Column: California farmers are low on water. Why not help them go solar?

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1. Hey all, I hope you’ll read my latest L.A. Times column and let me know what you think! Here’s how it starts:

   >*It sounds like a climate solution everyone should be able to support: Let’s make it easier and cheaper for farmers with dwindling water supplies to convert their lands from crop production to solar energy generation, if that’s what those farmers want.*

   >*So what’s stopping such a bill from sailing through the California Legislature?*

   >*“Change can be difficult,” said Shannon Eddy, executive director of the Large-scale Solar Assn.*

   >*Tell me about it.*

   >*Even as coal, oil and gas combustion fuel an ever-deadlier rise in global temperatures, finding a spot to build a solar or wind farm where no one will object is damn near impossible. Some concerns are legitimate, such as safeguarding wildlife habitat and sacred Indigenous sites. Others, not so much. Take, for example, false claims that living near renewable energy projects can cause health problems — claims that have been spread by groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry, and by former President Trump.*

   >*The misinformation campaigns, unfortunately, aren’t going anywhere.*

   >*But in the American West — where pristine landscapes are treasured, and dry times are getting drier with climate change — the region’s abundant agricultural lands seem like a great place to put solar panels while minimizing environmental conflicts.*

   >*In California in particular, groundwater levels have fallen dramatically after decades of overpumping, especially by Central Valley farmers. Global warming, meanwhile, is sapping the river flows that also supply large amounts of water to agribusinesses.*

   >*So it’s no surprise that a growing number of farmers are converting some of their fields to solar.*

   >*“In one case we’re growing an agricultural product that has value, and in another case we’re producing electrons that have value,” Steven Swartz, an executive at Wonderful Co., the company owned by billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, told me in 2019.*

   >*For some farmers, though, there’s a financial obstacle: the Williamson Act.*

   Again, I hope you’ll read the whole column and let me know what you think. If you’re interested, you can sign up to get my twice-weekly Boiling Point newsletters in your inbox here: [latimes.com/boilingpoint](http://latimes.com/boilingpoint)