On Friday March 13th, the Senate Agriculture voted out S.323 after stripping out a clause that would have made it virtually impossible to deploy distributed 1-5MW sized solar in Vermont.
The original version of S.323 stated “The siting of a facility … [that precludes] the tilling of soil, seeding, growing, or harvesting of agricultural crops on greater than five acres primary, statewide, or local importance agricultural soils, or reduce future Vermont-based food security or will result in the destruction of forest ecosystems, forest soils and their unique biology, or increased volatilization and release of forest soil carbon on more than five acres shall be considered undue and not in the public good.”
The stated goal of this language was to keep farmland in production yet while this language would have banned solar, it wouldn’t have prevented any other type of development on farmland including parking lots, residential sprawl or commercial development on the very same parcel of farmland.
REV supports the laudable goal of protecting farmland from unwise development but numerous testimony pointed out that commercial development and residential sprawl are the main culprits behind farmland loss.
REV’s testimony highlighted the American Farmland Trust’s research that found:
- From 2016-2023 Vermont lost 19,832 acres of ag land an average of 2,833 acres/yr
- By 2040 Vermont will lose 41,200 acres to urban high development and low density residential development and 1,200 acres to solar development. This 1200 acres represents just 2.4% of all ag land lost to development.
REV’s own research found that since 2023, the Renewable Energy Standard’s in state requirements impacted an average of 140 acres of agricultural soils a year. In 2025 for these solar arrays, the agriculture to solar conversion was:
- 4 acres in Canaan on a corn field
- 30 acres in Lowell on a hay field
- 15 acres in Ludlow on hay fields
- 40 acres in St. Albans on a corn field and fallow fields
- 10 acres on a fallow field on the GlobalFoundries campus
- 5 acres on a fallow hayfield and a smaller area of early successional fallow scrub on the Global Foundries campus
- 4 acres in Vernon with recently planted with corn and forage
This language was stripped out of S.323 in large part thanks to the leadership of Senators Rob Plunkett (D-Bennington), Joe Major (D-Windsor) and Senate Natural Resources and Energy Chair Anne Watson (D-Washington)