Saving Farmland by Flooding It: The Deniers’ Latest Triumph

A recent programme on the flooding risk of the Somerset Levels got me to do some research.

The next time a climate denier tells you that solar panels are “taking perfectly good farmland out of production”, offer them a map. Not of a solar farm, but of England’s flood-risk zones. Then watch the penny drop, assuming it ever does.

We now know that about 13 per cent of England’s agricultural land is already at risk from river or coastal flooding. That is not a forecast; that is today’s position. Move to the best farmland, the Grade 1 stuff that actually feeds people, and the figure jumps to a staggering 59 per cent. More than half of our most productive soil sits in areas the Environment Agency says are vulnerable. The Somerset Levels are simply the bit the public notice because the water sits there long enough to become news footage.

Now set that beside the numbers for renewables. The entire UK ground-mounted solar fleet covers roughly 0.1 per cent of the country. If we expanded solar massively, to 90 gigawatts, it would still use well under half of one per cent of UK land. Even the onshore wind plus solar combination that would give England thirteen times its current renewables generation comes in at less than 3 per cent of England’s land area. And this is land where sheep graze quite happily under the panels, crops grow between the rows, and the biodiversity is often better than on chemically hammered arable fields.

So which is the real threat to food security? Is it the panels that coexist with grazing, or the floods driven by a warming climate that will take acres out of use altogether? The arithmetic is clear. Renewable energy uses a rounding error of land. Climate change wipes out entire landscapes.

But this is what happens when opinion is given the same status as truth. People rail against the technology that protects farmland, and defend the fossil fuels that are busy drowning it. The logic is upside down, the evidence is ignored, and the loudest voices on social media shout about “saving the countryside” while backing the very policies that will put it underwater.

Solar farms are not the enemy of British agriculture. Fossil fuels are. The sooner we stop indulging comforting nonsense, the sooner we can start protecting the land that actually feeds us.