Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Is Frito-Lay categorically refusing to buy potatoes grown on farmland that has hosted solar installations? No, the company says.
That hasn’t stopped lawmakers in Michigan and Pennsylvania from spreading the false claim about one of the biggest purchasers of potatoes in the country.
In January, Michigan Republican state Rep. Cam Cavitt posted a 51-second clip to Facebook labeled “Solar Farm SECRET.” In the segment, he claimed that farmers in his district couldn’t grow potatoes on land where solar developments were sited.
“Frito [Frito-Lay] did the same with the potato growers up by us,” fellow Michigan Republican Rep. Dave Prestin told Cavitt in the clip. “Any field that had solar panels installed on it will never be allowed to grow potatoes for human consumption due to the leaching.”
More than 1 million people viewed that video. Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Cris Dush shared it and said he wanted “cash bond guaranteeing restoration” of the soil after a solar development was removed. “When Frito Lay refuses to accept potatoes from farms that had solar arrays we should all sit up and take notice!” he wrote.
“Raising these claims about solar could prevent farmers from diversifying their income stream and adding a really stable source of income.”
PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay, told Canary Media that the company “has not issued blanket guidance to growers that fields with solar installations will not be accepted.”
Nor is there any published evidence that solar farms have a negative impact on potato farming, according to experts consulted for this story. On the contrary, there is agrivoltaics research showing that potatoes—and many other crops—can benefit from growing alongside shade-making solar panels.
Nevertheless, this false claim about solar is gaining some traction. Like other forms of misinformation about renewables, it helps fuel local pushback to proposed energy installations.
The claim comes amid a broader wave of opposition to building solar arrays on farmland.
As energy developers look to build more solar installations to meet climate goals and fast-rising electricity demand in the U.S., more and more projects are being proposed on flat and sunny land that could otherwise grow crops. The impact these projects may have on the land is often exaggerated by opponents—including Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers—who claim solar will destroy prime farmland.
American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving agricultural land, found that by 2040, 7 million acres of agricultural land could be used for solar installations. That’s less than 1 percent of the farmland across the Lower 48 states.
Such misinformation could threaten not only solar developments but also farmers’ livelihoods. Farmers can earn tens of thousands of dollars by leasing land to solar developers, providing a financial lifeline in a precarious agricultural market. Potato farmers in particular could have a hard time leasing under “this sort of speculated risk,” according to Scott Laeser, senior working lands adviser for the Rural Climate Partnership, a nonprofit connecting rural and renewable development.
“Raising these claims about solar could prevent farmers from diversifying their income stream and adding a really stable source of income to their operation, which I suspect most farmers would be pretty happy to add in the volatile moment that we’re in,” he said.
The speculation about solar’s impact on potatoes began a year ago with a statement from the agricultural trade group Potato Growers of Michigan. While the organization recognized the role of renewable energy in Michigan’s future, it didn’t want solar on farmland and cited concerns about food safety.
“When solar panels and systems are eventually removed, small fragments of plastic and metal may remain in the soil,” the statement read. “For crops like potatoes, which grow underground, this poses a unique and serious risk. Tuber vegetables can readily engulf foreign objects, creating contamination hazards that impact not just growers, but also processors and consumers.”
But there’s no evidence to suggest that this actually happens, experts say.
Steven Loheide, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is located in one of the three biggest potato-growing states and researches the interaction of solar projects and farmland. Loheide had not heard of the concern from Michigan potato growers.
Nor had Alan Knapp, a plant ecologist at Colorado State University, who added that he did not know of any scientific study finding that solar panels installed aboveground could impact potato crops grown belowground. Knapp noted that there’s a list of worries about what happens underneath solar panels—like toxins leaching into the soil or metal and silica shards impacting crops—and most are unfounded.
“I’ve never heard of any sort of toxicity issues or any concerns about the quality of the crop being consumed by humans being impacted by the installation of solar panels above,” Knapp said.
Rumors have spread anyway.
In August 2025, a public comment from a farmer opposing a project in Kentucky called Wood Duck Solar quoted the Potato Growers of Michigan statement. Potential contamination from the 100-megawatt solar field threatened food safety, the farmer wrote. That project was ultimately approved.
In March 2026, Dennis Iott, the chair of the Potato Growers of Michigan, along with Kelly Turner, executive director of the Michigan Potato Growers Commission, another trade group, repeated the claims at a Michigan House Agriculture Committee hearing.
“There’s a huge opportunity to get both agricultural benefits and energy production off a single plot of land.”
Solar threatens potato growers because the vegetables require a lot of land that farmers often lease in rotational years, but solar groups are buying up that land, Turner said.
“You cannot blame them for signing the solar contracts,” Turner said of the farmers. “The problem is, though, that it takes that land out of production, and now it starts to hurt economies of scale because there’s no more land near the grower to be able to create enough land to have those rotations.”
Potatoes are also ground crops, and could form around foreign objects in the ground, Turner purported, including whatever might be left behind after a solar system is dismantled.
But Iott, speaking after Turner at the hearing, admitted, “The food safety issue hasn’t been seen yet, because we haven’t taken those solar fields out. But it will be a problem for anything that grows in the soil.”
Iott and Turner did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
At some point, the general speculation raised by industry lobbyists morphed into specific falsehoods about Frito-Lay, and caught the ear of the lawmakers from Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Neither Cavitt nor Prestin responded to multiple requests for comment.
Lynsey Mukomel, communications director for the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said she and her colleagues were not aware of any statements made by Frito-Lay or any other company asking Michigan farmers not to grow potatoes on land with solar installations.
And, of course, PepsiCo itself said it had issued no such directives.
The furthest PepsiCo says it has gone is to provide growers with its carefully worded perspective on endorsing solar outside of “prime agricultural lands,” but only when growers have asked them directly, a company spokesperson said.
While the firm says it values solar energy as part of its corporate decarbonization goals, it endorses solar and other renewable installations outside of prime agricultural lands “in order to avoid potential impacts to crop yields, quality and the creation of other unintended consequences,” a spokesperson for PepsiCo said in an email.
Although there is no evidence that solar panels damage potato farmland, there is mounting proof that siting solar and crops on the same land can be beneficial.
A four-year study in Italy published earlier this year showed that agrivoltaic systems, which combine farming with photovoltaic electricity generation, could potentially support potato crops.
Solar panels can help retain groundwater as rain runs off the sloped panels which then provide shade that blocks the sunlight and helps retain moisture, Loheide said. He has also studied solar’s impact on native pollinator habitats.
“There’s a huge opportunity to get both agricultural benefits and energy production off a single plot of land,” said Loheide, who was not part of the Italian study.
Despite the evidence, speculation that strikes a nerve has a way of circulating anyway. After all, concerns that offshore wind hurts whales, a claim that lacks any evidence, have turned out to be one of the biggest vectors of attack on the beleaguered energy source.
Speculation about potatoes and solar may never rise to quite that level. But it doesn’t seem likely to fade away, either. Late last month, a post on X from a prominent anti-solar account repeated the falsehood that customers won’t buy potatoes grown on land that once hosted solar. It racked up nearly 10,000 shares and 20,000 likes.
