Save Your Farm: Questioning Promises to Lease or Buy Your Land

This post has some urgency. I can't think of everything but it provides a start.

I want to caution my neighbors (and others who stumbled upon this post) about the dubious promises being made to rural landowners. If one needs the money and decides to sell or lease land, there are a few things to keep in mind.

First some background. Virginians across the political spectrum have spoken out against the Valley Link Project, a proposed new high-tension power line that would cut through Central Virginia to power data centers. Locally, we are in a legal fight to stop a hyperscaler from building 12 data centers on 900 acres of rural land formerly zoned agricultural.

These are important battles to win. I'm not opposed to AI per se; my other work includes teaching a class on AI and writing and am co-editing both a special issue of an academic journal about AI and peer-tutoring as well as a forthcoming book about AI and the teaching and tutoring of writing. My work with AI in education (see my other blog) has led me to learn quite a bit about the AI industry, its financing, and its use of land. Right now we have a Wild-West approach to this industry and its buildout. I suspect a crash of the 2008 sort is brewing. But by then, a lot of good rural land will have been ruined for decades.

So now my mailbox (not to mention my in-box) is filled with tempting offers to lease or sell some of our unused land to companies putting energy-storage faculties there. I have blocked hundreds of phone numbers from these firms, too. 

As I learned in a workshop on industrial solar-power farms last year, there are many caveats in contracts that turn a farm-field (or second-growth forest) into a solar farm. The same would apply to energy-storage facilities. Here's what to look for:

• If you sell land, can you get legally binding assurances as to how the land would be used? 
• At the end of a lease, will the soil on your land be returned to its "prior state" fully? One brochure promises that. What exactly does that mean? All footings, conduit, and other below-ground materials removed? Soil cultivated and sown with cover crop? Trees replanted? Which sorts of trees?
  
• What happens when a firm sells the lease? This has left some land-owners high and dry when the terms of a lease do not convey to the new owner. Solar farms change ownership frequently, I discovered. I see no reason that battery-storage would not, too.
• What remedies will you have in court if the lease-holder violates the terms of the lease?  
• How safe is an energy-storage facility? How often do they catch fire? If so, will it cause a forest fire near you? How susceptible is it to vandalism?
• Will the company show you other projects? They should take you to several and you should be able to talk to the owners of the property without hindrance from the lease-holders. 
• If the company needs water, where will it come from? Your aquifer or will they bring in their own water? 
• Will there be emissions? That's unlikely from energy-storage, but you should ask about any generators that may run in the event of power failures. If so, how often will they test these diesel-powered motors?

Valley Link and these land-lease companies couch their advertisements with images of solar panels and windmills. I'm not so sure of their environmental credentials. When one firm noted that we could lease wetlands to them, I know the ecosystems on which our farmland depends could be at risk, as well as our ground water and and soil health.

Say no if you can, "maybe but I need proof in a legal document" if you must lease. And get a lawyer to check the contract for you. Long-term thinking here may save us from some long-term damage to our health and the land.

Roman-Road Building on The Farm: Festina Lente

Image source: "Looking down the Roman Road 3 km from Calderbrook, Rochdale, Great Britain" by Nigel Homer. Creative Commons License for reuse.

It worked for the Romans, who began their road bed with a course of packed sand, then piled on rubble and tamped it. Thus the fate of their enemies' buildings that the ever-pragmatic Empire wanted gone! Here's an extant bit of Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland, where I made a brief visit in 2009 during a longer walking holiday in the Yorkshire Dales.

My local, Central-Viriginia bit of Roman engineering is neither so malevolent nor thorough. After moving to the old family farm, I found myself in possession of many piles of broken masonry, chunks of cinder-block, and odd stones with a bit of mortar attached. These oddities congregate in un-mowed areas and crop up every winter.

As I clear areas for planting or an expanded bee-yard for our hives, I began to tote the rubble to a road that runs through bottom-land below one of the out-buildings. It's been churned to mud by my tractors as well as a few heavy trucks bringing contractor dumpsters. I've been dealing with a Depression-era predecessor who bordered on hoarding, as many of his era did.

We have a lot of non-useable debris on the site too. I find old boards ripe with rusty nails, thousands of feet of of soggy insulation, decayed plastic containers in heaps that the prior owner wanted to save up "just in case" but never got around to re-using. Getting this stuff--and there are literally tons of it--out requires a heavy vehicle to travel over soft ground.

The bottom road is now the sort of mud that the Soviets honored, in their remark that their two best generals during the German Blitzkrieg were General Winter and General Mud. I've seen photos of Panzers up to the top of their treads, mired deep, in mud that later froze them in place.

We don't have tanks rumbling around or the Red Army to come "remove" them, but to keep my pickup truck or tractor from vanishing, gravel alone--at $400 delivered for 20 tons--won't do.  For the purposes of illustrating futility, I took a small scoop of "crusher run" gravel in my loader and spread it on the sea of mud.

 This will vanish quickly, as would a thin layer of larger #3 stone, purchased for roughly the same price. We are only a few miles from the quarry, and they know me well there. But before losing expensive stone deep in mud, an inexpensive road-bed needs to be established.

My technique is simple: toss in the free rubble I have, with flat sides up, break down larger chunks with a sledgehammer, then run the small tractor over it while doing chores. Here's the shot of the muddiest spot after a few passes:

With work, that will get smooth enough to hold a level bed of #3 gravel;  I will pay the boys at the quarry for 10 tons of that stone; placing it will be the subject of another post.

Timing is key here: if I wait until the dry summer we will likely have, the grass will be tall and the road dry. Setting stone now in late winter works beautifully to establish a road bed to last for many, many years.

I wish for a cohort of Legionaries under my orders, at times like this. Not to conquer the next county, but to get our pathways and roads sorted out. Every soldier carried tools that could make a road, and it was common practice to keep the legions employed doing public works for the Empire. It kept them busy and out of the sort of trouble that armed men, in groups, are likely to stir up.

Without such help, save for a fellow named John Deere, I get to work. Yet as the Romans would say, my practice is "festina lente." I make haste, slowly, before the weather warms, the snakes and the grass emerge, and the garden must go in. Thinking before doing will make a good road, as I am no Roman.

But how I love their roads and fashion sense.