Rebekah Housden: Solar farms are a threat to farming life

It’s hard to imagine a world without farming – a world without the characters who make our communities or the methods that shape our countryside.

Our recent Cumberland Show was a wonderful day for people to learn about agriculture.

The organisers had gone to town and there was a farming or countryside demonstration running all day.

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About the author

Rebekah Housden

Rebekah Housden is based at Roadhead in Cumbria, and has worked on a farm with 600 ewes for 11 years. She also shares a smallholding of 90 ewes. She is a first-responder, a parish clerk, runs a community bar and caters for rural weddings. 

Read more articles by Rebekah Housden

The local farm park brought along a selection of animals, while children “ooed” and “aarred”.

On a break from my duties as one of the show secretaries, I took a walk around and wondered how many of the public realise how much danger farming is in.

Until recently, the biggest threat to agriculture here has been commercial tree planting.

Some parishes have seen much of their surface area taken up with plantations.

There are cases where it has commenced under the guise of mixed woodland, and even on sites previously protected as sites of special scientific interest.

We hear whispers of solar farms swallowing up multiple farms elsewhere in an unstoppable gulp, but it feels like something happening in a distant land, not likely to trouble Cumbria with its infrequent sunshine. 

However, recently there have been stone wagons thundering up the road.

These convoys are usually only seen when they install new roads in the forestry, but this is for a different development – the solar farms have reached our little corner of tranquility, and they need roads and solid footings.

More farming land swallowed up by a scheme to save the planet. More curlews, lapwings and endangered animals displaced by a “green” policy.

For 180 years, the farmers of Cumbria have put on a great agricultural show, with the top-class animals on display an absolute credit to their producers.

But behind it all, the shadow of the solar farms, inheritance tax worries, hill farmers urged to clear the fells, the impossible labyrinth that tenant farmers face, the brick wall in front of new farmers wanting to stand on their own two feet.

But somehow, as they say, the show must go on.