Category: Outdoors Life

The future of a family farm in rural Salem County 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.

At one time, she said, there were close to a dozen.

“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 Corp., a Virginia 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.

What they couldn’t seem to quell, however, were the repeating concerns about how a solar farm would look in New Jersey’s most rural county. Those concerns raised open-ended, philosophical questions: What’s a working farm supposed to look like? What exactly does rural mean?

“It will destroy property values and will be an eyesore for our township,” a neighbor of the Cadwalladers commented on a 2025 Facebook post about the project.

Similar situations have played out nationwide. A recent Associated Press story from Ohio highlighted a struggling farmer’s solar project that also faced community pushback and was ultimately blocked.

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, Andrew Cadwallader pointed out.

Wright, however, thought solar panels would break up the township’s “contiguous farmland.”

“I’m just wondering how you see that the positive outweighs the negative,” Wright asked representatives from AES.

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. It was mostly silent there, too, aside from the winter wind.

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.

Andrew’s been milking cows since before his baby teeth fell out, though.

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.

“If he wants it,” David Cadwallader said.

Andrew is set to graduate from Haverford 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 Bucks County native.

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.

“I’m coming back here after I graduate,” he said.

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.

“We have been losing money for the last 10 years,” Andrew said of the dairy operation.

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 Salem County Advocates group in November.

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.

“I’m glad people can worry about the look of the farm,” he said in late January. “We have to worry about making a living.”

Cadwallader said flat farmland is not a natural part of landscapes in South Jersey. People have just gotten used to seeing it. His farmland was likely cleared of trees by the native Lenni-Lenape centuries ago, he said. Barns and tractors are industrial buildings and commercial machinery, he said, not quaint antiques.

“They are prioritizing the look, and it’s not reality,” he said. “It’s not a natural feature.”

Still, Cadwallader felt confident, on a late January afternoon on his farm, that the planning board might approve the project.

Jennifer Kugler, founder of the nonprofit South Jersey Preservation, visited Andrew’s farm shortly before the planning board meeting with her children and wrote a lengthy Facebook post in support of his plan that received 573 likes.

“The Cadwalladers want to evolve,” Kugler wrote. “This means new solutions are necessary to ensure the continued viability of the farming operation. For farmers, this can be incredibly scary.”

Kugler, 42, lives in Pilesgrove, Salem County, home to America’s oldest continuously-operating rodeo. She was raised on a dairy farm in Lackawanna County. That farm closed in the 1990s and never reopened, and part of her goal with South Jersey Preservations, she said, is to prevent more small farms from folding.

“We support farmers continuing to farm,” she told The Inquirer.

To preserve or not to preserve

While the Cadwalladers would prefer the solar project, there are other options to keep farms afloat in New Jersey. The state’s Farmland Preservation Program is a common way to ensure that housing and warehouse developers don’t buy up farms. It’s a relatively simple process.

The program uses a combination of federal, state, county, municipal, and nonprofit funds to buy a farm’s development rights. The purchase price, according to the program’s website, is “based on the difference between what a developer would pay for the land and what it is worth for agriculture.”

In turn, farmers get a much-needed payout while keeping their agricultural operation running. If those farmers choose to sell their land someday, deed restrictions require the property to be used for agricultural purposes or otherwise remain undeveloped.

“You can’t do additional residential or commercial improvements. You can’t turn it into a housing development or a Walmart,” said Charles Roohr, executive director of the New Jersey State Agriculture Development Committee.

Since the program began in 1984, Roohr said New Jersey has preserved 250,000-plus acres, with a goal of 500,000 acres. Salem County leads the way among counties, with more than 43,000 preserved acres.

The family has not ruled out farmland preservation if the solar project is rejected, but they were concerned about some of the potential restrictions and complications.

“It’d be like a bailout, but we have 500 acres,” Andrew said on the farm in late January. “We need to figure out what the heck we’re going to do with the 500 acres that’s going to actually make us some money.”

A complicated farmland preservation issue played out right in Mannington in recent years, when Mannington Deputy Mayor Robert DiGregorio filed a civil rights lawsuit against local and county officials in 2021. According to the lawsuit and Transparency NJ,, DiGregorio was holding weddings, private parties, and nonprofit functions on his preserved, 78-acre farm, but was told by officials that he would need variances and site plan approvals or waivers to continue. The back-and-forth between those officials and DiGregorio, according to Transparency NJ, almost grew physical.

In April, Mannington agreed to pay DiGregorio $55,000 to end the lawsuit, according to an article in NJ.com. Neither DiGregorio, who is on the planning board, nor his attorney returned requests for comment. It’s unclear if he will continue to host events on his farm.

Roohr, commenting on farmland preservation restrictions in general, said events are allowed if “the purpose of the event is to sell the things that you’re producing on your farm.”

A tomato festival on a tomato farm would be fine, for example. A folk festival on a tomato farm would probably require a special-use permit.

“If the main purpose of the event is some other focus and your stuff ‘might’ get sold as a side benefit, then we consider that a non-agricultural use. And so the greatest example of that would be a wedding.”

Roohr said the preservation program is more important than ever, as data centers look to build in rural areas nationwide.

“We have over 200 applications [for farmland preservation] in our office right now,” he said.

The Cadwalladers said they have no plans to sell to a developer.

The vote

Along with Alice Waddington, numerous others spoke at the March planning board meeting. Union officials said the solar project would bring jobs (AES put the number between 75 and 100). Some spoke in support of Andrew Cadwallader and his love for the ecosystem. Still, others talked about protecting Mannington’s “rural identity” and fears that the project could affect property values.

Andrew Cadwallader was the last member of the public to speak.

“As a family, we’re at a crossroads,” he said. “We can’t risk volatility anymore as a family and as a farm.”

When he was finished, Davis gave a final summation on behalf of AES and the Cadwalladers. Minutes later, the planning board made a resounding 6-1 vote, shooting down the project.

Cadwallader hung his head and gave a half-smile and some quiet “thank yous” to the attendees who patted his shoulder and shook his hand.

Laura Kellogg, a development manager for AES, said the team was disappointed but would continue to “evaluate next steps for the project.”

A week later, Andrew Cadwallader said he and the family were still dealing with the disappointment and contemplating their next move.

“People like this area so much, but we love it. No one loves this land more than my family,” he said. “People have to understand that a working farm is not a museum.”

Cadwallader’s life was getting busier at Haverford, too. He was taking geology classes and working on a senior thesis about preserving “the agricultural viability of mid-sized farming operations in the United States.”

Andrew drives the 38 miles south from college, back to Salem County, every weekend. A week or so after the meeting, though, Alice Waddington’s warning to the planning board, and the people of Mannington, proved prophetic.

Waldac still looked like a farm to neighbors and motorists passing by, but the Cadwalladers had stopped milking cows.

Correction: This article has been corrected to reflect that AES Corp. is based out of Virginia.