Arable Farms: Solar panels for agriculture

Arable: the widest range of solar options in agriculture

No part of agriculture has more ways to use solar than an arable holding, and that is exactly why solar panels for agriculture so often start with the arable case. You have large grain store and machinery shed roofs, you frequently have marginal corners that crop poorly, and you carry a seasonal load that spikes hard at harvest when the grain dryer runs flat out. That combination means an arable farm can go rooftop, ground-mount, or both at once, and the right answer depends entirely on your load profile and how much capital you want to commit. With the move from the Basic Payment Scheme towards the Sustainable Farming Incentive reshaping farm income, many arable businesses are turning to solar either to cut a controllable cost or to create a genuine new income stream from land that earns little from the plough. Few other sectors give you that breadth of choice, and the job of a good designer is to model the options side by side rather than push a single product.

Supermarket pressure is real in arable supply too. The major retailers push Scope 2 and Scope 3 expectations down to their suppliers, and on-farm solar generation is auditable evidence that supports those returns through supply-chain disclosures. Several arable growers have used solar as part of the evidence that helped win or retain a retail contract, so for an agricultural business supplying multiples, generation is a commercial asset as much as a cost saving. Treated as part of the whole holding's energy plan, an arable array balances seasonal demand against year-round value, and it sits alongside diesel for field operations as one of the two big energy costs an arable business can begin to bring under control.

The wider pressures on arable margins are familiar to anyone in the sector. Both diesel and grid electricity have climbed sharply since 2021, squeezing farm-gate returns at the same time as the shift from the Basic Payment Scheme to the Sustainable Farming Incentive has changed the income mix and added uncertainty about what land will earn in future. Against that backdrop, an asset that fixes a controllable cost for two decades, or turns marginal land into a reliable rent, is exactly the kind of decision that strengthens a farm business rather than adding to its exposure. Solar will not solve farm-gate price pressure, but it removes one of the few variables a grower can actually act on, and it does so on the buildings and land you already have.

What a typical install looks like and how we size it

Arable rooftop systems usually fall in the 30 to 500 kW band, around 55 to 920 plus panels over 200 to 3,000 plus square metres of roof, with ground-mount potential running to 5 MW and beyond where land and grid allow. Generation ranges from about 27,000 to 460,000 plus kWh a year, saving from 6 to over 100 tonnes of CO2. The defining feature is the grain dryer: a large but seasonal load that runs hard for a few autumn weeks and barely at all the rest of the year. There are two sensible routes. Size for the drying peak with a large rooftop or ground array and lean on export income outside the season, or size smaller for daytime baseload and add a battery for the drying weeks. We model both against your half-hourly data and tell you which pays better for your specific farm, because the honest answer differs from holding to holding.

The seasonal mismatch is the heart of arable sizing. A system big enough to cover peak drying demand will generate far more than the farm uses for the other eleven months, which is fine if export income is strong and the grid will take the surplus, but wasteful if export is constrained. A smaller system matched to daytime baseload exports less and is cheaper, but leans on a battery or the grid during drying. There is no universally right answer, which is why we run both scenarios from your actual data and present the payback for each. We also look at whether ground-mount on a poor-cropping field makes more sense than rooftop, or whether the two combine, because an arable holding often has both the roof and the land to consider together.

Costs, payback and tax relief

A rooftop project typically runs £32,000 to £500,000 plus with a payback near 6 years, helped substantially by the 100% Annual Investment Allowance writing off the cost against profit in year one. The alternative is a land lease, where a third-party developer builds and runs a ground-mount array and pays you rent, typically £900 to £1,300 per acre per year on a 25 to 40 year term, well above arable rental value, with the developer carrying all the capital and operational risk. Sheep can usually continue to graze beneath the panels, so the land keeps working twice over. The Smart Export Guarantee matters more in arable than in always-on sectors because the seasonal profile means more units are exported outside harvest. Our cost guide compares owning a system against leasing land in detail.

The choice between owning and leasing is a genuine fork, not a sales preference. Owning a rooftop system gives you the tax relief, the avoided-import saving and the export income, but it is capital you commit and operate. Leasing land to a developer needs no capital from you, transfers the risk, and pays a long-term rent that comfortably beats arable rental value, but the generation income is the developer's rather than yours. For a farm with strong on-site daytime demand, ownership usually wins; for a farm with marginal land and limited on-site load, the lease can be the better diversification. We set both out plainly so the decision is yours on the numbers.

One question that comes up early on every arable project is the grid, and the honest answer is that rural connections are constrained rather than impossible. Where a network has little spare export capacity, a conventional connection can take many months, but there are ways around it. Sizing a system for self-consumption only, with no export, removes the need for export capacity altogether and can cut the connection timeline dramatically on a congested network. Adding battery storage is another route, soaking up daytime generation for use later rather than pushing it onto a grid that cannot take it. We submit the G99 application early and design around the capacity that is actually available, rather than promising an export-led system the network will not support.

Funding routes in detail

For an owned rooftop or ground array, the 100% Annual Investment Allowance is the headline relief, fully expensing qualifying plant in year one within the annual cap that most arable installs sit comfortably below. The Smart Export Guarantee then provides ongoing income on the substantial export an arable profile tends to generate, paying in the region of 4 to 15p per kWh depending on tariff. The Sustainable Farming Incentive does not pay for solar directly, but biodiversity and soil-health actions can stack alongside a ground-mount lease on the same land, with relevant actions paying in the region of 500 to 5,000 pounds per hectare per year, and the scheme is moving steadily towards clearer renewable-energy alignment. The Farming Investment Fund occasionally helps where solar is paired with an eligible productivity item such as a grain dryer, so it is worth a check. Welsh and Scottish arable farms should look at their devolved frameworks, which carry their own renewable support and often more generous intervention rates than the England schemes. We list every route you may qualify for in the proposal.

Compliance and sector considerations

Rooftop PV on agricultural buildings is generally permitted development within size limits, and ground-mount up to 9m by 9m by 4m in height also falls under permitted development; anything larger needs full planning permission, with an Environmental Impact Assessment above 5 MW. If you are a tenant you will need landlord consent for the structural alteration or change of land use, and most institutional landlords such as the Crown Estate, the Church Commissioners and county councils operate standard tenant solar agreements; we provide the lease addendum template for private landlords. The long pole is almost always the grid: a G99 connection on a capacity-constrained rural network can take six to eighteen months, and connection studies are essential before final sizing. As across all agriculture, older buildings may carry asbestos cement roofing under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, which cannot take panels and must be replaced before PV goes on. We confirm the roof build-up and any asbestos before quoting, because finding it on the day of the install is the single most common cause of a project running over budget.

How we approach this kind of project

An arable project lives or dies on getting the seasonal sizing right, so we start with your half-hourly meter data and your crop calendar, modelling the grain-drying peak against the rest of the year before recommending rooftop, ground-mount, battery or a lease. We survey the buildings, check for asbestos and confirm the structure before issuing a fixed-price proposal, so the quoted figure holds. Because the grid connection is the slowest step, we submit the G99 application early, alongside the survey, and where export capacity is tight we can design for self-consumption only to cut the timeline. For tenanted land we handle the landlord conversation and provide the lease addendum, and where an institutional landlord is involved we work to their standard tenant-PV process. Every install comes with an insurance-backed workmanship warranty, and where a lease is the better route we model that honestly against ownership rather than steering you towards the option that suits us.

An illustrative example

As an illustrative composite based on typical UK arable projects, and not a real named client or real project, a large family arable farm with around 12 acres of marginal pasture leases the land to a UK developer for a 1.8 MW ground-mount array of roughly 3,300 panels, generating about 1.7 million kWh a year. The lease runs 25 years at around 1,200 pounds per acre per year with a built-in ratchet, the land continues to graze sheep, and biodiversity actions stack with the lease income under the Sustainable Farming Incentive. The figures are illustrative and depend on your land, grid position and the developer terms available in your region; we model your own options before anything is signed, and we would never present a worked example as a guaranteed outcome for a different holding.

If you also run livestock or a glasshouse, see livestock solar and horticulture and glasshouse solar. To weigh ownership against leasing, read the cost guide and the grants and funding page, then request a free feasibility or read the agricultural solar FAQs.