By Henry Carnell
March 14, 2026
Introduction:
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/environmen ... n-power/(Mother Jones) “Tell me that is a gorgeous country.” Dave Rogers, an Oregon farmer, points across an expanse of green ryegrass fields. “My goodness, look at that.”
We’re walking along a stretch of land that is under contract for solar development by Hanwha Qcells, a Seoul-based firm known for opening the United States’ largest solar manufacturing facility in 2023. Rogers describes the new project, dubbed Muddy Creek Energy Park, as a “huge amount of construction, three miles of solar panels, a football field with hundreds of batteries” to be built.
Rogers, a wiry man with tanned skin in a plaid shirt, is easily distracted by pointing out the local flora and fauna. He has spent the better part of two years fighting the project, pitting him against his neighbor John Langdon.
Rogers has known Langdon, also a farmer, for Langdon’s entire life. Langdon’s late father was friends with many people now opposing his son’s choice to lease the family land for agrivoltaics, the integration of solar panels into farmland. It’s a practice seen by proponents as vital to expanding cheap renewable power. Several other landowners in the area—who are neither farmers nor locals—have also leased their land as part of the same solar project.
“The only local farmers who signed the [solar] lease,” Rogers says, are “terrible, terrible farmers.”
