In this episode of This Week in Solar, host Aaron Nichols sits down with Azuraye Wycoff, co-founder of Yellow Barn Farm, to explore the tension between solar energy and regenerative agriculture.

They discuss why utility-scale solar often faces resistance in rural communities and how long-term trust is really built.

You can connect with Azuraye on Instagram at @yellowbarn.farm or visit her website at yellowbarn.farm

Listen to this episode here, or on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Expect to learn:

* The Power of “Social Soil”: Why building trust at the speed of trust is the only way to avoid NIMBYism and community pushback.

* Agrivoltaics and Integration: How combining solar with grazing and microclimates actually improves land fertility and water retention.

* Stacking Functions: Why solar developers should look beyond energy production to solve local needs like noise barriers, shade for livestock, and decentralized power.

Quote from the episode:

“Nature grows slowly and intentionally. And anything that is truly fast and exponential is usually some sort of virus and that’s not usually a good thing... You build trust at the speed of trust.” — Azuraye Wycoff

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols So, Azuraye, welcome and thank you for sitting down with me today. When I was getting ready for this, I was thinking through it and I think you’re one of the people that I respect most in the world. I was like, it’s my wife, my family, Azuraye is very high on the list. And I think it’s because you didn’t have to do any of this. But you’ve worked so hard to create a community and bring a community together. And so I wanted to start with that tone. And if you wouldn’t mind giving anyone who’s listening an overview of who you are and what Yellow Barn Farm is.

Azuraye Wycoff Thank you. It’s quite the honor just to be named that. Yeah, my name is Azuraye Wycoff and I actually grew up on this property where we are right now, Yellow Barn Farm. And it was originally called Autumn Hill, but well before that it was indigenous land. Truly its origination is the home of the Ute, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone tribes, many others that moved through these foothills for many, many generations and steered to the land in what we now call regenerative agriculture.

So where we are now, what we’re doing now as Yellow Barn Farm is really paying homage to what living in harmony with ecosystems really looks like, but also recognizing where we are in history with technology and energy and innovation that we can’t necessarily live the same way any longer. But what we can do is really live in a holistic integrated way that incorporates everything and really tries to build bridges between all of these different industries and worlds.

Aaron Nichols And would you explain what has been happening with the county?

Azuraye Wycoff So back in December, we got notified by some of our community that the county had plans to do an aerial drone spray of the herbicide rejuvra in the open space county land back behind Elk Green Farm and Yellow Barn Farm. But this had been a plan that had been solidified in their weed management plan back in 2024. But this was the first that we were really getting word that it was coming right up to the edge of our regenerative farms.

Aaron Nichols So to summarize, the county decided what was best for you without consulting you.

Azuraye Wycoff I think the county was doing its best to meet a lot of demands from a lot of different parties.

Aaron Nichols Okay. And you’ve managed to engage, I believe it was more than 1,200 people against this effort. Is that about right?

Azuraye Wycoff Definitely not alone. But yes, with DAR’s help, we sent out a mass campaign on social media, on our newsletters that just made it really easy for people to send an email directly to the county. We had helped with pre-drafting everything, writing the subject line, and addressing it to each of the individual county commissioners so people could just sign their name, add a little bit more information if they wanted to, and press send.

Aaron Nichols Okay. And who else was involved and who else would this affect if it went through?

Azuraye Wycoff A lot of people, a lot of people are involved, a lot of people it affects. A lot of communities in this whole front hill, the foothills region would be affected. Residents, a lot of different agricultural operations along this area. And everyone who got involved, there are so many people to name. It has been truly a community effort. And there are many other people that were pioneering this to combat the use of aerial drone spraying, the pesticides use on open land for years before we came along.

Tess McDonald is a really big name in this area. We’ve had a lot of support from some of the people here, John and Margo, Shana, and just the whole community has really rallied. I’m just really voicing what their concerns are, the way that something like this would affect a bunch of different people downstream, from the people, the animals, the aquatic life, the plants. It’s more than just isolating and targeting one issue, which is right now cheatgrass.

Aaron Nichols Right. And so let’s get a little deeper into the potential consequences if this goes forward. What could that potentially do?

Azuraye Wycoff I mean, man, we’re seeing this in so many arenas in our world right now. It’s just the use of a toxic chemical has so much of a domino effect. You can’t just target one thing in an ecosystem and not expect it to affect everything else in that ecosystem. So while they’re focusing on cheatgrass and trying to stop that seed bank from regrowing every year, it still is harming the seed bank of not just that plant, but everything else around it. It affects the runoff in the rivers downstream. It affects the aquatic life, the invertebrate, it affects any animals that are eating anything from those ecosystems. You can’t just have this one thing target that one issue and not expect to see the ripple effect.

Aaron Nichols And so I think the reason that I wanted to sit down with you is because I work for a solar company. I work in the solar industry. And even though I work in what’s called behind the meter where homes and businesses own their own solar and they’re the people like trying to put it on warehouses and on their home roofs, there’s also the other side of the solar industry which I haven’t had a lot of experience with which is utility scale where people are going in and developing large projects often in rural America. And a lot of solar companies struggle with community engagement and often run up against resistance.

Now, I’m interested, like, why do you think you were able to engage so many people against this effort to spray the herbicide?

Azuraye Wycoff I mean, I think we’ve all seen a lot of the effects of what toxic chemicals can do. I we’re seeing it with the glyphosate that’s sprayed on all of our food right now. We’re seeing it when you try to mass produce a result that you get a really big ripple effect and that’s gonna affect everything from our internal health, it’s gonna affect our children’s health, it’s going to be something that we have to deal with for generations to come and it’s not easy to solve. So I think when you’re looking at things like how do you work with communities rather than enact something without necessarily consulting what might work for a specific community, I think you’re gonna face pushback in any kind of industry.

Aaron Nichols So for any project developers who are listening to this, if they’re going into a community to develop a project, how can they connect with that community and connect with the leaders and work with the community in the right way?

Azuraye Wycoff Geez, I mean, for us, it’s been this idea of social soil. We have relationships with people. We have gotten to know everyone in this entire community over many years, my family being here for 25 some odd years. It’s going to be hard for someone who’s in an industry trying to build relationships because that, at least quickly, because that does move slowly. You build trust at the speed of trust. so I think if you are looking to come into community, it’s really getting to know what their needs are. If you’re coming into a rural community, what matters to them? If you’re coming in with laser focus to just get a project done, and you’ve got enough money behind you to just bulldoze anything in your way, of course you’re gonna hear a lot of pain and pushback because you’re not considering what the needs of that community truly are.

Aaron Nichols And what diverse perspectives do you think we often bulldoze? I know when we were talking before the interview, you were talking about how people work in different silos. They think energy is one silo, agriculture is another silo, these things don’t need to meet and mix. What holistic perspective are we missing that people need to consider?

Azuraye Wycoff I mean, how can you integrate everything? How can you build bridges? How can you do diplomacy, the boots on the ground work that is actually getting to know the people and know what their needs are and actually hopefully stack functions. If you’ve got a solar project coming in, what would it look like instead of being super laser focused or siloed in one industry and saying this is just solar, but saying, we’ve also got agriculture, we’ve got community needs, what could solar do to benefit all of those different industries?

The idea of covering an entire giant swath of empty land with just solar, you’re taking away a really valuable resource that could have been used for grazing cattle. And that grazing cattle is something that actually brings fertility back into the land, which creates coverage for the soil, which prevents things like cheatgrass. We’re dealing with this entire circular system that we’re looking at it only at one point in the entire circle. So when you do that, it’s like whack-a-mole. You’re forever going to be trying to snuff out other issues that arise that you didn’t foresee because you were so focused on one aspect.

Aaron Nichols Right. Yeah, I mean, I think we’re certainly on the same page. We spoke before, we recorded about, you know, like I personally don’t believe that it’s a great victory for the environment if we cover a huge amount of land in solar panels and then we just blast everything under it with herbicide and don’t use that land in other ways or just don’t let the land be what it is. It seems so silly to do that, that you would utilize such incredible resource like land and then cover it in herbicides because you’re dealing with trying to mitigate. I don’t know what cheatgrass It’s just like why not integrate these things I mean Jack solar garden what Byron’s doing with agrivoltaics is such a beautiful example of integration right that is an integrated system.

You know we were talking to... What’s the big energy? well yes, and we were talking by the way we’re supposed to call it something different now, but it’s NREL God... Well, we were talking to NREL and they gave us an entire evaluation of our property and what it would look like if we were to do solar. And so we looked at like the solar fencing. We looked at the solar on the roof on this big barn that we have. We looked at agrivoltaics. I mean, unfortunately for us, none of it made economical sense for a little while. But if you could work with someone who was looking for land and they were funding something like that and then there was a benefit to us because now we had solar agrivoltaics or panels that were blocking us from this very noisy highway. Then you’d have microclimates. So you’d have shade, you’d have more forage, you’d have spaces like in Colorado where water is so valuable. You would now have a way to create more of these little micro-climates that can retain water, that could help trees grow, that can be shade for cattle and other livestock that are grazing all of these alleyways.

That’s an integrated system. That is a way that you can truly incorporate everything that meets everyone’s needs. And then you don’t have so much pushback. You don’t have the NIMBYism because now they see that it’s benefiting multiple parties. Especially if you could even say, all the neighbors around Yellow Barn, we can actually support you with all of your home energy needs based on the energy that’s being produced off this farm. That’s a pretty good reason to want that.

So this is a diversion, but why do you think we’re so unimaginative as a species? What is it that holds us back from doing integrated things?

Azuraye Wycoff My perspective on that is that everything kind of works in a big circle. We started out this way. This is the indigenous principle—everything is integrated and we moved very, far away from that as we needed to grow and everyone diversified where you had one person who was focusing on food production. You had one person who was focusing on, I don’t know, making clothes. You had one person that was now focusing on industry and that just continued to branch outward and outward and now you you go to college and you specialize in one thing and you don’t think about anything else. If you’re focusing on medicine, maybe you’re only focusing on the brain and then even within the brain you’re focusing on the campus, I don’t know.

Whatever it is, you’re only so narrow-minded on this one topic where you forget that this whole thing is actually connected to a whole bunch of other parts. And it’s like when we eat meat, everyone’s looking at what the value of one cost of price per pound for ground beef. We completely forget that that came from a cow and that that cow actually had an entire purpose in an ecosystem. And that that purpose was actually to create fertility, turn soil, create more grass forage so that things like cheatgrass wouldn’t happen. We forget that that is all connected.

So why we went down that route? I think it was for our ability to grow. All of these things around us, from the lights and the ground and the stalls and the paint that’s on the stalls, all of that was a specialization. But I think we’re now starting to come full circle back to this integrated holistic viewpoint that’s allowing all of these diverse perspectives to now start to see each other. I think that’s really what Yellow Barn’s here to say is like everyone needs to be here. It’s not just the farmers. It’s not just the entrepreneurs. It’s all of those perspectives coming together so we can all learn from each other and see what we were missing.

Aaron Nichols Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you’ve done a beautiful job integrating into your community with things like the stock market.

Azuraye Wycoff Yeah, the stock market, it’s such a journey. The stock market’s really been our way to invite people to learn about land stewardship. You remember last year for our first pilot, and that whole thing I just talked about of what is the price per pound of beef. We don’t want to talk about beef like that. That completely dehumanizes the idea of what this animal’s life was really for.

Really what we’re talking about with this idea of the stock market. When I say stock market, it’s corn. Stock market. S-T-A-L-K for anyone listening. And the idea behind that was really a tongue-in-cheek play on the actual stock market, which is probably the most extractive system in the world at large. And if you could actually shift that narrative of saying, what would it look like if I invested my energy, my money into a regenerative holistic system that was actually focused on stewardship? And there’s many forms of stewardship right now. We focus primarily on land stewardship. And then what does that look like when we’re actually dealing with a holistic system? That we’re actually honoring the life of the animals that were tending the land, that they’re part of this ecosystem, and that at the end of their life and their service, they become something that then nourishes us. And that cycle continues.

Aaron Nichols So you’re obviously just a super connector in this community. And if someone is... is there a way that if someone is coming into a community to develop a project that they can find super connectors like you and, you know, have them work with the community members in the communities they built so that there’s more of a likelihood that not only will projects go forward but they’ll go forward in a more holistic way?

Azuraye Wycoff I mean, I think the most important thing again comes down to trust. You know, for the people who are connecting things, they’re connecting people that they know and that they trust and that they want to build more bridges. If someone came to me and they’re like, hey, I’m trying to do a giant solar project across the street from you, help me get this passed, I would be very, very hesitant to do that. And like, what would be the benefit? It needs to be reciprocity. That’s what all of this is about. That’s what builds trust.

And it usually starts very small. It starts with a very small gesture. It usually starts with a meal. It starts with getting to know someone. You know, don’t make big moves in community very, very rapidly. That’s how you get a ton of pushback. That’s how you get people digging their heels in. And you build a lot more enemies than you do friends. And that was a lesson that I had to learn when I first came here myself, of just shoving myself into the farmers community too quickly, you know? Saying, I’m here, let’s do this, let’s all collaborate. And they were like, yo, you are new here, you need to earn your seat at the table. And that was very humbling. And it’s really taught me a lot over the years of how you build those relationships and they’re very slow and intentional. And it’s the way that food grows. It’s the way that ecosystems grow. Nature grows slowly and intentionally. And anything that is truly fast and exponential is usually some sort of virus and that’s not usually a good thing.

Aaron Nichols Well, Azuraye, I end this show for everyone that I invite on with the same question. And it has to do with last year, I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party. And when I was writing about that and reflecting about it afterwards, I realized that 80 years means my grandma was born into a world where what we call renewable energy did not exist. The only way we knew how to create electricity was to dig things up and then move them somewhere and then burn them and then send it out. And then we had to go find more things to dig up and burn. And we still do a lot of that, but we’re trying to be better.

But everything that has happened with the invention of solar and solar slowly becoming the cheapest power source in the world, all of that happened within my grandma’s 80-year lifespan. So I know that you’re working in your own way to bring a beautiful future about, but if you’re gonna moonshot to take us out here, what do you think energy looks like in 80 years? 80 years from now.

Azuraye Wycoff I mean, on the most extreme end of the spectrum, I think it looks like something like zero point energy. It looks like something that you can pretty much just pull out of the atmosphere from the atomic structure that exists around us. And it’s free. It’s accessible to everyone. It is completely doable and abundant. And it decreases all of the costs for all of us because so much of what we put energy into right now is creating energy.

I think solar is an incredible bridge to get there. I think with solar, what we’re really hoping for, and what I’ve kind of been hoping for, is that the efficiency of the solar panels really starts to increase, that the storage capacity in the batteries really starts to increase, and that those costs start to decrease as all of that technology starts to become more efficient. Because once all of that starts to become more efficient, then you’ll have a lot more micro nodes that can do their own energy. And once you have a decentralized system that can then really move energy as needed, man, you have a lot more ability to create, to grow, to do what is needed, rather than being completely reliant on a big, massive centralized system. So, that’s my hope.

Aaron Nichols Amazing. We share a similar vision. I mean, I want to bring about a future where energy belongs to the people, rather than having to be rented from huge regional monopolies. Well... Where do you like people to find you for anyone listening if you do like to be found online or in person or whatever?

Azuraye Wycoff Absolutely. Instagram is probably the easiest. That’s at yellowbarn.farm and our website is the same yellowbarn.farm. And really the best way is to come out to the farm. Come check out any of our events. We host wellness Wednesdays every single Wednesday. Puffin Sauna is open during that time and throughout the week. There are so many different ways to get involved. We have open mic nights and concerts and volunteer days in the garden once the spring starts. You can join the stock market if you want to support local food. That’s our CSA and herd share aggregator from a lot of the local farms. Or you can become a Yellow Barn social share member.

Aaron Nichols For anyone passing through Denver who’s listening, or if you’re local, or if you just come to a conference in Colorado, Yellow Barn is one of my favorite places in the world. And I know I’ve told you that a bajillion times.

Azuraye Wycoff Never get sick of hearing that.

Aaron Nichols So thank you so much for coming on today. And yeah, for everyone listening, that’s been This Week in Solar.

Azuraye Wycoff Thank you.

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