Steven Becker put it plainly to the Will County Board in May: however the vote went, someone was suing. His sixteen clients would sue if the board approved Earthrise Energy's 6,100-acre solar complex. Earthrise would likely sue if it didn't. The board voted 12-8 to approve it anyway, and both sides are now doing exactly what he predicted.
That fight is happening in Manhattan, Green Garden, and Wilton Townships, not in Wilmington. But if you're pricing acreage anywhere near Wilmington right now, it's the fight that matters most, because it's rewriting what farmland in this corridor is actually worth and whether that new value is stable enough to underwrite.
The Project That Changed the Math
Called Pride of the Prairie, the project stitches together 96 separate parcels into a single 600-megawatt solar complex, the largest ever approved in Will County. Earthrise plans to route the power through its existing Lincoln Generating Facility in Manhattan, which lets it skip building new transmission infrastructure from scratch. Construction is targeted for early 2027. The company's own projections put first-year tax revenue at $3.5 million and construction employment near 1,000 jobs.
It isn't the county's first project of this scale. A month earlier, the board approved Earthrise's Plum Valley development near Crete, 2,400 acres projected to generate $2.3 million in first-year tax revenue using the same peaker-plant interconnection strategy. Two projects, one developer, one playbook: buy or lease the land around an existing power plant, skip the years-long wait for new grid capacity, and move faster than a typical greenfield solar farm.
Why Farmland Started Pricing Like an Annuity
At the May hearing, Green Garden Township farm owner Ruby Roemer spoke in favor of having the option to lease her land for solar. Several residents at that same hearing estimated the project would take up roughly a quarter of all farmland in the township. Whether or not that exact share holds up, the direction is clear: a meaningful slice of working farmland in the townships bordering Wilmington is being converted from row crops to lease income.
The appeal is arithmetic, not ideological. Solar developers nationally are paying landowners somewhere in the range of $500 to $1,000 or more per acre per year, on leases running 20 to 35 years with annual escalators of roughly 1.5 to 2.5 percent. Traditional row-crop farming, by contrast, tends to net something closer to $200 to $400 per acre in a good year, with no guarantee that next year looks anything like this one. A farmer weighing those two numbers isn't just comparing income streams. They're comparing a fixed, rising payment against a volatile one, and for a lot of landowners near retirement age or carrying a large tax bill, the fixed payment wins the comparison easily.
That's the piece a per-acre asking price doesn't show you. Two neighboring parcels can carry similar farmland assessments and wildly different underlying values, depending on whether one of them has grid proximity, flat topography, and a pending lease that the other doesn't.
Wilmington Isn't in the Project Boundary, and That Is the Point
Wilmington Township sits directly against Green Garden Township, and the city of Wilmington itself is about three miles southeast of the township line. None of the Pride of the Prairie acreage falls inside Wilmington Township. But the same county board, the same state law, and the same countywide planning process that produced this project apply to any qualifying parcel in the region, including ones closer to Wilmington than Green Garden is.
Ray Sundine, who owns farmland in Wilmington Township, told the board earlier this year that leasing ground for solar would help his family cover its property taxes. That's a landowner in Wilmington's own township already reasoning through the same math playing out in the townships next door. And Will County Board Speaker Joe VanDuyne, who represents the Wilmington district, was the one who pushed a resolution asking Springfield to give counties back control over where solar can be sited, after watching the board get overridden by a judge on six smaller projects it had previously rejected. The fight over local control isn't an abstraction to Wilmington's own representation. It's the thing Wilmington's representative is actively trying to change.
The county is also mid-rewrite of its Land Resource Management Plan, the document that guides land use decisions across unincorporated Will County. It's called Guide Will, and it's the first comprehensive update to that plan since 2002. One of the public open houses for that process was held at Wilmington City Hall in May. Whatever comes out of that rewrite will shape how agricultural land near Wilmington gets classified and what it can be used for, long after the current wave of solar litigation resolves.
The Legal Fight Isn't Settled
The path to the May 21 approval wasn't a straight line, and understanding the sequence matters if you're trying to gauge how much more of this is coming.
- In March, the Will County Planning and Zoning Commission voted 4-2 to recommend denying the project.
- In April, sixteen residents represented by attorney Steven Becker sued to block the board's scheduled vote, arguing they'd been denied the chance to cross-examine Earthrise representatives at earlier hearings.
- That same month, a Will County judge separately ordered the board to reverse its prior rejections of six smaller solar projects, ruling the board lacked authority under state law to block them.
- In May, at a second court-ordered hearing, the commission again voted against the project, this time 4-1.
- On May 21, the full county board approved Pride of the Prairie anyway, 12-8, largely along party lines.
- Opponents are now preparing to challenge the vote and the underlying state law in court, while Earthrise moves toward a 2027 construction start.
Becker's line about being sued either way wasn't posturing. The state law that removed local zoning control over qualifying solar projects is the actual battleground, and that battle is headed to a courtroom regardless of how any single county vote comes out. Until that question is resolved, every approval in Will County, including Pride of the Prairie, carries a layer of legal exposure that a buyer needs to price in.
What to Check Before You Make an Offer
If you're evaluating acreage in the Wilmington corridor with an eye toward its lease income potential, a few questions do more work than the asking price alone:
- What township is the parcel actually in, and what's its current zoning classification?
- Does the seller or listing agent know of any existing lease, option payment, or easement tied to a solar developer, active or expired?
- Is the parcel inside the boundary of any filed special use permit application, approved or pending?
- Has the Guide Will process flagged this corridor for any proposed land use change?
- If a seller mentions solar income as part of the pitch, is that an option payment, a signed lease, or a purchase offer, and what term and escalator does it carry?
A guaranteed income stream is only as guaranteed as the permit underneath it. Right now, in Will County, that permit is being tested in court.
A Short FAQ
Does this affect land inside Wilmington's city limits? Pride of the Prairie sits entirely outside the city, in the neighboring townships. But the state law and the county planning process behind it apply countywide, so any qualifying parcel near Wilmington could draw the same kind of developer interest.
Could a similar project get proposed closer to Wilmington? Nothing rules it out. The state law that limits local zoning control over solar siting doesn't stop at a township line, and flat land with grid access anywhere in the county can attract a developer's attention. It's worth asking about a parcel's zoning history even if no project has been proposed yet.
Does a solar lease prevent a landowner from selling for residential development later? Typically, yes, for the life of the lease. These agreements run 20 to 35 years and usually restrict other uses of the land during that term. A buyer purchasing already-leased land inherits those restrictions along with the income, so reviewing the lease language before closing matters as much as reviewing the deed.
Land near Wilmington is being repriced by forces that have nothing to do with the house or the crop sitting on it today. If you're weighing acreage in this corridor, whether for a homestead, a future build site, or a longer-term investment, the numbers on the listing sheet are the start of the conversation, not the end of it. Hexagon Real Estate works this ground regularly and can walk through the zoning, permitting, and lease questions specific to the parcel you're looking at. Schedule Your Consultation before you make an offer, not after.
