Imagine you own a small 20-acre farm in California’s Central Valley. You and your family have cultivated this land for decades, but drought, increasing costs and decreasing water availability are making each year more difficult.

Now imagine that a solar-electricity developer approaches you and presents three options:

You can lease the developer 10 acres of otherwise productive cropland, on which the developer will build an array of solar panels and sell electricity to the local power company. You can select one or two acres of your land on which to build and operate your own solar array, using some electricity for your farm and selling the rest to the utility. Or you can keep going as you have been, hoping your farm can somehow survive.

Thousands of farmers across the country, including in the Central Valley, are choosing one of the first two options. A 2022 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found roughly 117,000 U.S.