Sun shines on a new era of farming

Where I come from, farming is a way of life for an awful lot of folks. Even for the folks who don’t farm, their lives are set against a backdrop of fields of corn, peanuts, soybeans and hay, along with orchards of peaches and pecans.

Folks farm things we don’t even eat, like pine trees and some hidden-away patches of herbs for medicinal purposes. They even farm catfish — you just have to be careful you don’t get finned while picking them.

High schools are blessed with bountiful crops of Future Farmers and 4-H’ers. Mom-and-pop restaurants and meat-and-two joints have parking lots packed with muddy pickup trucks. If you forgot to pick up the maters your wife asked you to get from the roadside stand on the way home, no need to worry because there’s another one in a hundred yards. Traffic slows for combines in the road, and music stops for the hog report.

City folks from places like Atlanta — a small, foreign country a little north of Macon — marvel at the all the green they see when they take a wrong turn into town. They also wonder what that sound is — it’s called “quiet” — and deeply inhale that fresh country air, which we know as the smell of cow poop and chicken houses. Heaven help the bikers who tailgate that slow-moving trailer loaded up with what they mistakenly believe is dark soil.

Back home and in the hundreds of agricultural hotspots from Florida citrus plantations to the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, folks are used to seeing just about everything associated with farming.

But there are some strange new farms popping up in my old stomping grounds and similar spots. It’s a result of the push toward green energy — which is no longer what Popeye gets from eating a can of spinach.

I’d already seen a solar farm pop up in my hometown, but it was only about 10 acres worth. Last weekend, though, I drove through Taylor County, Ga., and saw hundreds upon hundreds of acres of solar panels. Compared to that, the solar panels back home are a mere solar garden. After researching it, I found out it’s the largest such solar farm east of the Mississippi.

I rolled down the window as I drove past and noticed these solar farms didn’t stink or make a whole lot of noise. Other than taking a little land away from gopher tortoises and ATV riders, it appears to have little negative impact. It’ll provide about 63,000 homes’ worth of power and cut down on dozens of broken bones that begin with the phrase, “Hey, y’all, watch this!” (For you city slickers, that would be country boys on four-wheelers saying that, not gopher tortoises.)

I support an all-of-the-above approach to energy with an ever-increasing focus on renewables. But I always thought those great strides in renewables would come from places where they don’t eat grits or ask about how your “mama’n’dem” are doing. I’m shocked it’s booming in South Georgia.

I’m happy about it, though. Granted, no one will let you borrow their solar farm to do any dove hunting. And no one will ever roll down the windows and say, “Mmm, I think those solar panels are ripe for the pickin’.” Nor will any granny fry up some hoecakes to go with the solar panels she’d been storing since fall in the big freezer on the back porch.

But I’m happy because if clean energy is ever gonna work, it’s gonna take leadership from folks who ain’t afraid to get dirty.

This story was originally published April 23, 2016 at 9:32 PM with the headline "Sun shines on a new era of farming."