2023-09-16 17:13:57
Solar modules in the Klein Rheide solar park in Schleswig-Holstein Image: dpa
Farmers can earn many times over if they lease their fields to photovoltaic investors. This is good for the energy transition – but it creates new conflicts and raises the question: What should arable land be used for?
If you had asked farmer Bernd Starick five years ago whether he would give up his field for a solar park, he would have refused. Today he sees it differently. “For years there has been increasing uncertainty and cost pressure in agriculture. “You have to think completely new,” he says. Photovoltaic systems in the fields could stabilize businesses economically and ensure long-term predictable income. “That’s what we’re missing.”
Starick is on the board of the Neißetal farmers’ cooperative in Lusatia, an agricultural business in the south of Brandenburg near the Polish border. The farmer has now leased part of the 2,500 hectare area to the Lausitz energy company Leag. This has built a solar park on it. It was not easy for him to take land out of production. But on the corresponding areas – former mining areas with difficult soil quality – he had previously earned nothing from farming for ten years. The rest of his fields grow, among other things, wheat, rye and barley, corn and grasses.
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