How much farmland has SOLAR really taken?

Solar farms divide people in a way that few other pieces of infrastructure do. Supporters see the cheapest electricity Britain has ever built, put up in months rather than decades, quietly earning a rent for farmers whose margins on wheat or barley have been thin for years. Opponents see glass and steel spreading across the countryside, fields fenced off, views changed, and above all good farmland lost at a time when the country imports nearly half its food. Both sides are arguing from a real place. Where they part company is on scale, and scale is something a map can settle.

So I set out to measure it, using data anyone can check. OpenStreetMap, the volunteer built map of the world, holds a traced outline of nearly every solar farm in Britain: 1,716 sites once duplicates are merged and rooftop arrays are set aside. To be sure the map was not missing anything, I cross checked it against the government's own Renewable Energy Planning Database, which lists every solar project above about 150 kW that has passed through planning. OpenStreetMap turned out to contain 94% of the operational ground-mounted sites on the register and 98% of their capacity. The 68 sites it lacks add up to 191 MW, and I have added them at their registered footprint. The picture that follows is therefore complete to within about 2%.

Two hundred and twenty four square kilometres

Every solar farm in the United Kingdom, drawn at its real footprint, covers about 224 km². That is 0.09% of the country's land. Drawn at true scale on a map of Britain the sites are barely visible, which is not a trick of the graphic but the actual proportion. Gathered into a single block they would make a square 15 km on a side, roughly the size of the Isle of Sheppey.

Set beside other things we give land to, from the same map, solar looks small. Golf courses take 1,191 km², five times as much. Military training land takes over 1,800 km². Quarries take 484 km², airports and airfields 312 km². Cemeteries and allotments each take a little over half what solar does. Nobody argues that golf is eating Britain's food supply.

The best land

The sharper version of the objection is not that solar takes farmland in general but that it takes the best farmland, the Grade 1 and 2 land that grows the country's vegetables and highest yielding cereals. That is a fair thing to check, and the answer is not zero. Overlaying the solar footprints on Natural England's Agricultural Land Classification, 7.9 km² of England's solar sits on Grade 1 land and 32 km² on Grade 2. Together that is 40 km², a fifth of England's solar area, and 0.18% of England's Grade 1 and 2 land. A further 121 km² sits on Grade 3, which the national map does not split into the better 3a and the poorer 3b; the developer surveys that make that distinction are not published in one place. Around 30 km² is on Grade 4 and 5 land or on land not classed as agricultural at all.

Put plainly: for every thousand hectares of England's best farmland, solar occupies just under two. Across all graded farmland in England the figure is 0.17%. Nearly every solar lease is also for a fixed term, typically 25 to 40 years, on land that returns to farming afterwards, and a growing share of sites graze sheep between the rows.

What the argument is really about

None of this means every application is well sited, or that a village losing the fields around it is wrong to mind. Local concentration is real: the densest 40 km square in the country, around Cambridge and Newmarket, holds 39 sites, and even there they cover under 1% of the ground. The land use objection deserves an answer on the merits, and the honest answer is that solar's footprint on British farmland, and on the best farmland in particular, is small by any measure you choose. Whatever the case against a particular site, the national numbers do not support the idea that solar is consuming the country's capacity to feed itself.

Method notes. Solar footprints are OpenStreetMap polygons tagged as solar power plants (data as of May 2026), overlapping outlines merged, rooftop plants excluded, plus 68 operational sites from the DESNZ Renewable Energy Planning Database (Q2 2026) not yet in OSM, drawn at their registered site area or 2.2 hectares per megawatt. Comparison land uses are OSM polygons for the same tags across the UK, dissolved to remove overlaps; OSM's coverage of quarries, landfill and allotments is likely incomplete, so those are undercounts. Farmland grades are from Natural England's provisional Agricultural Land Classification at 1:250,000, so attribution is approximate at the scale of a single field, and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland use different systems and are excluded from the grade analysis. Maps are on the British National Grid, which preserves area. All map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.