“We also need to eat:” Big solar biting into food security, says NSW MP

A New South Wales politician has thrown his weight behind a new alliance formed in opposition to the development of solar farms on agricultural land in the state’s Riverina region, warning that the national push to renewable is eating away at national food security.

Independent Member for Wagga Wagga, Dr Joe McGirr, said in a statement that he was supporting the new local push to keep “solar factories” off productive agricultural land in the region known as the “food bowl” of NSW.

That push is being mounted by a group called the Riverina Sustainable Food Alliance (RSFA), which launched last week to “safeguard valuable farmland and food security” – they have a private Facebook page here.

McGirr, who notes that there are currently a number of “solar factories” proposed for his electorate – including a 12MW project proposed for around 16km outside of Wagga by BayWa RE – said it made “no sense” to put them on some of Australia’s best farm land.

“We know we need renewable energy, but we also need to eat,” the MP said.

“There’s plenty of places – like the state’s renewable energy zones – where these solar factories could be developed.

“Why put them on prime agricultural land and why put them so close to regional cities? It makes no sense.

“The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has rightly pointed out that with the global population continuing to climb, we are also going to need a substantial increase in food production. Covering prime agricultural land with solar panels is not going to improve food security.”

McGirr quotes two of the Alliance’s members, Borambola landowners Rick and Pam Martin, whose property is adjacent to land on which a 307-hectare solar farm is being proposed – most likely the 160MW Mates Gully project being developed by Spark Renewables. Spark also owns the nearby 100MW Bomen solar farm.

The Martins say their concerns about the construction of the solar farm next door include loss of productive farmland, as well as the impact the solar panels will have on the long-term quality of the land.

“(It’s) possible there will need to be substantial earthworks to flatten parts of the undulating land,” said Mr Martin in McGirr’s media release.

“This will have a detrimental impact on the water table and likely increase the threat of dryland salinity, an issue we have worked so hard to address.” Mrs Martin also flagged concerns about bushfires.

Opposition to large-scale solar from Australia’s agricultural sector has been growing over the past few years, particularly as projects get bigger and are more frequently proposed.

In May last year, a branch of the NSW Country Women’s Association voted to call on governments to prevent solar farms from being developed in prime agricultural areas.

In comments to The Land at the time, CWA NSW president Stephanie Stanhope said members were concerned that a number of solar farms being proposed for regional NSW were “foreign-owned” and being built on land that was better used for farming.

“There is a line there and the government has to decide where that line is,” she told the paper. “I don’t think we have really looked at what all the impacts are.

“Do we need to preserve prime [agricultural] land for food production or face a future where we have to import our own food? A lot of these solar farms are foreign owned. Landholders quite often don’t have a say and some will sell because they want to get out and retire. This is a real fear we will lose our prime agricultural land,” she said.

This will be a key issue for the NSW government and for project developers as the state works to roll out huge amounts of new renewable energy capacity to populate renewable energy zones and replace outgoing coal power generators.

Already, the state government has tightened the guidelines to state planning rules to protect major regional centres from “encroaching solar and wind development,” after receiving almost unanimous support for the changes.

The planning amendment, first flagged by the government in October, seeks to restrict renewable energy projects from building within 10km of a commercial centre, or within 5km of residential land, in Albury, Armidale, Bathurst, Dubbo, Griffith, Orange, Tamworth and Wagga Wagga.