A farming family talks its county out of a ban — cattle will graze under the solar panels

The Smiths farm some of Iowa's richest soil — 'black gold' — and their plan sounded, to neighbours, like a contradiction: solar panels and a battery on farmland, with cattle grazing underneath the raised arrays. Cherokee County had banned battery storage outright. So the sixth-generation farming family, with a county supervisor, did the slow work of persuasion: experts, safety workshops, and their own fire chief in the room answering the hardest questions. In August the county board overturned the moratorium. The project with Nomad Infrastructure — 30 megawatts of elevated solar plus a 25-megawatt battery, an investment upwards of $80 million — is expected to bring the county an estimated $60,000 to $80,000 a year in new tax revenue, with grass planting hoped for next spring. Farming the sun and farming cattle turn out not to be rivals. Sometimes the convincing just has to be done by people the county already trusts.

SDG 7 · Affordable and clean energy — Mechanism: policy reform