wind energy

Solar and wind farms occupy a sliver of rural land — an estimated 424,000 acres in 2020 — but the large majority of renewable energy projects installed in recent years are located on agricultural land. USDA researchers, who looked at land cover three years before and three years after construction of energy projects, found that cropland or pasture-rangeland usually stayed in the same land cover even after the addition of solar or wind development.

A fraction of U.S. farmers, about 3.5 percent, receive payments for oil, gas, and wind energy production on their land, and those payments provide “substantial income,” said a USDA report. With the growth of wind and solar energy, a wider array of farmers could benefit from the payments, now centered in the Great Plains, said the Economic Research Service.

The relative handful of farmers who have signed carbon sequestration contracts is half the size of the group that has leased land for solar electricity production, said Purdue University on Tuesday. Solar leases, which may exceed $1,000 an acre annually, are more lucrative than the rates offered for carbon capture.

Despite his visits to Iowa, President Trump “seems to be out of touch with what really matters out in the countryside,” said Tom Vilsack, agriculture secretary in the Obama era, on Monday. Vilsack was part of a line-up of Iowa Democrats to criticize Trump for his opposition to wind …