For more than a century, Dawson Singletary’s family has grown tobacco, peanuts and cotton on a 530-acre farm amid the coastal flatlands of North Carolina. Now he’s making money from a different crop: solar panels.
Singletary has leased 34 acres of his Bladen County farm to Strata Solar LLC for a 7-MW array, part of a growing wave of solar deals that are transforming U.S. farmland and boosting income for farmers.
Farmland has become fertile territory for clean energy, as solar and wind developers in North America, Europe and Asia seek more flat, treeless expanses to build.
