Tom Wilcox has farmed the same plots of land around his home in Clark County for more than 20 years. He’s admittedly old fashioned with how he goes about it.

“You got to understand, I farm like it’s 1950,” Wilcox said. He uses older equipment to harvest his hay and soybeans, and he mixes his own corn feed for beef cattle, chickens and turkeys.

Wilcox prefers it that way.

“It’s not that we’re making a lot of money on these animals — it’s the lifestyle,” he said.

But there is something that Wilcox feels threatens the work of farmers across Wisconsin — that’s the increase of renewable energy projects to generate wind and solar power. He said the acreage that’s used for such projects is just too valuable.

“At some point we’re going to have to decide. You know, do we want to use up all this tillable land? And I personally, I don’t,” Wilcox said. “We need to preserve our valuable farmland in the state of Wisconsin and really everywhere.

To advocate against these developments, Wilcox leads the volunteer group known as Farmland First. They attend community meetings, fairs and parades — and reach out to public officials — to stop developments that have been proposed. He said most of his fellow rural Wisconsin residents don’t want wind turbines and solar panel fields near them.

“If you go anywhere around here to a public forum, you wind up being like a 90-10 split,” Wilcox said. “The residents really don’t want this, and usually the people that are for it are going to get paid.”

Farmland First is actively opposing two projects nearby: the Silo Bend Wind Farm in Clark County and the Hub City Wind Farm in Marathon County.

“It’s basically a city of farms, and there’s too many people here for this kind of project,” he said.

On the other side of this energy debate, several utility companies and clean energy organizations are pushing to build more solar and wind projects, saying that they’re needed.

“It can be controversial for sure,” said Alex Beld, communications director for RENEW Wisconsin. The nonprofit group says renewable energy projects make economic sense.

“The wind keeps blowing, the sun keeps shining, and those energy sources aren’t usually impacted by things like tariffs or global conflict,” Beld said.

Proponents also say the benefits of renewable energy go beyond just money.

“Even if there wasn’t, at this point, a great economic argument to be made for renewables, there’s a huge environmental health and just human health argument to be made,” he added.

Beld said the group understands there’s resistance, but the needs outweigh the costs.

“There are people who don’t want to see the landscape change or see farmland get used for something else,” he said. “The goal is to completely transform our economy and our energy system so that it’s all running on clean energy.”

For the utility companies, renewable energy projects are big business.

“The renewables are a great way for us to make big and positive impacts in our communities,” said Ben Lipari, who is in charge of commercial operations for Alliant Energy, one of the biggest public utility companies in Wisconsin.

“We have our wind portfolio that’s growing. We have a solar portfolio that is established, and one of the largest operating solar portfolios in the upper Midwest,” he said.

Lipari explained that Alliant strives for a mixed menu of energy production.

“There’s a need for natural gas and coal to support the around-the-clock energy needs,” he said. “And then, as we’ve been committed for a number of years now, we think that there’s a critical role for renewables that don’t have fuel costs and are able to complement some of those traditional energy sources.”

Lipari also points to local funding generated by taxing power per megawatt that utility companies are required to pay as part of solar and wind projects.

“Let me start with solar,” he said. “Over the last few years, we’ve brought 12 utility scale projects online throughout the state — that’s enough power to support over 350,000 residential homes and businesses. In those communities, that’s providing critical shared revenues to support community projects. Over the life of those projects, that’s going to support communities upwards of $150 million.”

Across Wisconsin, there are more than 20 large, utility-scale solar panel fields. For wind power, there are more than a dozen projects generating electricity for utility use.

Still, Lipari acknowledged the “not in my backyard” opposition.

“You have certain folks in the community that would rather you site the project somewhere else. We spend a lot of time with those community members. We want to hear their concerns,” he said.

Residents can make their voice heard about these projects.

“Throughout the entire review process, there are many opportunities for public participation,” said Megan Sovey-Lashua, who is communications director for the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin. Often called the PSC, the agency regulates utilities in the state.

She said approving any new energy project is a very deliberate, drawn-out process. Over a 180-day period, the agency is required to conduct reviews and hold public hearings.

“And then there’ll be an open meeting where the commission then deliberates after reviewing that very full record of evidence — and then the commission makes its decision,” Sovey-Lashua explained.

One major factor that the PSC considers with new power generation applications is the state’s growing need for more energy. In the draft of its forthcoming “Strategic Energy Assessment” for 2026-32, demand for power in the state is projected to jump more than 40%. More than 70% of that increase is due to three active data center developments.

“If there’s a construction project that a utility needs to build to serve a data center, that would come before the commission,” Sovey-Lashua said. “But the commission has no authority over data centers.”

The report also predicts a significant change in the types of energy production that will be used around the state over the next six years. In all:

• Coal power will decline 28%.
• Natural gas power will increase 14%.
• Wind power will increase 6%.
• And solar power will increase 11%.

Such growth in wind and solar will require more landowners to share and lease land. That’s a decision Kathy Hass made more than 20 years ago.

“I’m turbine number two, and there’s 41 in the project,” she said.

Since the early 2000s, Hass has leased land for one wind turbine to the Cedar Ridge Wind Farm project in the town of Empire in Fond du Lac County.

The lease payments Hass and her neighbors receive has made a difference.

“It’s helped a lot of farmers, some of the smaller ones to be able to hang on to their farms,” said Hass, who shared that the land needed is minimal.

“The wind turbine project — it’s able, you can farm right up to it,” she said. “All you gave up was just this small piece of land to be able to develop this project and add electricity to the grid.”

Hass said there was opposition to the project early on, but that’s faded.

“Once they realized that these were going to help keep our taxes down, then it was a little, just so that everybody was going to benefit somehow,” she said. “Everybody’s pretty much got used to them up there.”

Still, for farmers like Wilcox, their opposition is steadfast and represents what he sees is worth protecting.

“You asked earlier if there’s good places for this,” he said. “Yeah, places where crops don’t grow and people don’t grow.”