A local planning board was set to vote on a variance to install solar panels on a dairy farm in Mannington Township, New Jersey. The Cadwalladers, the dairy farm owners, believed the solar project could be a lifeline to avoid selling to developers. However, some board members and locals questioned the environmental impacts and the visual impact on the picturesque farm.
What’s a working farm supposed to look like? was at stake, and after multiple meetings and hours of presentations, questions, pleas, and complaints, a local planning board was set to vote.
Before the vote, one longtime resident of Mannington Township came to the podium with a warning. In preparation for this crowded, mid-March meeting, Alice Waddington, 98, said she’d made a list of dairy farms she remembered from her decades in the little town.
‘There’s only one farm left milking cows,’ Waddington told the board, ‘and that’s the Cadwalladers. ’ The Cadwalladers were struggling in the volatile dairy industry, though, and believed a large solar project could be a lifeline, a way to avoid shuttering and selling to developers eager to build warehouses, data centers, and housing in the nation’s most densely populated state.
This was the fourth Mannington Township planning board meeting for the Cadwalladers, who were seeking a variance to install 300 acres of solar panels on Waldac Farm that would, eventually, generate enough energy to power 19,000 homes annually. Some board members and locals questioned the environmental impacts, whether it would affect the soil, injure the abundant wildlife in the area, or taint the nearby Delaware River watershed.
Representatives from AES, an Illinois company that would build the solar project and pay a lease to the Cadwalladers, had answers for all of them.
‘Whether we all, in this room, agree with it or not, it is the state’s policy to advance these types of solar energy uses to meet the energy demands that we need,’ Keith Davis, an attorney representing AES, told the planning board. In Salem County, Mannington planning board member Joanne Wright was the most vocal at the meeting. She mentioned, often, that Mannington’s master plan called for maintaining ‘scenic vistas’ and its rural, agricultural characteristics.
The Cadwalladers said they would plant pollinator habitats and plants on the solar farm, and introduce roughly 300 sheep to graze around and under the panels. The combination of solar and agriculture — ‘agrovoltaics’ — is supported by the New Jersey Farm Bureau.
A picturesque farm The Cadwallader family has been farming since the 1860s, and Waldac Farms certainly looks the part: There’s a circa-1790 farmhouse down a long dirt road, a slew of silos dotting the flat landscape, and big red barns, faded by time, that are full of cows and cats. The only thing that seems out of place on the family farm on a frigid afternoon is Andrew Cadwallader.
The college senior looks younger than 22, and his sneakers and pants were impeccably clean. In 2007, a South Jersey newspaper visited the Cadwalladers to discuss the dismal state of dairy farming at the time. The newspaper took a picture of Andrew, then 3, surrounded by cows in a pen. His father, David, told the newspaper he’d love to pass the farm down to his son.
College with a degree in political science. He’s merged his life history — agriculture and geology — with his interests in politics and government, and recently began an internship for CNN’s Michael Smerconish, a Andrew’s an only child, and, yes, he wants to farm, bucking a trend that’s seen the average age of farmers, 58.1, rise steadily, according to the 2022 U.S. Census of Agriculture Data.
Nationwide, small dairy farms like Waldac have continued to shutter at a rapid rate since Andrew was in the local newspaper. Overall, milk production is up in the United States. That’s because modern genetics has produced cows that make more milk than their ancestors. Those big production numbers are coming from massive farms with large herds, too.
The Cadwalladers milk about 130 dairy cows on approximately 500 acres, and small farms like theirs have been decimated. In 2005, according to the USDA, there were 78,295 dairy farms in the United States. In 2025, that number was 23,609, a 70% decrease in just 20 years. Andrew Cadwallader declined to go into exact figures but said the family would be ‘paid well’ by the AES lease.
Waldac Farms would pivot to sheep and the sale of their lambs, while possibly still milking cows on a smaller scale. AES approached the family about ‘solar grazing’ during the pandemic, Andrew said, and as they sought a use variance from the Mannington planning board to move forward, he became the project’s public face. Andrew made numerous, lengthy Facebook posts in local groups about the project to be transparent.
‘Will we continue to hope that the price of milk goes up and risk failure, or will we pivot and change? ’ Andrew wrote in the Many comments were supportive or neutral, in a libertarian ‘it’s your land’ way. There was plenty of pushback, though, and Andrew said it was disheartening to see how many comments focused on visual impact
Mannington Township New Jersey Planning Board Meeting Solar Project Dairy Farm Visual Impact Environmental Concerns
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