Agrivoltaics in the UK: grazing and cropping alongside solar

“Agrivoltaics” sounds like a lab experiment. In practice, on UK farms, it’s usually something familiar: sheep grazing between rows of solar panels. From a hedge line away, the farm looks much as it always has.

The idea is simple: combine solar generation with continued food production on the same land, rather than choosing one or the other. In just a couple of years, this has moved from a niche pilot to a recognised part of national solar policy. It’s now one of the most useful tools a farm or landowner has when weighing up a ground-mount solar scheme.

This piece explains how agrivoltaics works physically. It also covers why it matters for planning, and what to check before committing land to it.

What agrivoltaics actually means

At its simplest, agrivoltaics is any arrangement that keeps land in agricultural use — grazing or cropping — while solar panels also generate power on it. Rather than choosing one use or the other, the land does both jobs at once.

In the UK, this overwhelmingly means one of two models. The first is livestock grazing beneath and between conventional or elevated panel rows. The second is arable cropping in wider rows, with the panels mounted high enough, and spaced far enough apart, to let machinery and enough light through.

A smaller but growing third category uses tracking or vertical bifacial panels designed specifically to share light with a growing crop. These remain far less common on UK farms than the grazing model, however.

Solar grazing means running sheep to manage vegetation on and around an array, instead of mowing it. It’s by some distance the most established and most widely deployed form of agrivoltaics in the UK. In fact, most existing UK solar farms already use some form of it — even where nobody involved calls it “agrivoltaics.”

How it works physically: grazing versus cropping

The two models need genuinely different engineering. It’s worth understanding this before assuming a site can simply do either one.

	Grazing (sheep)	Arable cropping
Typical panel clearance	0.8–1.2 m below the panel’s lower edge on a standard ground-mount frame	2.5–4 m above ground, on elevated steel posts, to let machinery pass beneath
Row spacing	Standard commercial spacing; sheep move freely between and under rows	Wider inter-row spacing, sized to the farm’s own combine, sprayer or drill width
Structure	Conventional fixed-tilt or single-axis tracker frames	Taller, more expensive elevated frames, or vertical bifacial panels between crop strips
Livestock/crop choice	Hardy, low-stature breeds — Welsh Mules, Romneys, Shetlands and Suffolk crosses are common, chosen so animals don’t rub cabling or damage frames	Shade-tolerant crops perform best; UK and international trial work has found maize, Swiss chard and beans among the crops that tolerate the partial shading well, and reduced evaporation under panels can improve water efficiency
Site management	Grazing replaces mechanical mowing — a genuine maintenance saving for the solar operator, not just a farming add-on	Requires the array’s row layout and mounting height to be designed around the crop and machinery from the outset, not retrofitted

The grazing model is cheaper and simpler. That’s because it uses standard ground-mount hardware — the panels don’t need to sit any higher than a conventional array already does. The cropping model asks more of the design: taller posts, wider rows, and a layout planned around specific machinery. All of this costs more to build. It also reduces panel density — and therefore generation — per hectare, compared with a solar-only scheme.

That trade-off means giving up some generating capacity in exchange for keeping the land in full arable production. A feasibility study needs to work through this calculation before a landowner commits, because the right answer depends on the land’s grade, its existing use, and what a developer is actually prepared to build.

The planning case: answering the BMV objection

This is where agrivoltaics earns its place in the conversation, not just as an environmental nicety. National planning policy steers ground-mounted solar away from Grade 1, 2 and 3a farmland. This land is officially termed “Best and Most Versatile” (BMV) land, and policy instead favours Grade 3b and below. The reasoning is straightforward: the country’s best food-producing land shouldn’t be permanently taken out of production. As a result, a solar-only scheme on strong farmland is one of the more common grounds for planning refusal or objection.

A well-evidenced agrivoltaic scheme answers that objection directly. The land demonstrably stays in agricultural use, rather than being lost to it — and that’s no longer a fringe argument. In particular, the UK government’s Solar Roadmap, published in June 2025 explicitly recognises dual-use and agrivoltaic solar as part of the route to the government’s 45–47 GW solar target for 2030.

Separate University of Sheffield research published in February 2025 went further. It concluded that the UK has enough agrivoltaic potential to meet its 2030 solar ambitions several times over, without permanently sacrificing farmland. The researchers named Cambridgeshire, Essex and the wider East and South East of England as particularly well suited, thanks to their flat land, existing arable base, grid connectivity and solar resource.

None of that guarantees consent on any specific site. The underlying Agricultural Land Classification (ALC) grade still matters. A credible agrivoltaic scheme also has to be genuinely evidenced — a real grazing or cropping plan, not a token gesture. Still, on land that struggles against the BMV policy test, agrivoltaics is one of the few design choices that can change the planning odds.

A UK example: Bracks Solar Farm, Cambridgeshire

The Bracks solar farm in East Cambridgeshire is a useful real-world reference point, rather than a hypothetical one. The 30.1MW site has allowed local farmers to graze sheep on the land since 2024, alongside hedgerow planting and nest-box provision for birds and bats. It sits on exactly the kind of large, flat East Anglian arable land that the Sheffield research flags as well suited to agrivoltaics. As a working example, it shows that a large ground-mount scheme and continued farming can go together.

Practical considerations for a landowner

Before treating agrivoltaics as the answer to a difficult planning position, it’s worth working through a few questions. These determine whether it will actually work on your land:

• Who manages the livestock or crop, and under what agreement? Options include a developer-run grazing licence with a local grazier, a direct arrangement with the landowner’s own flock, or a share-farming arrangement for cropping. Each option carries different income, liability and management implications.
• Does the frame height and spacing suit your actual equipment or stock? A cropping scheme designed around someone else’s machinery width is no use if it doesn’t match what you run.
• What happens to Basic Payment Scheme successor payments or Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) eligibility on the leased area? Agri-environment scheme rules and eligibility criteria change fairly often, so check this against the current scheme rules for the specific land. Don’t assume it from an older scheme’s terms.
• How is the land classified, and has that been surveyed recently? An ALC survey done years ago, or an assumption based on soil type alone, isn’t a substitute for a current assessment. This matters especially where BMV status is contested.
• What’s the decommissioning and reinstatement position? As with any ground-mount lease, the agreement should specify who returns the land to full agricultural condition, and when, at the end of the term.
• Does the income and structure fit alongside — or instead of — a land lease? Agrivoltaics is one design choice within a wider land-use decision, not a separate product.

Where this sits in the wider land decision

Agrivoltaics answers a planning question — it isn’t, on its own, a financial one. Whether continued grazing or cropping alongside a solar array is the right structure for your land still depends on the same fundamentals as any other scheme. These include the site’s grid connection, its ALC grade, the lease or licence terms on offer, and how the income compares with farming the land conventionally or leasing it outright.

If you’re weighing an agrivoltaic proposal against a straightforward land lease or self-supply, our land lease versus on-site solar guide sets out that broader comparison in detail. And where a feasibility study is the right next step for a specific site, that’s exactly the assessment our agriculture and land advisory work is built around.