Massachusetts farmers who have embraced agrivoltaics—integrating solar panels with crops or livestock to create revenue—are now encountering financial instability following the removal of significant federal solar tax credits by the Trump administration.
Cuts to federal solar tax credits send Mass. farmers ‘scrambling’
NATE TASSINARI OWNS a 145-acre farm in western Massachusetts that has been in his family for three generations. His farm supplies hay and corn to the cows in the dairy farm his cousins own next door.
When he bought the land nine years ago from his grandmother, his intention was to keep farming the land at a time when farmland is disappearing across the state. But the business was in the red.
Tassinari found a way to make his farm profitable by installing 249 kilowatts of solar panels that are just high enough to allow him to continue growing hay under them. His solar project – which he calls Million Little Sunbeams – came online in 2020.
He sells all of the electricity produced to the grid and makes between $30,000 to $40,000 every year. The solar panels don’t really impact his hay production except for adding about eight extra hours of work to navigate around the solar panels, which require the use of smaller equipment.
This concept – which pairs solar panels with crops or livestock on the same land to harvest sunlight for both energy and food – is called agrivoltaics or dual-use solar.
For Tassinari, the agrivoltaics project makes it more possible for him to keep his farmland in agricultural production. He uses the money he gets to buy equipment like tractors and invest in the farm.
Federal tax credits for solar, which have covered 30 percent of the cost of installing solar projects, helped Tassinari build his first project.
Farmers across Massachusetts are struggling financially – as shown by the loss of more than 100,000 acres of farmland since 1997 due to rising land prices, an aging farmer population, costly equipment, and climate-related weather challenges – making federal solar tax credits essential to the viability of agrivoltaics projects that farmers might consider as an option to preserve farmland.
But the federal tax bill that President Trump signed in July eliminated these tax credits. Projects must begin construction by July 4, 2026, or commence operations before 2028 to still get the incentive before the credits are completely phased out.
Tassinari is building a second agrivoltaics project on his land. He’s going to be able to start his project within the window to still receive the tax credit, and says he’s lucky that he is in that situation.
“That tax credit is definitely the thing that makes the project work financially,” said Tassinari. “I was already under a contract, and I was doing it before the budget bill passed, so I’m okay. But I think a lot of other people who are in similar spots are scrambling right now to get things started before the end of the year, so they don’t lose those tax credits. Because otherwise it doesn’t pencil.”
Proponents of agrivoltaics say that the revenue from solar can help preserve farmland while also meeting the clean energy needs of the state. But without the federal tax credits, the outlook is grim for agrivoltaics projects that won’t be able to break ground before the credits are taken away.
The Trump administration also cancelled $3.4 million in grant funding through which schools and low-income families could access food from local farms – a lifeline for farmers who could count on the grant as steady revenue. A land conservation program to protect farmland, forests, and wetlands that would have brought $20.8 million to the state was terminated by the administration in June. Farmers have also struggled to access grants for the climate resilience projects from the US Department of Agriculture, as the administration has frozen and unfrozen funding.
Some farmers see solar farms as competition for agricultural land, but many are beginning to look to agrivoltaics as a means of staying afloat and preserving their land as farmland, according to Iain Ward, the head of Solar Agricultural Services, a company that connects farmers to options for agrivoltaics.
“Most farmers are in silent desperation to stay in existence,” said Ward. “Agrivoltaics is truly a farmland conservation technique. We revitalize the farm by giving farmers a chance to make a steady income that reduces the risks.”
Massachusetts was the first state to offer financial incentives for agrivoltaics. As part of the state program designed to make solar economically viable, agrivoltaics projects receive an extra 6 cents per kilowatt hour. In June, the state bumped up that amount to 8 cents per kilowatt hour for program year 2025.
“President Trump’s new law will significantly increase customer energy bills, disrupt critical energy projects needed to meet rising demand, and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs across the nation, while also undermining an important source of revenue for farmers,” said Department of Energy Resources Commissioner Elizabeth Mahony in an emailed statement. “Our administration is working hard to lower energy costs for people and businesses, but President Trump and Congressional Republicans are taking us backward.”
Even with the increased state incentive, some agrivoltaics projects in the pipeline are already being cancelled.
Jake Marley, the owner of agrivoltaics solar development company Hyperion Systems, said his company has had to cancel four agrivoltaics projects, which would have totaled 2.7 megawatts in energy, following the changes to the tax credits.
Hyperion and other agrivoltaics companies like BlueWave are solar developers that work with farmers and landowners to design, finance, and install customized solar arrays that are most conducive to preserving agricultural production on farms. They also oversee construction, maintenance, and monitoring of the dual-use system.
Agrivoltaics solar arrays tend to cost more than traditional solar development because they typically need to be taller and therefore require more steel.
“It’s incredibly disheartening to see the potential negative impact of this rollback of the investment tax credits,” said Jesse Robertson-Dubois, the director of sustainable solar development at BlueWave. “Taking away a part of the capital that is available for building a solar array makes it much much harder for all solar arrays, but even more so for agrivoltaics arrays.”
There are currently 12 agrivoltaics projects in operation across the state in Carver, Plympton, Plymouth, Rochester, Hadley, Monsoon, Grafton, Douglas, Dighton, Palmer, and Haverhill. The earliest project was Tassinari’s Million Little Sunbeams, and the most recent project – in Douglas – began operating in June of this year.
There are 10 more agrivoltaics projects in the pipeline that have already qualified for the state incentive but haven’t begun operating yet. These projects – if they have already broken ground or are operational by December 31, 2027 – will likely go forward. There are two projects that are currently under review by the state, and those will have longer timelines, which might prevent them from qualifying for the federal tax credits.
Agrivoltaics is a growing industry, but it’s still in its early stages in the state and across the country – and there are some farmers who don’t consider it a viable option because of questions about how solar panels on farms affect different types of crops. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have been conducting studies on the impacts of agrivoltaics on crop productivity and farm economics since 2021.
“Our research has uncovered that there are still a lot of unknowns here,” said Dwayne Bregger, the director of the UMass Clean Energy Extension, who noted that there is nationwide interest in agrivoltaics. “Solar developers are strong advocates for agrivoltaics and have had some success. … But to some extent, everybody sort of still considers this somewhat of a grand experiment of how this actually works out for the farmers and for agricultural production.”
The Trump administration delivered another blow this week to solar on farms by disqualifying certain wind and solar projects from two loan programs for rural development.
Kate Daniels, the northeast regional director at the coalition for community solar access, said that with the cuts to solar at the federal level and the uncertainty around what will come next in terms of solar policy, the state’s incentive program is going to be all the more important.
“When the federal tax credits disappear, there is a larger gap towards being able to make solar projects economic,” said Daniels. “In a post-federal tax credit environment, there are a number of ways in which the states can lead and make sure that solar is still a sustainable industry and still delivering on affordable energy for all ratepayers in their states.”
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
While Massachusetts, a frontrunner in agrivoltaics, provides additional state incentives, experts caution that these may not sufficiently compensate for the federal reductions.
