California farm earns 10 times more leasing land for solar than growing wheat

On the Changala family farm in Tulare County, California, a dirt road and a barbed-wire fence separate two very different ways of using the same land. On one side, wheat grows with little irrigation. On the other, rows of solar panels turn sunlight into electricity for thousands of Southern California homes. For Alan Changala, the choice was not sentimental. The solar lease paid about ten times what the dry-farmed wheat could earn.Changala leased 300 acres of his father’s 1,400-acre farm to solar developers at $1,000 per acre, while the wheat operation generated roughly $100 per acre annually, reported The Sacramento Bee. The deal, negotiated at the family kitchen table in 2014, became part of a wider shift across California’s San Joaquin Valley, where farmers facing water shortages and rising costs are looking to solar as a way to keep their businesses viable. Read more about it here, as reported by The Sacramento Bee:Dry farming left little marginThe Changala farm had water available from wells and an irrigation canal, but using it was expensive. Instead, Alan Changala said nearly the entire property was dry-farmed, relying on rainfall rather than irrigation. That approach allowe...