BROWN COUNTY, Ohio — For Melanie and Chad Hawk, farming has been engrained in their families for generations.

“We’ve been doing this for 35 years,” said Melanie.

But back in 2021, their landscape changed when they decide to turn some of their land into a solar farm.

“We did find that this would give us a constant and consistent source of income that doesn’t rely on weather outputs,” Melanie said.

The Hawks did a lot of research before leasing 450 acres of their farmland to the Amazon Hillcrest solar project in 2016. These solar farms use renewable energy to power Amazon’s data centers and distribution centers in the state.

The Hawks say it also has a positive impact on their farmland.

“The solar farm puts an Ohio pollinator species ground cover on the soil and it keeps our topsoil at rest for the next 25, 35, 40 years for the life of the project,” Melanie said.

Grant Goodrich, executive director of the Great Lakes Energy Institute at Case Western Reserve University, said many people often debate whether solar farms belong in their communities. He says it all comes down to their association with the land. 

“If people look at a site that’s getting ready for solar development and they see a brownfield, they see a garbage dump, they have a very positive association with them putting solar on that site because from their perspective that site is being improved,” Goodrich said.

But not everyone sees it that way.

Many farmers oppose renewable energy, worried it could hurt the amount of crops they’re able to produce.

“If people’s association with that land is they remember or they see a field of wheat, a pasture of cows and they understand that developments gonna come in and change how that looks then they’re going to see rows of solar panels, they tend to have a negative association with it,” Goodrich said.

But Goodrich said there are ways that solar farms can co-exist with the natural habitat. 

“So that may mean wider rows where animals are allowed to graze between the rows, it may mean wider rows where you’re planting crops at the base of solar panels,” Goodrich said.

For the Hawk family, they said the solar farm that now sits on their property is benefitting the community.  

“That tax money has now increased to $1.8 million on a yearly basis so that’s helping the infrastructure from the township trustees, for our schools, down to the state for our roads and definitely has made a big impact there and will over the course of the life of the project,” Hawk said.