The Leaching That Wasn't
On Closer Inspection
The video runs 51 seconds. It's labelled "Solar Farm SECRET." In it, Michigan Republican state Rep. Dave Prestin delivers the key line: "Any field that had solar panels installed on it will never be allowed to grow potatoes for human consumption due to the leaching."
His colleague Rep. Cam Cavitt posted it to Facebook in January. By the time anyone thought to ask the company at the centre of the claim whether it was true, more than a million people had already watched it.
There's an old saying — attributed at various times to Swift, Twain, and Churchill, convincingly to none of them — that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on. The potato-and-solar story is a useful modern illustration. Not because the claim is especially sophisticated. But because it didn't need to be.
Frito-Lay was asked. Frito-Lay said no.
The company named in the video is Frito-Lay — one of the biggest purchasers of potatoes in the United States. The claim, as Prestin and Cavitt told it, is that Frito-Lay has drawn a permanent line: potatoes from land that's ever hosted solar panels won't be accepted for human consumption. Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Cris Dush later amplified the message: "When Frito Lay refuses to accept potatoes from farms that had solar arrays we should all sit up and take notice!"
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."
That's a denial. A clear one. From the company whose name was being used to lend the claim its weight.
The call that could have established this before a million people watched the video apparently wasn't made.
"The leaching" is doing a lot of work
Here's what makes the claim stickier than a simple falsehood. It doesn't just assert a conclusion — it offers a mechanism. The leaching. Two words that carry the texture of scientific language without any of the content.
It helps to start with what "leaching" actually means. It's a real process: water moving through soil picks up soluble substances and carries them downward. It happens in farming all the time — nitrates from fertiliser leach into groundwater, for instance. So the word itself is legitimate. That's the point. If it appears in a sentence about solar panels and potato fields, it borrows that legitimacy. Something is leaching. From the panels. Into the soil. Into the tubers.
What, exactly? Prestin didn't say. He didn't need to.
Stephen Colbert, on the first episode of The Colbert Report in 2005, introduced the word "truthiness" for exactly this phenomenon: something that feels true, that has the right shape and the right vocabulary, without any of the actual substance. Truthiness doesn't need evidence. It needs to feel like evidence could exist.
Here's the twist: the underlying question is one that scientists have actually taken seriously. Solar panels do contain small amounts of heavy metals — lead, cadmium, others. Whether those materials can leach into soil under operational panels is a legitimate thing to study, and researchers have studied it. A peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Natural Resources and Development measured heavy metal concentrations in soil at various distances from a solar installation and found no significant difference between soil directly underneath the panels and soil 45 or 100 feet away. Lead and cadmium levels were far below any threshold considered dangerous to environmental health.
For context on scale: coal fly ash, which is commonly used as a soil amendment in agriculture, contains forty times more lead than the soil samples taken directly under those solar panels.
So when Prestin says "the leaching," he's borrowing the vocabulary of a scientific question that researchers have already engaged with — and ignoring what they found. The language doesn't cite a study. It conjures the ghost of one.
That's truthiness operating at its most effective. Vague alarm is easy to dismiss. Alarm that arrives wearing the right words is much harder to shake, even when the science is pointing firmly in the other direction.
Alan Knapp, a plant ecologist at Colorado State University, was direct: he'd never heard of toxicity concerns or food safety issues arising from solar panels. Even Dennis Iott, chair of Potato Growers of Michigan — hardly a solar booster — wouldn't back the specific claim at a committee hearing. "The food safety issue hasn't been seen yet," he said, "because we haven't taken those solar fields out." That's not confirmation. That's a placeholder for a fear that hasn't materialised — and, on current evidence, may not need to.¹
The science runs the other way
There's no published evidence that solar panels damage potato farmland. What there is is a growing body of research pointing in the opposite direction.
A four-year Italian study published this year found that agrivoltaic systems — solar panels and active farming on the same land — can support potato crops. The reasoning isn't complicated: panels provide shade that reduces moisture evaporation, and rain running off sloped panels can be redirected to benefit crops. A Fraunhofer Institute study of agrivoltaic potato cultivation near Lake Constance found land productivity improved by up to 86%.
Steven Loheide, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who researches solar-farmland interactions, put it plainly: "There's a huge opportunity to get both agricultural benefits and energy production off a single plot of land."
Suddenly very concerned about farmland
The lawmakers spreading this claim haven't, as far as the record shows, been prominent voices on soil health, agricultural land preservation, or food safety. The concern arrived, fully formed, in the context of opposing solar development.
That pattern has a name in this series. It's the same sudden-onset environmentalism that produces passionate whale advocates whenever an offshore wind project is proposed, and concerned battery-materials ethicists whenever someone buys an EV.
The actual long-term threats to potato farming — drought, heat stress, shifting growing seasons, reduced snowpack — are precisely the threats that accelerating solar deployment helps to address. That context doesn't make it into the 51-second video. It wouldn't fit the label.
Truth eventually got its boots on. It had a lot of ground to cover.
Two related concerns are sometimes raised about solar and farmland, both worth taking seriously. The first is that decommissioned sites might leave behind physical debris — mounting hardware, wiring, concrete — that tuber crops could engulf during harvest. Decommissioning regulations in many states already address this directly, requiring complete removal of all infrastructure to several feet below grade, soil testing, and certified restoration to agricultural use, backed by financial bonds lodged before a single panel goes in. The second concern is broken glass from storm-damaged panels — a scenario that got a real public airing after baseball-sized hail shattered thousands of panels at a Texas solar farm in 2024. Here too the picture is less alarming than the viral imagery suggested: standard panels are silicon laminated between sealed layers of plastic and tempered glass in an aluminium frame, and the Solar Energy Industries Association noted after the Texas incident that even broken panels left in place would take decades to release any substances. In practice, damaged panels are collected and recycled, not left on the ground. Modern large-scale installations increasingly use tracking systems with a storm "stow" mode that angles panels away from direct hail impacts. And in an irony that didn't make the viral posts: solar panels over crops protect them from hail damage. Neither concern, in any case, has anything to do with Frito-Lay.
