Barn roofs are the cheapest square footage on the farm, and a milking parlour draws hardest exactly when the sun is up. We design from your consumption data, tell you honestly whether it pays, and show you the ways to pay, including options that lower what you need to find upfront.
Milk cooling, vacuum pumps, grain drying, ventilation, irrigation and refrigeration all draw power through the middle of the day, which is precisely when a roof full of panels is producing. That overlap is the whole game. A site that uses most of what it generates is a site where the numbers work, and it is why a modest array on a working farm often pays back faster than a much larger one on a building that sits empty until five o'clock.
The second reason is the roofs. Barns and outbuildings tend to be large, unshaded, south-facing more often than not, and structurally simple. They are also doing nothing else.
The third is that farm businesses are usually asset-rich and cash-tight at the same time, which is an awkward combination for a capital purchase. That is why how you pay matters as much as what you install. More on that below.
Most buildings use their electricity in the evening. Farms do not.
Barn and outbuilding roofs are almost always the right answer first. No land comes out of production, the planning position is far simpler, and the cable runs to where the load actually is. We will want to know the age and condition of the roof sheets, because there is no sense fixing a twenty-five year array to a roof with ten years left in it. If the sheets need replacing, it is worth doing both at once.
Ground mount is a different proposition. Permitted development for a stand-alone solar installation on non-domestic land is narrow: one installation within the curtilage of a building, no more than four metres high, no more than nine square metres of surface area, no dimension over three metres, and normally at least five metres from the boundary. Nine square metres is roughly four panels. Anything of a useful size is therefore a full planning application, assessed on landscape and visual impact, glint and glare, heritage, biodiversity, drainage, agricultural land classification and decommissioning.
That is not a reason to rule ground mount out. Plenty of farm schemes get consent. It is a reason to plan for a planning application with a proper timescale rather than assuming it works like a barn roof. Anyone telling you otherwise has not read the order.
What happens to the land underneath. It normally stays in use. Sheep grazing under and around ground-mounted arrays is common, the ground beneath is usually left to grass, and the panels are mounted high enough to allow access for both maintenance and stock.
Everything on the farm's supply, but the return comes from the equipment that runs in daylight.
Milk cooling and vacuum pumps are close to the ideal solar load: heavy, daily, and concentrated in the milking windows. Plate coolers and water heating add to it.
Grain drying is the big one, and it has the useful property of peaking in late summer when generation is at its highest.
Ventilation, lighting and water heating, running through the day, all year.
Pumps draw hard in exactly the dry, bright conditions that produce the most generation.
Smaller loads, but steady ones.
Where it works less well: a holding whose electricity use is mostly domestic and evening-weighted, or one where the only substantial load is a single seasonal operation. We would tell you that at assessment stage rather than after installation.
We work from your consumption data rather than your roof area, because roof area tells us what will fit and consumption tells us what is worth fitting.
| System size | Typical installed cost | Roughly what it suits |
|---|---|---|
| 30 kWp | £18,000 to £24,000 | A single large barn roof, dairy or mixed holding |
| 50 kWp | £30,000 to £40,000 | Multiple buildings, or one substantial shed |
| 100 kWp | £60,000 to £80,000 | A larger holding with grain drying or significant refrigeration |
| 250 kWp | £150,000 to £200,000 | Multi-building estate or a site with heavy processing load |
On payback. The figure is driven far more by the share of generation you use on site than by the size of the array. A holding consuming most of what it produces pays back considerably faster than one exporting half of it at whatever the current export rate happens to be. We model that from your actual half-hourly data, in writing, and we do not put a payback figure on this page, because a payback figure that is not calculated from your own usage is decoration.
On tax. HMRC classifies solar equipment as a special-rate asset. It does not qualify for full expensing, though qualifying expenditure may attract the Annual Investment Allowance or the 50% special-rate first-year allowance depending on your circumstances. We are not accountants, we will not pretend to be, and your own will want the figures. We will supply whatever they ask for.
For a farm business, how you pay is often as important as what you install.
Buy it outright. You own the system, keep all the generation and take the capital allowances described above. Usually the cheapest route over the life of the system, if the capital is there.
A lower price, with a battery on site. On suitable holdings we can reduce what you pay for the solar by including a battery that is run in the electricity and flexibility markets, either hosted by us or owned by you with an agreed share of its trading revenue. That revenue is variable and never guaranteed, and the contract sets out exactly who owns and controls what.
Funded. On some projects a third party pays for and owns the system, and you buy the electricity it generates. It depends on your consumption, the roof, the tenure and a credit assessment, and tenanted land brings in the landlord.
We will tell you quickly which of these your holding qualifies for, rather than letting you find out after a survey.
Rooftop solar on an agricultural building often falls under permitted development, but "often" is doing real work in that sentence.
Solar equipment on a non-domestic building, including agricultural buildings, subject to every limitation in the order. The old one-megawatt ceiling was removed in 2023, so size alone no longer rules it out.
Installations above 50 kWp need prior approval from the local planning authority, covering siting, design and the effect of glare on neighbouring occupiers. That is a planning threshold and it has nothing to do with the grid connection threshold, which is a separate question with separate numbers.
Equipment must not protrude more than 0.2 metres beyond the plane of the roof slope or wall, must not sit higher than the highest part of a pitched roof, and must not stand more than one metre above the highest part of a flat roof.
Listed buildings and land within their curtilage, and scheduled monuments. On conservation-area and World Heritage Site land, additional limits apply. Councils can also remove permitted development rights locally through an Article 4 direction.
as above, is a much narrower right in practice and normally means a full application.
We check all of this at assessment stage and tell you in writing what applies to your buildings. Where the position is genuinely uncertain, the right answer is written confirmation from the planning authority before anyone orders equipment, not an installer's opinion.
A farm is a high-soiling environment.
That is not a sales line, it is one of the specific conditions where industry guidance agrees cleaning is genuinely worth doing.
Ploughing and harvest dust, grain dust, lime, and fouling from birds around farm buildings all settle on panels and do not fully rinse off in rain. On a shallow-pitched barn roof they settle faster and stay longer. A farm array will need cleaning on a schedule that a suburban semi will not.
We would rather build that into the plan from the start than have you discover it three years in and wonder why generation is drifting down. It is also why a maintenance agreement on a farm array is usually worth having, where on a domestic roof it often is not. Cleaning · Servicing and maintenance
The birds are worth a separate mention. Barn roofs attract pigeons, pigeons nest under panels, and nesting material under a live array is both a generation problem and a fire-safety consideration. Bird proofing is usually cheaper fitted at installation than retrofitted after two years of occupation.
We plan access around the operation rather than the other way round. Milking times, harvest, lambing and calving, livestock movements, and the tracks that will not take a telehandler after a wet week.
Site-specific risk assessments and method statements before anyone arrives. Public and employer's liability cover of £10 million. One short planned interruption for the electrical connection, agreed with you in advance. Gates shut.
Usually yes, and often more so than for a typical business, because farms tend to combine large unshaded roofs with heavy daytime electricity use. Milking parlours, refrigeration, grain drying, irrigation and workshops all draw power exactly when the sun is up, which is the pattern that makes solar pay.
Either, and often both. Barn and outbuilding roofs are usually the first choice because they need no land and no planning complications. Ground-mounted arrays make sense where roof space is limited or the system needs to be larger than the buildings can carry.
Anything on the farm's electricity supply. The best returns come from equipment running through daylight hours, particularly refrigeration and milk cooling, grain drying, ventilation and irrigation pumps.
Not always. You can buy outright, and on suitable holdings there are ways to lower the upfront cost, which we compare for you in writing. Farm businesses are often asset-rich and cash-tight, so it is worth asking early.
Rooftop installations on agricultural buildings often fall under permitted development, but there are size and siting thresholds, and ground-mounted arrays are more likely to need a full application. We check this before anything is designed.
More than most people expect, and this is one of the genuine cases where regular cleaning is worth paying for. Agricultural dust, along with bird fouling from farm buildings, is one of the recognised high-soiling conditions where panels do not self-clean adequately in rain. We would rather build maintenance into the plan from the start than have you discover it three years in.
It usually stays in use. Sheep grazing under and around ground-mounted arrays is common, and the ground beneath is typically left to grass. The panels are mounted high enough to allow access for maintenance and stock.
That is genuinely enough to start. We will come back with a view on system size, what it would cost, what share of your own use it would cover, which ways to pay suit you, and whether the planning position is straightforward or not. If your holding is not a good candidate, we will tell you that too.
We take on agricultural projects across the UK, including Scotland, Wales, London, the Midlands and the North East.
