Where Corn Don’t Grow by Clayton Mitchell

There is nothing noble about state officials stripping rural counties of their land use authority in the name of green climate policy and placing a heavy boot on the farming communities’ neck. In Maryland, the script is being written by urban Democrats who have never held a seed in their hand or watched a storm roll across a field with the worry of a yield hanging in the balance. Their latest affront is a legislative land grab cloaked in green virtue: the pre-emption of local zoning laws to ram through utility-scale solar farms, directed not by elected county governments, but by the unelected and unaccountable Maryland Public Service Commission.

This, dear reader, is not policy – it is plunder.

In the song “Where Corn Don’t Grow,” Waylon Jennings warned us about the mirage of easy progress, where the “weeds are high where corn don’t grow.” In Maryland, we are sowing weeds indeed. 

Urban legislators, intoxicated by climate platitudes and federal subsidies, have decided that Maryland’s breadbasket—the Eastern Shore—must become their energy pantry. Our farmland, cultivated through generations of grit and stewardship, is now being commodified by climate czars and solar salesmen with hundreds of millions to spend, aided and abetted by none other than Senate President Bill Ferguson, who moonlights—as luck would have it—as legal counsel for a solar company.

Scandalous? Only if you still believe Annapolis is anything but a racket.

Let us not beat about the bush. This is a systematic undermining of local control by urban politicians who believe virtue-signaling from a rowhouse stoop in Baltimore entitles them to dictate land use on the Eastern Shore. 

House Bill 1036 and Senate Bill 931 are nothing short of a war declaration against rural Maryland. Under these bills, the Public Service Commission—an entity whose members earn over $207,000 per year and answer only to the Governor at the end of their terms—has been legislatively given carte blanche to preempt county zoning, effectively deciding where solar arrays may sprout like so many metallic weeds.  

The urban progressives claim they need 18,000 to 30,000 acres for solar. But they’ve seized the authority to control far more—5% of all Priority Preservation Area farmland, which in Caroline County alone equals 8,800 acres. Across the Shore? Tens of thousands of acres. 

Meanwhile, a state bill to prohibit solar eminent domain was not only killed—it was opposed by the Maryland Energy Administration. The solar energy companies are offering seductively obscene high prices for leasing farmland – amounts that farmers will find hard to refuse and with no fear that local county governments can enforce their zoning laws or comprehensive plans.  

Connect the dots.  This is neither a compromise nor true freedom of choice. This is conquest.

What makes this all the more galling is that these solar fields are not even efficient. As I have stated in a prior article, “Maryland is not green; Maryland is irresponsible”. We’re racing to meet abstract arbitrary climate benchmarks, gutting food-producing land in the process, while refusing to require that solar installations first cover impervious surfaces, parking lots, rooftops, and brownfields—the very spaces urban Maryland controls in abundance. Why? Because it’s easier—and more profitable—to dump solar arrays in Dorchester County than in downtown Baltimore or Silver Spring.

The urban progressives lecture us rural Marylanders about climate justice while quietly dismantling the foundation of food security. One 216-acre solar project in Millington (a town in Kent County for those of you in the urban areas that have no idea about the real Eastern Shore) has already taken 2 million pounds of corn and over a million pounds of wheat and soybeans off the market. Multiply that by 25. Then by nine counties. This is not environmentalism – it is scorched-earth policy wrapped in silicon.

And who is at the center of it all? One such person is Senate President Bill Ferguson. But his fingerprints are all over more than just land policy.

Ferguson has made a habit of advancing legislation that creates a crisis and then proposing government-funded solutions that deepen it. His support for a law allowing utility companies to lock in multi-year rate plans has helped drive a wave of energy price hikes now hitting working families across the state. Households already struggling under inflation are now facing punishing power bills—with little relief in sight.

Instead of reversing course, Ferguson is championing the use of taxpayer funds to send out “rebate checks” to help cover these rising utility costs. But these are the very costs his policy helped create. And the money for those checks? It’s coming straight from a state’s taxpayer funded budget that’s already hemorrhaging money.

Maryland is facing a staggering $3.3 billion budget shortfall. Federal aid that was once promised—such as the $418 million intended for education—has been yanked back, leaving school systems in disarray. Temporary pandemic funding has dried up, and the positions it once paid for—teachers, mental health professionals, construction workers—are vanishing. The state is now scrambling to paper over holes it helped permanently punch into the fiscal wall.

This isn’t crisis management. It’s a cycle of dysfunction dressed up as public service.

And Ferguson isn’t alone. Delegate Brian Crosby played a role in enabling these utility rate hikes, while Delegate CT Wilson has routinely backed legislation that weakens transparency and circumvents local accountability. They are not governing—they are insulating themselves from the consequences of their own votes, all while feeding the narrative that they are “fixing” what they have broken.

Caroline County Commissioner Larry Porter said it plainly in a recent social media post: “If only 2% of farmland is needed, why take 5%?” Why would Annapolis progressives gut our preservation programs and preempt local zoning ordinances for solar developers? Why override rural voices? The answer: Because they can… and because they believe us “hayseeds” on the Shore will not notice.

But we do notice. We are from the Eastern Shore, but we are not stupid.  We know more than we say, think more than we speak, and notice more than the urban progressives realize. We see how the very people engineering the budget crisis are now asking for applause because they offer momentary relief. We see how Annapolis insiders treat the Eastern Shore not as a region of equal citizens, but as an extraction zone for urban fantasies.

Jay Falstad, the Executive Director of the Queen Anne’s Conservation Association, in a recent social media post, put it best: “Solar panels are not agriculture, and they do not belong on agricultural land.” This is not rural resistance. This is common sense.

And where is Governor Wes Moore in all this?  Silent – as usual – above the fray and unwilling to offend the powerful. But the people of Maryland are paying the high price—for their power bills, their classrooms, and their property.

Let’s be very clear: the budget crisis is not just an abstract number. It’s affecting our schools, our energy bills, and our state’s fiscal credibility. The same insiders who caused the crisis now want to be seen as saviors. And unless Maryland voters demand a reckoning, this cycle of ruin will continue.

Speaking of fiscal credibility, I wonder if the Wall Street bond rating agencies know about the State’s unfunded liability of the many brewing Maryland detention abuse cases.  This looming liability will be measured in billions of dollars and is something I bet was not disclosed to Wall Street.  But do not pay attention to this my Eastern Shore readers, for the progressive urbanites are telling us, “All is well and there is nothing to see here”.  I bet you that due to this progressive government’s malpractice, Maryland’s bond rating will be downgraded, and within 12 months your taxes will be further upgraded.  

Just like the “green agenda” energy crisis, this is another expensive problem created by the progressive Democrat supermajority and the silent sidelined Governor.  Who doubts me?

Because “where corn don’t grow”, weeds take root. Weeds like cronyism, cynicism, and centralized power.

And if Maryland keeps letting urban bureaucrats decide what grows on its farmland—both literally and politically—then the next thing to die will not be crops.  It’ll be the Eastern Shore’s local freedoms.

Clayton A. Mitchell, Sr. is a life-long Eastern Shoreman, an attorney, and former Chairman of the Maryland Department of Labor’s Board of Appeals.  He is co-host of the Gonzales/Mitchell Show podcast that discusses politics, business, and cultural issues.