Farmers who are losing half farmland despite court battle say firms ‘just riding roughshod over us’
The current solar farm movement is more about large companies riding roughshod over communities than it is about sustainability and the environment, say farmers losing half their farmland despite a high court battle.
Tenant farmers Robert and Emma Sturdy have been campaigning since 2022 to prevent what is almost half the farmland they rent from The Fitzwilliam Trust being taken off them and handed to Harmony Energy to site 90,000 solar panels.
Despite East Riding Council refusing Harmony’s original application, and a campaign which went to the High Court, a planning inspector ruled in February the solar farm should go ahead on what is best agricultural land.
Emma Sturdy said even though they had lost, she encouraged other farmers and communities to speak up and fight for their land.
She told the Yorkshire Post: “We have had some time to digest it and still think it is wrong but there has to come a point where you say ‘there is no more we can do’.
“We were never doing this to be difficult. We were just doing it to get what we felt we needed and was fair. We gave it everything we could and the planning system has failed us and we have lost.
“What we are struggling with now is the landlord not paying us what they said.”
The payment the Sturdys will get is a legal requirement to get out of the tenancy. It won’t recognise the loss to business, the farm or food security and their argument was “lost” on the inspector.
All that is left for the Sturdys, and their two young children, is to hope they make enough money this harvest to pay for the legal bills and that they can stay on the farm, which has been tenanted by Robert’s family for three generations.
Mrs Sturdy said: “We are not sure how it is going to pan out, we are just hoping we will get another harvest to pay the bills for it.
“We have no intention of leaving or walking away. It was never an option. It is our home, it is more than just a business or a farm. We will do whatever we can to stay and hope we can.”
They will have to farm more intensively to make up the shortfall, be less entrepreneurial or varied and stick to wheat which is the best yielding crop and cattle.
All while feeling vulnerable, she added.
“It makes us feel very unsettled in a way we should not be made to feel and did not deserve to feel. It has altered the way we feel about everything and how we farm. We are going to have to work harder to meet the loss.
“This is not about sustainability and the environment. It is about companies saying sod everybody at ground level and communities who have no say.
“You have to have a moment and say ‘I just can’t change it, there is nothing we can do’. We are just not big enough.”