How a reluctant Iowa farming county undid a ban on battery storage

The soil in northwest Iowa is so fertile it’s referred to as ​“black gold.”

“It’s incredibly rich, wonderful topsoil from thousands of years of silty deposits from the Missouri River,” said Luke Seaberg, a researcher at Iowa State University’s extension program. So rich that some counties restrict development on land that scores especially high on the state’s official Corn Suitability Rating.

The Smith family has been farming that soil for six generations in Cherokee County, population 11,000. But the corn market has been depressed lately, prompting the three Smith brothers to consider other uses for a 160-acre parcel, 10% of their farmland. Looking at rising beef prices and the region’s ballooning energy demand, they landed on an idea: Graze cows amid rows of solar panels.

“We’re trying to diversify into another revenue stream. The cattle business is really good right now, and grain has been not as good,” Mark Smith told me over the phone, as he drove across the state for his son’s high school football game. ​“With solar, we can put cornfields back to pasture. Solar revenue plus cattle revenue makes it work.”

But to loft the solar panels up above the butting heads of grazing cattle costs more than a regular solar installation; indeed, this type of agrivoltaics only recently entered commercial-scale use, at a 40-acre, 3-megawatt site in Tennessee developed by Silicon Ranch. To mitigate the extra cost, the Smiths want to pair 30 megawatts of cattle-friendly solar capacity with a 25-megawatt/100-megawatt-hour battery composed of modular containerized units covering about an acre and a half.

The Smith brothers’ desire to install batteries on their land, though, set them on a collision course with local authorities. When the county supervisors heard of the plan, they approved an indefinite moratorium on March 24, blocking any battery projects in the county. Similar bans are popping up around the country as communities grapple with the real and perceived risks of lithium-ion batteries, which rose from obscurity over the last decade and now constitute the largest source of on-demand power getting built in the U.S.

In many counties, this story ends with the battery moratorium, stymieing new emissions-free power capacity at a time when everyone from climate advocates to AI giants to the Trump administration wants to see more batteries get built. But the Smiths found an ally in Supervisor Shane Bellefy, the lone vote against the moratorium.

Together, they set out to flip the county back to a place that lets landowners decide what to do on their acreage. Within just five months, they succeeded.

The rise of the wind and solar moratorium

Iowa subscribes to the ​“home rule” philosophy, whereby the state constitution leaves many decisions up to city or county governments, Seaberg said. But even those local authorities typically take a hands-off approach. The state’s ​“right to farm” law blocks local governments from regulating what landowners choose to grow or raise on their farmland. Some rural counties don’t even have a zoning code.

“Your nearest neighbor might be 5 or 10 miles down the road,” Seaberg explained. ​“The general policy of county supervisors was, folks can do what they want to do with their land.”

That attitude started to shift after the onshore wind boom came to Iowa in the early 2000s. The state has since added 13 gigawatts and remains the nation’s top state for share of wind energy produced. But in some rural counties, the nonexistent zoning code enabled a frenzy of development that ​“left a bad taste in their mouths,” Seaberg said. Now some counties have added land use regulations — but only for wind and solar.

In Cherokee County, an earlier proposed 900-acre solar project prompted the supervisors to throw up a solar moratorium last year. But they subsequently worked through their concerns with the technology and adopted an ordinance allowing large-scale solar, with some restrictions.

The March 2026 battery moratorium, though, would block the Smiths’ project, jeopardizing tens of millions of dollars in financing that the developers had lined up from investment banks.

The Smiths might have had a case to challenge the moratorium on procedural grounds, since it passed without the usual multiple readings and lacked a specified time frame. But instead, they opted for persuasion.

Opening up battery development

After the moratorium was approved, it fell to the county zoning board to compose a long-term ordinance to govern battery development. That body held a public meeting in May where the Smiths testified about their plans. The family also invited Seaberg to answer the community’s questions about battery technology based on Iowa State University’s independent research.

The Smiths explained what they wanted to build on their land in partnership with energy developer Nomad Infrastructure. The Indiana-based firm has considerable experience constructing solar and battery projects, and one brother, Thomas Smith, works there as an engineer.

They had gotten permission from the local rural electric cooperative, Mark Smith noted, to transmit the generation over the wires and sell it in the broader regional grid, run by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator. The MISO grid has very high rates of wind and solar production, but batteries are just starting to proliferate there. Meanwhile, data center expansion is driving up electricity demand in the region to never-before-seen heights, making for auspicious conditions to sell on-demand power from a battery.

Bellefy, who works as a banker, pitched his fellow supervisors on the economic potential of allowing the project to move forward. The Smith installation would involve investing upwards of $80 million, which could generate $60,000 to $80,000 in new county tax revenue annually, Bellefy estimated.

“Land in Iowa is our No. 1 asset. It’s a row-crop state, cow-calf operations — it’s what we do,” he said. ​“We don’t have the ability in certain areas, especially in rural Iowa, to just attract skyscrapers or 400-people housing developments.”

The zoning board initially proposed wide-ranging setbacks to limit where batteries could go. Bellefy explained that such rules would reduce the business prospects of such projects, which would, in turn, cut the expected tax revenue for the county. He also appealed for humility from his fellow supervisors when it came to passing judgment on something that other people might know more about.

“If the financial institution is fine with it, and the insurance institution is fine with insuring it, I know that their regulations are way heavier than ours,” he said. ​“If they’re OK with it, and they’re willing to put their skin on the line, how are we going to justify we’re smarter than them?”

In making his case, Bellefy leaned on the guidance of a conservative nonprofit group, the Private Property Rights Institute, which supports local leaders who protect landowners’ rights, particularly in efforts to build critical infrastructure and housing. The group launched in 2024 and supported 165 candidates in elections that year, including Bellefy, and is working on nearly 200 races in this year’s cycle.

“We want to get rid of regulations,” said Charlie Kolean, the conservative political strategist who serves as the group’s executive director. ​“If people own their property and they’re going to operate on it responsibly, they should be able to build what they want on their property.”

Kolean declined to name his funders but described them as ​“people who want to have this critical infrastructure built.”

Vetting the safety of newer energy technology

Bellefy still had to assuage his colleagues’ concerns over battery safety. Grid batteries have burned in fires that are extremely difficult to put out once lithium-ion cells heat up and start a chain reaction. Most infamously, the massive battery plant that Vistra built in Moss Landing, California, forced a local evacuation during a lengthy conflagration in early 2025; a second fire sprang up there last month among the stranded battery packs that workers had been laboriously removing from the damaged structure.

Seaberg conducted a workshop on battery fundamentals for the board in February and returned for the May meeting, explaining how the battery industry’s safety standards — and failure rate — have improved since the era of the Moss Landing installation. Grid batteries today mostly use the safer lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry. They adhere to safety codes that did not exist when the first Moss Landing facility was installed. And they place batteries in modular containers to prevent fire from spreading if it does break out.

In running these informational workshops around the state, Seaberg said, he typically fields some fears that ​“stem from a misunderstanding of the material or easily debunkable misinformation.” But the vast majority of questions have to do with the local ramifications of a technology that hasn’t been seen yet in the vicinity — like what a plume of battery smoke could mean for a nearby hog-farming operation or whether local responders have the right tools to handle a fire.

The fire chief also dispelled some of the concerns that had been circulating, Bellefy said.

Ultimately, the supervisors got on board, approving a workable battery ordinance on Aug. 26 in a 5–0 vote.

It’s hard to overturn a moratorium like that, Kolean noted. But Bellefy’s engagement with the community and fellow supervisors helped produce ​“a very good success case” that ​“paved the way for something to be getting built.” Once they secure the necessary permissions, the Smiths hope to turn the parcel over to grass in the spring and start installing solar and batteries next fall.

Bellefy, for his part, was excited to see his community embracing an entrepreneurial spirit while maintaining their traditional values.

“We’re blue-collar people — we raise them up right, as we try to say, with good Christian values, and you know our work ethic is strong,” he said. ​“This started with family farms that have been around for hundreds of years, that have been handed down generation over generation. And to have that type of innovation, I think, is a really neat story in Cherokee County.”