How Agrivoltaics and Solar Grazing Are Creating New Opportunities for Texas Farmers

Texas now leads the nation in utility-scale solar capacity. Solar energy generation in Texas has quadrupled between 2021 and 2025. At the same time, the threats to farmland due to housing and urban encroachment are accelerating. Texas working-land prices surged more than 500% between 1997 and 2022, with most of that increase happening since 2017. Beginning farmers and ranchers face the steepest land-access barriers in a generation, reducing producers’ ability to expand their operations and aspiring farmers or ranchers to enter the sector. These pressures are compounded by the aging agricultural producer base in Texas, where the average age in 2022 was nearly 60 years old.

While solar development and agriculture are often seen as competing for the same acres, compelling opportunities are emerging in which agriculture is designed into solar projects from the start rather than treated as an afterthought, creating an opportunity for win-win solutions. Agrivoltaics, the intentional integration of solar energy and agricultural production on the same land, offers a solution that American Farmland Trust is working to advance.