Drive into the small town of Plains, in southwest Georgia.
It is a sleepy place of church steeples and old peanut fields.
On the edge of town, one field looks different from the rest.
Row after row of dark solar panels catches the sun.
They sit on land that once grew peanuts and cotton.
And that land belonged to a former president.
The peanut farmer from Plains
The president is Jimmy Carter.
Long before the White House, he was a peanut farmer.
He grew up on this red Georgia soil in the 1920s.
As a boy he sold peanuts on the streets of Plains.
His family worked the land through hard and lean years.
He knew the rhythm of planting and harvest by heart.
The town was tiny, with just a few hundred people.
Everyone knew the Carters and their peanut business.
Even as president, he never lost his love for Plains.
He came home to the same small town after his term.
It stayed his anchor for the rest of his life.
The farm was part of who he was.
So it was fitting that the land would matter again.
This time it would not grow a single crop.
It would harvest the sun itself.
A president who bet on the sun
Carter cared about clean energy long before it was popular.
In the 1970s, an oil crisis shook the whole country.
He asked Americans to save power and look to the sun.
In 1979, he put solar panels on the White House roof.
They were used to heat water for the building.
It was a bold and symbolic move for the time.
No president had ever done anything quite like it.
He wanted the nation to see a cleaner path ahead.
Many people thought the idea was far ahead of its day.
Years later, a new president had the panels taken down.
For a while, his solar dream seemed to fade away.
But Carter never let go of the idea.
He simply carried it back home.
Turning the old farm over to the sun
By 2017, Carter was in his nineties and still busy.
He was still teaching Sunday school in his hometown.
He decided to put his family land to a new use.
The wide open acres were a fine fit for catching the sun.
He leased about 10 acres of the farm to a solar company.
The firm, SolAmerica, would build a small solar farm there.
Workers covered the open field with rows of panels.
The same soil that grew peanuts would now gather light.
The panels were angled to catch the strong Georgia sun.
For a lifelong farmer, it was a natural next step.
He saw it as planting a different kind of crop.
The project drew attention from across the country.
A former president was betting again on solar power.
And this time it would truly last.
What the field powers today
Here is what that modest field actually does.
According to one report, the array holds 3,852 solar panels.
Together they add up to about 1.3 megawatts of power.
That is a serious amount for such a small town.
The panels feed clean electricity straight into the local grid.
They supply more than half of all the power Plains uses.
A town of a few hundred people runs largely on sunlight.
Homes, shops, and streetlights all draw on the field.
And it all flows from one old peanut farm.
The former president had powered his own hometown.
His family field became a small power plant.
A legacy that keeps shining
Jimmy Carter died in late 2024, at the age of 100.
He lived long enough to see his solar bet pay off.
Tributes after his death often mentioned the little solar farm.
It had become one of the enduring symbols of his long life.
The panels in Plains are still soaking up the sun.
They keep the lights on for his neighbors every day.
The array was built to run for decades to come.
Wildflowers grow beneath them to feed the local bees.
The ground was planted with blooms instead of bare gravel.
The field is at once a power plant and a small meadow of blooms.
It stands as a lasting monument to a lifelong belief.
According to one account, the farm still powers about half of Plains.
The same mix of land and clean power shows up elsewhere, from a solar farm fox to the seals near an offshore wind farm.
A humble peanut farmer from Georgia left his town a gift of light.
Where crops once grew, the panels keep on giving, sunrise after steady sunrise.
