Steve Cargil’s family has farmed the flat, arid ground near Uvalde, a small city in southwest Texas, since 1953. Cargil, 67, always expected one of his three children would someday take over, as he did from his father.
But that notion took a beating one night in 2018, following a heavy hailstorm. Cargill and his son Ryan had spent months tending cabbages and onions for the harvest. “Then a storm blew along and took them out in one nite.I recall my son saying, ‘Dad, I simply don’t know if I can do this. ‘You do everything correctly, we work so hard and then you come out one morning and it’s all gone,’ Cargil adds.
The farm was in danger of dying with me,” he recalls. “My three children don’t want to farm full time. All that left him wondering for years what would happen to the land, and to his own retirement, as farmers rarely have a pension to fall back on.
Then in 2001 Cargil secured a lease arrangement for 600 acres of his land, a quarter of the total, to a company called OCI Energy, which developed a huge solar farm.“I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that I would have a solar project on my farm,” says Cargil. In retrospect, he says it was a blessing.
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