Michigan Farmers Who Say Yes to Solar Face Neighbors’ Wrath (1)

When Michigan farmer Clara Ostrander heard about the benefits of hosting a solar energy project, she remembered something her father had told her four days before he died: Don’t sell the farm. Keep it in the family.

Skeptical at first, Ostrander ultimately decided that harvesting the sun on most of her 120-acre corn-and-soybeans farm south of Detroit would enable her to someday pass the land to her son.

But the project proposed by Virginia-based Apex Clean Energy faced fierce opposition from neighbors who feared lower property values, the spoiling of farmland, and an end to the picturesque views that defined ...