Clara Ostrander on her field she plans to lease to a solar company in Maybee, Michigan.
Photographer: Sylvia Jarrus/BloombergClimate Politics
Midwestern Farmers Who Say Yes to Solar Power Face Neighbors’ Wrath
In Michigan, a new law aims to quash not-in-my-backyard local challenges to renewable energy projects. But communities remain bitterly divided.
When Michigan farmer Clara Ostrander heard about the benefits of hosting a solar energy project, she remembered something her father had told her four days before he died: Don’t sell the farm. Keep it in the family.
Skeptical at first, Ostrander ultimately decided that harvesting the sun on most of her 120-acre corn-and-soybeans farm south of Detroit would enable her to someday pass the land to her son.