what agriculture represents. And it would be nice for our policymakers to also sit around those kitchen tables.”

Though a vocal opposition movement has developed, there are still rural landowners who are choosing solar.

Craig Crawmer and his wife, Jo-Ann Middleton — whose farmland in Howard County’s Fulton became the Lime Kiln Community Solar Project — had a plot of land that they were leasing to a farmer, who was growing hay.

“People kept asking us to develop. And to do so, there would be about 11 properties in there,” Crawmer said. “We decided: ‘Let’s look at other alternatives.’”

That’s when Crawmer received a flyer in the mail, urging him to consider solar panels. Maybe, he thought, this could be the best of both worlds, allowing the couple to bring in more income, but protecting the surrounding area from the pressures of adding more residences.

“It’s a lot more profitable,” he said. “We were probably breaking even before, and we’re substantially making a lot more revenue now.”

In early July, Crawmer watched as officials from Chaberton Energy cut the ribbon on the project, officially electrifying 13 acres worth of solar panels on his land, bordered by a tract of woods on one side and a newly planted buffer of young pine trees on the other.

“We know for at least the next 20 years, this is what we’re going to have,” Crawmer said. “And it benefits everyone, really.”