Farm vs. solar vs. CRP
Farm It, Lease It for Solar, or Put It in CRP?
For landowners weighing a solar-lease offer who want farming, solar, and CRP compared on five-year income, capital, reversibility, and risk — before they sign.
The AgriTerra farm vs. solar vs. CRP calculator is a free tool that puts three choices for a parcel side by side — keep farming it, lease it for solar, or enroll it in CRP — scored on five-year income, capital required, reversibility, and headline risk. It is built for landowners who’ve received a solar-lease offer and want to weigh it honestly against the alternatives, using USDA farm-income data and NREL solar modeling keyed to their parcel.
How the comparison works
- Choose your parcel. Search or pin the parcel; Scout measures it and pulls its soil, cash-rent, crop, and solar data.
- Three options are modeled. Farming (revenue minus USDA ERS costs, or the county cash rent), a solar lease (a modeled income band from NREL PVWatts), and CRP (the USDA FSA rental rate on eligible acres).
- Read the side-by-side summary. Each option shows five-year income, the capital it requires of you, how reversible it is, and its key risk — the four things that actually decide this, not just the biggest dollar figure.
- Get a tailored recommendation. The tool suggests which option fits best given the parcel and flags what would change the answer.
- Optionally, get a human review. For $99, a person reviews the recommendation against your situation — useful before a decision this large and this hard to reverse.
What the comparison is based on
Each column is built from the same audited data the rest of Scout uses, so the three options are compared on a level footing:
- Farming income — USDA ERS cost of production against USDA NASS pricing, or the USDA NASS county cash-rent benchmark if you’d rather lease to a farmer.
- Solar income — NREL PVWatts v8 modeled output for the parcel, banded against state output percentiles using the annual Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory lease figures.
- CRP income — USDA FSA Conservation Reserve Program rental rates on the acres the soil data flags as eligible.
- Reversibility & risk — derived from the nature of each option: annual for farming, a fixed contract for CRP, and a multi-decade commitment for solar.
The honest caveat is the solar number. It’s a defensible seed band that tells you whether energy income is worth pursuing and roughly at what scale — not what a specific developer will pay. Illustratively, a strong-solar parcel might model a solar band around $1,000/acre/year against a farming return near $150/acre and a CRP rate near $180/acre — a gap wide enough to take seriously, and precisely why the reversibility and risk columns matter: that $1,000 comes with a 25-year lock-in.
A worked example
A 140-acre parcel in Fulton County, Ohio, with a solar letter on the kitchen table. The developer’s offer sounds huge next to what the ground earns in corn. The owner runs the comparison: solar leads on five-year income by a wide margin, CRP sits in the middle, farming is lowest — but reversibility flips the story. Farming is fully reversible, CRP returns the land after the contract, and the solar lease is a 25-year commitment on prime ground.
The recommendation lays out the real question: is the income worth giving up the option to farm this specific parcel for a generation? For an owner who wants to keep the land in the family and farmable, that reframing — visible in one screen — is worth more than the headline dollar figure. They take it, and the $99 human review, to an attorney before responding to the developer.
Who it’s for
Landowners holding a solar or wind lease offer, families deciding what to do with inherited farm ground, and anyone who wants the “farm, lease, or conserve?” trade-off laid out in numbers. If you first want to see every use of the parcel ranked — including cash rent and wind — start with the farmland use optimizer, or screen the CRP side in detail with the USDA program eligibility checker.
Frequently asked questions
- Is the farm vs. solar vs. CRP comparison free?
- Yes — the side-by-side comparison of farming, a solar lease, and CRP is free and needs no account. There’s an optional $99 human review if you want a person to sanity-check the recommendation, and the $39 report if you want the full parcel analysis as a PDF.
- Do I need to sign up?
- No account is required to run the comparison and see the recommendation. An email only comes in if you want results sent to you or you request the human review.
- How does it calculate the solar-lease income?
- Solar income is a modeled band, not a developer’s offer. Scout runs NREL PVWatts for your parcel’s modeled output and compares it to your state’s output percentiles to place it in a low / mid / high income band mirrored from annual Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory lease reports.
- What does "reversibility" mean in the comparison?
- How easily you can undo the choice. Farming is fully reversible year to year; CRP locks the land in a contract but returns it to you at the end; a solar lease is a 20–30 year commitment and the least reversible. The tool shows this as its own column because it often matters as much as the dollars.
- Should I lease my land for solar?
- That depends on your parcel and your goals, which is exactly what the tool is for — it shows the five-year income, capital, reversibility, and risk of the solar option next to farming and CRP so you can decide with numbers. For the trade-offs to think through beyond the math, our guides on solar leasing go deeper.
- Is this financial or legal advice?
- No. AgriTerra is independent and this is a decision-support tool, not financial or legal advice. A solar lease in particular is a long contract — take the comparison to an attorney before signing anything.
Related tools
Land-Use Optimizer
Rank every use of your acres — row crops, cash rent, CRP, solar, wind — by projected return.
farmland use optimizer →USDA Programs
See which USDA conservation and commodity programs your parcel likely qualifies for.
USDA program eligibility checker →Insights
One plain-language read on a parcel’s soil, value, water, flood risk, and market context.
parcel data lookup →Or see all six free farmland tools.
Farm it, lease it, or conserve it — see the trade-off.
Compare farming, solar, and CRP free on five-year income, capital, reversibility, and risk for any parcel — before you sign a lease.
Free to use without an account. The full 20-page PDF report is $39.