Sustainable Springfield

That rule was never really about astronomy. It was about the animals losing their instructions. Migratory birds navigate by starlight and the soft glow of the moon — artificial light punches holes in that map. Moths spiral toward bulbs instead of pollinating at night, burning through their energy on loops that lead nowhere. Predators that hunt by darkness find their timing thrown off because the darkness keeps shrinking. Colorado's full-cutoff standard forces each fixture above a certain brightness to aim all of its light downward — nothing allowed to bleed upward past the horizontal line. It sounds like a small technical detail. But light is not neutral. A single parking lot lamp spills far enough to pull insects away from surrounding plants, break a bird's migratory heading, and shift which predator catches which prey that night. Multiply that by every state-funded fixture installed across two decades. The disruption is not dramatic. It is quiet and cumulative — the way a river changes course not from one flood but from a thousand unremarkable nights. Darkness is not empty. It is occupied. [3M2XP]

A common argument I hear is that solar is “taking up food-producing land.”

But here’s a bigger question worth asking:

How much of our agricultural landscape is actually producing food?

Drive through almost any farming community, and you’ll see road ditches, fencrows, woodlots, wet spots, highly erodible ground, rocky hillsides, pastures, hay fields, and acres enrolled in conservation programs like CRP.

None of those are producing sweet corn, soybeans, wheat, cattle, lamb, chicken, or whatever else for your dinner table.

Even with a single field, productivity varies enormously. Some acres consistently produce excellent crops. Others lose money, year after year, because of poor soils, drought, flooding, or difficult field conditions.

That’s why farmers need to be trusted to make their own decisions about the different pieces of their land.

It’s also why the assumption that every acre under solar was previously producing “the maximum amount of food possible” simply isn’t true.

And while we’re talking about land use, it’s worth remembering that millions of acres of U.S. farmland are devoted to crops that don’t become food at all.

Corn grown for ethanol is an obvious example, comprising roughly 30 million acres of American farmland. A full-scale deployment of solar (which isn’t necessary if we’re going to maintain a diversified grid) would at most take only 6 million acres, per the DOE.

Aside from ethanol, other acres grow feed for livestock, fiber, seed, or bio-based products. That’s not wrong. Farmers should grow whatever they want, and whatever helps them make a living.

But the argument here is that agriculture isn’t just a matter of producing food for people. It’s a matter of producing. Farmers should have the option of producing energy, through solar panels, on their properties if they choose to, just like they should have the option of growing ethanol corn if they want to.

None of this means every solar project belongs everywhere. It doesn’t. It also doesn't mean we’re ignoring zoning or environmental regulation.

But if we’re going to have conversations about land use and pin our concerns back on the loss of farmland, let’s all come to the table with a very clear idea of how farmland is actually used, not how we imagine it’s used.

Growing food is important. But so, too, is making the best long-term use of every acre we have.