Fresno County, Calif., is a verdant, sunny land, producing an abundance of crops, one of which is and will be solar power.

However, some are increasingly concerned that solar projects will take the productive land out of agriculture use for electric generation. As such Fresno County implemented a new policy for siting solar projects, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The newly implemented regulations require proposed solar projects to be reviewed for whether the land had previously been used for agriculture and how productive it is before issuing conditional use permits. The measure may ultimately limit where solar is sited in the county, but is not nearly as stringent as some wanted, according to the newspaper.

The California Solar Energy Industries Association (CALSEIA) understands the need for regulations.

“The County Planning Directors have been working on a model ordinance, but each jurisdiction must next adopt this ordinance, designating solar energy development zones or overlays,” said CALSEIA Executive Director Mignon Marks. “The ground-mount solar industry needs guidance from both the local jurisdiction and the electric utility about where the acceptable sites are.”

In addition, regulators should consider land-use planning in respect to transmission.

“They also need to work with the local electric utility to plan in advance where new transmission corridors are needed, because you can’t do land-use planning for renewable generation without transmission planning, too,” Marks said.

CALSEIA also advocates for infill projects.

“CALSEIA is the leading advocate for California’s rooftop solar industry, both solar electric and solar heating,” Marks said. “Our members pursue urban infill projects and installations on residential and commercial roofs. In effect, they work in areas where local land-use decisions about whether to convert farmland to other uses or not has already been made.”

It’s the land where the decisions haven’t been made that is troubling those in Fresno County. Farm organizations, like California Farm Bureau Federation, had called for PV projects to be located only on lands that were no longer agriculturally productive, the newspaper said.

Some former farmland in the county is contaminated with selenium, for instance.