There’s a romantic version of farming being peddled in the solar debate on Romney Marsh, and as someone who farms here, I barely recognise it. In that version, every acre is bursting with wheat, every harvest pays its way and farmers simply need protecting from wicked developers waving cheque books. I wish farming were that straightforward. It isn’t.
My livelihood depends on what comes out of this land. That means weather I can’t control, yields I can’t guarantee and bills that arrive long before I know what the harvest will bring. Fertiliser, diesel, machinery, seed, labour and repairs don’t wait for a good year.
And lately the weather has been giving us a hiding.
July 2026 was England’s driest July on record. Southern England received just 1.9mm of rain, 3% of its long-term average, while Kent was among 19 counties recording 1mm or less. On 10 August, Kent and East Sussex were formally moved into drought. Those figures aren’t an interesting weather story to me. They’re the conditions I’m expected to make a living from.
The economics are just as sobering. Defra forecasts average Farm Business Income on English cereal farms falling by two-thirds in 2025/26, from £49,700 to £17,000, the lowest level since the present series began in 2004/05. General cropping farms are forecast to see average income halve from £107,700 to £54,000. Fertiliser and soil improver prices rose 11% in 2025, with ammonium nitrate averaging £385 a tonne, up from £338 the year before.
So when Hands Off Our Marsh and councillors talk about protecting the “farming economy”, I’d like them to ask the people who have to make it pay.
A farm isn’t preserved because somebody stops a solar development. A farm survives because the figures add up. If part of my holding can provide dependable income for decades while I keep ownership, retain agricultural activity where practical and eventually get the land back, I’d be daft not to consider it.
That isn’t abandoning farming. It’s diversification. Farmers have always diversified because relying on one unpredictable income is risky. Solar is another option.
The Government’s Solar Roadmap gives a useful example. A 509-acre farm near Sheringham in Norfolk put about 20 acres of moderate-quality agricultural land into solar. Forty ewes and their lambs still graze there from April to October, while the farm receives income from lamb and solar rent. The Government says those two streams help underpin the business against fluctuating crop prices.
That’s the bit some campaigners seem remarkably reluctant to discuss. Rent is predictable. Harvests aren’t.
Hands Off Our Marsh has every right to object. I share some concerns. I want drainage protected, proper soil surveys, construction traffic controlled and batteries scrutinised. I don’t want the best land sacrificed where poorer land would do, or developers making promises they aren’t held to.
But Hands Off Our Marsh doesn’t speak for every farmer or resident. Its website warns that projects could put up to 8,000 acres under solar and frames the issue around prime farmland and food security. Those arguments deserve testing. They don’t prove every solar scheme is wrong.
We’ve already seen why the detail matters. At St Mary’s Road, opposite Marten Farm, Folkestone & Hythe District Council approved a roughly 40-hectare solar farm in January. Council mapping had indicated Grades 1 and 2, but a field-specific Agricultural Land Classification survey found the whole site to be Grade 3b, moderate-quality land. The limiting factors included heavy silty clay loam and wetness. Claims about “prime Marsh farmland” need testing against soil evidence.
The scheme also allows sheep grazing around and beneath the panels. The officer report says the land will remain in pastoral agricultural use and, after the 40-year operational period, the equipment must be removed and the site restored to agricultural use apart from retained landscaping. KCC Ecology, Kent Fire and Rescue, the Environment Agency and the Internal Drainage Board raised no objection in principle, subject to conditions where applicable. The committee approved it eight votes to four.
Cllr David Wimble has publicly backed Hands Off Our Marsh and opposed St Mary’s Road, raising agricultural-land and grid concerns. He’s entitled to challenge it. But councillors must deal with the evidence: the detailed survey said Grade 3b, relevant consultees raised no objection in principle and officers recommended approval. Opposition doesn’t turn Grade 3b into Grade 1.
South Brooks is vastly bigger and raises much harder questions. The scheme covers about 1,208 hectares and is proposed for 60 years. Of the 812 hectares surveyed so far, 84% has been classed as Best and Most Versatile land: 1% Grade 1, 51% Grade 2 and 32% Grade 3a. Another 15% is Grade 3b and 1% Grade 4. The council is right to demand the final classification, justification for using higher-quality land and proper assessment of farming and cumulative effects.
Being pro-solar doesn’t require me to switch my brain off. If a developer wants hundreds of hectares of Grade 2 land, it must explain why. If panels can go onto poorer land, they should. If drainage, soil, farm businesses or habitats can’t be safeguarded, the scheme should change. That’s planning: an evidence test, not a referendum on panels.
At Folkestone & Hythe’s Planning and Licensing Committee on Tuesday 21 July 2026, members were considering the council’s consultation response to South Brooks. They weren’t deciding whether the solar farm would go ahead; the Chair made that explicit. It’s a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project and any eventual Development Consent Order will be determined nationally after examination.
At 54 minutes and eight seconds, Cllr Goddard said he wasn’t against solar and could accept Parcel D. Then the speech changed gear. Referring to new Prime Minister Andy Burnham, he said: “Take the panels with him, take them up north. The people of Marsh, the people of Marsh do not want this.”
Well, Councillor, I’m one of the people of the Marsh.
I farm here. I want the option of solar because I have to keep a farm alive through drought, volatile crop returns and unpredictable costs. Cllr Goddard doesn’t get to turn “the people of the Marsh” into one convenient voice because it plays well in the chamber. Nor does Hands Off Our Marsh.
He should stop playing the room and start talking to us farmers. He might learn something.
There’s an irony here. Andy Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July, the day before that committee meeting. On 14 August his Government announced £65 million of extra drought support after the record-dry July. The Government said this was the third drought in five years and stressed that farmers shouldn’t be left carrying the risks of a changing climate alone. Cllr Goddard congratulated Burnham, then suggested sending the panels north. Perhaps he should also listen to what the new Prime Minister is saying about the pressures farmers face.
Then there’s the cry of “put it on roofs”.
Yes. Put solar on warehouses, schools, hospitals, supermarkets, houses and car parks. But roofs and fields aren’t an either-or choice. The Government’s Solar Roadmap says current-policy projections could see 60–65% of installed solar capacity by 2030 coming from large-scale projects. Solar currently uses around 0.1% of total UK land; the high end of the Government’s 2030 scenario would take that to about 0.4%. The same policy says poorer agricultural land should be preferred and Best and Most Versatile land must be justified.
The wildlife argument needs the same care. Solar can be badly designed and badly managed, but it isn’t automatically an ecological dead zone. Research involving the RSPB and University of Cambridge found nature-friendly solar farms in East Anglia supported nearly three times as many birds per hectare as surrounding arable land. At St Mary’s Road, the biodiversity metric predicts an 80.92% gain in habitat units, 387.87% in hedgerow units and 28.09% in watercourse units. Those gains now have to be delivered and monitored.
I don’t want Romney Marsh indiscriminately carpeted with panels or every scheme waved through. I want the right development on the right land, protected drainage and soil, enforceable restoration and developers made to prove their case.
But I also want councillors and campaigners to stop talking about farmers as though we’re scenery in somebody else’s countryside.
Romney Marsh is a working landscape. Working landscapes have to earn money. If putting solar on part of a farm provides stable income that allows the rest of that farm to keep producing food, employing people, maintaining ditches and staying viable, that matters too.
I don’t need Hands Off Our Marsh or a councillor deciding on my behalf that diversification is somehow a betrayal of farming.
I need the freedom to decide how I keep farming.
And when a councillor tells a room that “the people of Marsh” don’t want solar, he might remember that some of us are out here trying to make a living from the Marsh he’s talking about.
The views expressed in this guest post are those of the individual contributor and do not necessarily reflect those of the Shepway Vox Team.
Have a story that needs telling, or information you think may interest us? Please get in touch. All correspondence will be treated in the strictest confidence. TheShepwayVoxTeam@proton.me
There’s a lot in this piece we agree with. Farming is hard, drought is a real and growing risk, farm incomes have taken a genuine hit, and farmers are entitled to diversify however makes sense for their business, solar included. Hands Off Our Marsh has never said otherwise, and nothing above changes that.
Where we part ways is the idea that this is fundamentally a story about one farmer’s freedom to use his own land. It isn’t, and the Norfolk example in the piece actually shows why: twenty acres of a 509-acre farm, land retained, sheep still grazing underneath. Nobody objects to that.
South Brooks is a different scale of question. It’s roughly 1,208 hectares, proposed for 60 years, and of the land surveyed so far, 84% has been classified Best and Most Versatile (1% Grade 1, 51% Grade 2, 32% Grade 3a). That’s the developer’s own figure, and it’s not one they had reason to inflate, the same policy this piece cites means BMV land makes approval harder, not easier. A number that runs against the applicant’s own interest is worth taking at face value. It also isn’t proposed in isolation. South Kent Energy Park (859 hectares) and Shepway Energy Park (406 hectares) are proposed for the same stretch of Marsh, which puts around 2,473 hectares, over 6,100 acres, under some form of large-scale energy development boundary between the three schemes. Not every acre inside those boundaries will carry panels. But that’s the actual conversation this area needs, cumulative scale, not one field at a time.
On St Mary’s Road specifically: the piece is right that claims about land quality should be tested against evidence, and we’d go further than the piece does. That Grade 3b finding came from a survey commissioned by the applicant, Environmena, for their own application. Unlike South Brooks’ figure, that result is the one that suits the applicant’s own case (it clears the same BMV hurdle rather than complicating it). That’s exactly the kind of finding that needs checking against an independent source. Natural England’s provisional Agricultural Land Classification, cited in the Shepway Energy Park EIA Scoping Report (Part 4, pages 82 and 85, doc ref EN0110017-000005) for the same stretch of land, places that site within a Grade 2 area. Same test in both cases: a developer’s number carries more weight against their own interest, and needs independent checking when it happens to run in their favour.
One correction worth making plainly: HOOM doesn’t speak through any councillor, and no councillor speaks for us. What gets said in a committee room, by anyone, on either side, isn’t our position. Ours is what we’ve put in writing.
Nor do we claim to speak for every farmer, or for “the people of the Marsh” as a single voice. We’ve spoken to farmers who support these schemes, farmers who oppose them, and farmers still weighing up what they’d mean.
The question isn’t whether this farmer, or any farmer, should be free to diversify. It’s whether the scale of what’s being proposed across Romney Marsh, taken together, has been properly tested. And so far, that testing keeps turning up inconsistencies like the one above.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
Discover more from ShepwayVox Dissent is not a Crime
Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.
There’s a lot in this piece we agree with. Farming is hard, drought is a real and growing risk, farm incomes have taken a genuine hit, and farmers are entitled to diversify however makes sense for their business, solar included. Hands Off Our Marsh has never said otherwise, and nothing above changes that.
Where we part ways is the idea that this is fundamentally a story about one farmer’s freedom to use his own land. It isn’t, and the Norfolk example in the piece actually shows why: twenty acres of a 509-acre farm, land retained, sheep still grazing underneath. Nobody objects to that.
South Brooks is a different scale of question. It’s roughly 1,208 hectares, proposed for 60 years, and of the land surveyed so far, 84% has been classified Best and Most Versatile (1% Grade 1, 51% Grade 2, 32% Grade 3a). That’s the developer’s own figure, and it’s not one they had reason to inflate, the same policy this piece cites means BMV land makes approval harder, not easier. A number that runs against the applicant’s own interest is worth taking at face value. It also isn’t proposed in isolation. South Kent Energy Park (859 hectares) and Shepway Energy Park (406 hectares) are proposed for the same stretch of Marsh, which puts around 2,473 hectares, over 6,100 acres, under some form of large-scale energy development boundary between the three schemes. Not every acre inside those boundaries will carry panels. But that’s the actual conversation this area needs, cumulative scale, not one field at a time.
On St Mary’s Road specifically: the piece is right that claims about land quality should be tested against evidence, and we’d go further than the piece does. That Grade 3b finding came from a survey commissioned by the applicant, Environmena, for their own application. Unlike South Brooks’ figure, that result is the one that suits the applicant’s own case (it clears the same BMV hurdle rather than complicating it). That’s exactly the kind of finding that needs checking against an independent source. Natural England’s provisional Agricultural Land Classification, cited in the Shepway Energy Park EIA Scoping Report (Part 4, pages 82 and 85, doc ref EN0110017-000005) for the same stretch of land, places that site within a Grade 2 area. Same test in both cases: a developer’s number carries more weight against their own interest, and needs independent checking when it happens to run in their favour.
One correction worth making plainly: HOOM doesn’t speak through any councillor, and no councillor speaks for us. What gets said in a committee room, by anyone, on either side, isn’t our position. Ours is what we’ve put in writing.
Nor do we claim to speak for every farmer, or for “the people of the Marsh” as a single voice. We’ve spoken to farmers who support these schemes, farmers who oppose them, and farmers still weighing up what they’d mean.
The question isn’t whether this farmer, or any farmer, should be free to diversify. It’s whether the scale of what’s being proposed across Romney Marsh, taken together, has been properly tested. And so far, that testing keeps turning up inconsistencies like the one above.
Kim, Co-Director, Hands Off Our Marsh