The USDA, EPA, and SBA are demanding answers from Gov. Kathy Hochul after New York quietly rewrote its own soil standards to fast-track industrial solar projects on some of the nation's most productive farmland.
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, EPA Chief Lee Zeldin, and country singer John Rich, recently appointed as the USDA's Special Envoy for American Landowners, co-signed a letter to Hochul's administration challenging the state's approval of 18 solar complexes across upstate New York. The letter set a July 26 deadline for the governor's office to respond, the New York Post reported. As of publication, Hochul's office had not replied.
The core dispute centers on a move New York made in 2020, when the state's energy authority, NYSERDA, replaced the USDA's nationally recognized "Prime Farmland" soil classification with its own system called "Mineral Soil Groups 1-4." The swap let state officials reclassify land that the federal government considers prime agricultural ground, and approve solar development on it under far more permissive standards.
The numbers tell the story. At the proposed Mill Point Solar complex in Montgomery County, a 2,600-acre, 250-megawatt project west of Albany in one of the state's poorest areas, the USDA's classification system identified more than 82 percent of the affected land as prime farmland or its equivalent. New York's system counted just 11 percent. On some parcels, the USDA considers the acreage entirely prime. New York classifies less than 5 percent, or none at all, as prime.
Zeldin, a former congressman from Long Island, did not hold back. He told the Post that the letter aims to get "answers from Hochul about her heavy-handed steamrolling over America's most productive farmland."
He went further in a separate statement:
"Nothing is more insulting to hardworking New Yorkers than Albany politicians who think they know it all and enthusiastically override local control and railroad local communities."
Zeldin added that Hochul's administration was forcing upstate communities to absorb the burden of industrial-scale solar farms on agricultural land, a pattern he called "on-brand elitism that New Yorkers have grown to despise." The EPA is also separately raising alarms about the long-term waste crisis posed by solar panels, which contain toxic metals including lead, cadmium, and arsenic and carry an estimated lifespan of roughly 15 years.
The scale of what New York is building, and what it is displacing, is staggering even before the waste question. The Cider Solar Farm in Genesee County covers 4,000 acres, roughly 6.25 square miles, for 500 megawatts of capacity. The Ridge View Solar Farm in Niagara County spans 2,000 acres. Montgomery County alone faces 18,000 acres of planned solar complexes, an area larger than Manhattan and more than 7 percent of the county's total land.
A Post analysis found that generating the same electricity output as one typical natural gas facility, which sits on about 25 acres and powers 250,000 homes, would require roughly 24,000 acres of solar panels in upstate New York. That is approximately the footprint of Paris, France.
SBA Chief Kelly Loeffler told the Post in an exclusive interview that the state's solar expansion amounts to government-backed regulatory pressure against small farmers and rural businesses. New York has 2.5 million small businesses, she said, employing nearly half the state's population, and the state apparatus is working against them in favor of 18 large solar farms that will only raise operating costs.
"These are farmers operating a small business designed to feed, fuel and clothe America. And the climate lobby is exerting pressure through these regulatory bodies to really have regulatory arbitrage against small businesses."
Loeffler called the dynamic "an example of big government overreach" and "the promise of socialism." She pointed to a broader national trend, claiming that America became a net importer of food during the Biden administration "because of policy that disrespects agriculture and tries to replace agriculture with climate activism." That pattern of federal overreach under the prior administration has drawn scrutiny in other policy areas as well.
The foreign ownership of many solar contractors sharpens the criticism. Boralex is based in Canada. EDF Renewables is French. Cypress Creek Renewables is tied to South Korea. These companies hold multibillion-dollar contracts to build on land the USDA classifies as some of America's best cropland, while local residents say they were blocked from meaningful participation in project decisions, offered only what they described as performative town hall meetings.
The federal letter zeroes in on the 2020 classification change as the mechanism that made all of this possible. Before that year, New York's renewable energy programs used the same USDA Prime Farmland standard that the rest of the country relies on. NYSERDA's quiet substitution of the Mineral Soil Groups system, a first-in-the-nation move, according to the Post, created a parallel set of rules under which vast stretches of federally recognized prime farmland simply stopped counting as prime.
The result: projects that might have faced federal scrutiny, or at least triggered protections for high-value agricultural land, sailed through state review. The USDA retains the ability to block taxpayer dollars and limit subsidies to solar projects built on certified prime farmland, a lever that could matter if Hochul's office fails to answer the letter's questions by the July 26 deadline.
New York's 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, the state law that set the renewable energy targets driving this expansion, requires 70 percent of statewide electricity from renewable sources, a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels, and at least 3,000 megawatts of energy storage capacity. Meeting those mandates has meant approving solar projects at a pace and scale that critics say leaves farmland protection as an afterthought. The broader tension between aggressive progressive mandates and real-world consequences has become a recurring theme in state-level Democratic governance.
An estimated 11,000 acres of USDA-certified prime farmland already sit under industrial-scale solar complexes in New York, according to an analysis by the Solar Energy Industries Association.
Rich, one half of the Nashville duo Big & Rich, was appointed Special Envoy for American Landowners under the USDA on July 10. A White House press release described his primary mission as serving as "an advocate for farmers, ranchers, foresters & other landowners with matters related to renewable energy development projects." His co-signature on the letter to Hochul marked his first major public action in the role.
The appointment put a recognizable public face on a fight that has been building in rural New York for months. Local communities near the proposed projects have described the solar complexes as a blight on the landscape and warned of economic and environmental consequences that Albany has refused to address. The disconnect between state capital decision-making and the people who live with the results echoes a familiar pattern in which institutional actors override local concerns in service of ideological priorities.
A spokesperson for Hochul pushed back, telling the Post that New York is a "national leader in agricultural land protections" and has "invested hundreds of millions of dollars toward protecting agricultural land since the inception of the State Farmland Protection Program in 1992." The spokesperson said the state has preserved more than 138,000 acres of prime farmland and that energy project development "is occurring only on land that is willingly leased by landowners."
But those claims sit uneasily beside the classification numbers. Preserving 138,000 acres through one program while rewriting the soil standards to let industrial solar cover thousands of additional acres of federally recognized prime farmland is not conservation, it is accounting. And "willingly leased" does not address whether communities had any meaningful say in projects that will reshape their counties for decades.
Robert Bryce, a Texas-based author and energy analyst, framed the stakes bluntly:
"We have a lot of ways to produce electricity: nuclear, natural gas, coal, hydro. We only have one way to grow food, and that's prime farmland."
Bryce also warned of a looming waste crisis. Industrial solar panels last roughly 15 years. Within a few years, he said, the volume of discarded panels will equal or exceed all the panels being deployed today, and no recycling infrastructure exists to handle them. Meanwhile, the same governor who is blanketing farmland with solar panels recently announced a moratorium of up to one year on new data centers using more than 50 megawatts of electricity. A comparable data center sits on 15 to 40 acres. The contrast, restricting compact, high-output facilities while greenlighting thousands of acres of low-output solar, captures the incoherence of the state's energy posture.
Hochul has until July 26 to answer the letter. Three federal agencies, a country music star with a White House mandate, and the farmers who actually work the land are waiting. So far, Albany's only response has been silence.
When a state has to rewrite the definition of "prime farmland" to make its energy policy work, the problem is not the soil, it is the policy.