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Well a friend of mine, he approached me... "if you've got a bit of land, do something"
and we said... "yes!"
This is a perfect location for it. It is agricultural land, we grow wheat and *** on it but basically
you can't grow anything else... so it's an absolute perfect location for a solar farm.
Got planning permission, we had a village meeting to see what the local community thought
about it: no problems at all. So it went ahead... got set up in about two months, they built
the whole site, and it's been performing very very well.
Since the solar farm's been here i mean, we've had... my big passion is my gray partridge
and wild English partridge are very rare... around this area anyway. And since we've had
the solar farm here we had two pairs on here, we had two pairs brought off ten young last
year... this year... we don't know yet but they're definitely about here and we got our
fingers crossed that we're gonna bring on some big broods this year.
in this 36 acres here i dare say we've got 200 hares in here and yes we have got the
fence around us but the hares can still get in and out... and we've got a badger sett
over the other side there... that's opened up since the solar farm's been here. There'll
be about four holes there now that the badgers are using, so that's another good sign that
we're doing stuff for the wildlife.
in twenty years time, rather than degrading the land it's going to be preserving it...
so i mean, everything here can just be taken up, so in twentyfive years time we can go
back to agricultural land which is actually better land than it is at the moment.
Brilliant. Lightsource are absolutely brilliant. I mean, they'll come to you. I got a friend
of mine John Peck... who's doing all the hedging round the outside and it was Lightsource keeping
local people doing the jobs around it. I'm local, I've lived here for 37 years, i mean i am
37 years old [laughs] and the same as the friend of mine John Peck, he's done all the
hedging around the outside and it's Lightsource that've actually come here and said to him,
"John Paul, will you do this?"... and he's got on and done that. So it's keeping local
people employed by the solar farm.
Well i don't think it's a problem! Solar, we've got 36 acres here, this land can go
back into production in 25 years time. With the A.D. plants you're growing Maize, you
don't need planning permission for Maize but solar is actually 34 times more efficient
than A.D. plants so... there's sort of no question there really and we are preserving
the land rather than degrading it, it's actually being preserved! This land is not very good
growing land but in 25 years time it's going to be a lot better than it is as the moment.
Well obviously i mean, our bee population at the moment is declining because of disease
and what not, and you can see here it's absolutely ideal for the bees. And what better could
you have than this? It's absolutely ideal.