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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

I'm not the person you're replying to, but if I read the following link correctly, the USA average price to purchase is only $5.5k/acre, and any part of the US cheaper than or including the average price in Nebraska (ranked 17th at $3,884/acre) could well be trading food farmland for solar farm land at that price:

https://acretrader.com/resources/farmland-values/farmland-pr...

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In Nebraska, you're talking about food for cattle. The profit per acre is low and so the price is low.

1. The Nebraska price is the 17th highest on that list. Nevada and Montana are both below $1k/acre. I've seen Nevada in person, I can guess why the small amount of possibly-arable land I saw there might be cheap, never been to Montana but the Google street view photos told me the same story.

2. If the profit per acre is low, surely this just means they don't have a better use for the land?

3. Even if you assume they're all idiots who could make more profit if they thought harder about better uses for their land, I'm not clear why the reason for the land being what it is, is supposed to matter?

The point I was trying to get across is that, because animal feed is an inefficient way of making people food, it's a little tendentious to say that we're trading food for energy.

Oh, right; I agree, but that intent wasn't clear.

High plains Nebraska land can support cattle grazing or maybe a wheat crop, given they receive less than 10” of rain per year.

Nobody is converting irrigated Ogallala aquifer farmland to solar fields, they’re taking marginal land used for grazing and using that for solar fields. Productive farmland can have wind turbines within it, due to the smaller footprint of the turbine tower.

Productive farmland is $10k+ an acre, more if it’s irrigated. The cost of rural land is based on the economic rents/value that can be extracted from the land.

> Nobody is converting irrigated Ogallala aquifer farmland to solar fields

Given the rate at which the aquifer is being depleted, they should. There are some water districts in CA that have encouraged conversion to solar but it's controversial.

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/07/california-agricul...

I agree with you 100%, but the unfortunate truth is that irrigated farmland will be farmed until the aquifer runs dry :/

Well thanks. Now I reviewed what I had in mind for the size of an acre, and it's way smaller than I though (I don't know why I was thinking it was way bigger than an hectare). Also, I always forget the size differences of unused land between continental Europe and the US. :D

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