A farm management boss has warned against converting agricultural land into solar farms, telling Parliament: “You can’t eat solar panels.”

Conservative peer Lord Fuller is a non-executive director of UK farm management company Sentry Ltd and the founder and chairman of fertiliser manufacturer Brineflow Ltd.

He told the House of Lords: “You can’t eat a solar panel, yet very soon a large proportion of our most productive and versatile farmland could be covered by them.”

Lord Fuller voiced concerns about the nationally significant infrastructure project (NSIP) regime, which can enable developments to bypass normal local planning requirements to build major infrastructure such as airports, road and rail, power plants and large renewable energy projects.

He insisted the Government has “quite simply lost control of the numbers” in terms of the amount of farmland being considered for solar farms.

Lord Fuller also claimed NSIP is being “abused by the aggregation of a large number of small proposals into one”.

Highlighting the importance of retaining farmland for food production, he urged for the Government’s upcoming land use strategy to explicitly stop the conversion of high quality agricultural land (grades one to three).

Lord Fuller concluded: “Britain will starve if all we have to eat are solar panels.”

Baroness Hayman of Ullock, minister in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said she was not aware of any solar farms approved on current agricultural land that is grade one or grade two.

She said: “The Government recognises that food security is national security.

“We will champion British farming and protect the environment and we are committed to maintaining strong protections on agricultural land to ensure that our mission to deliver clean power won’t come at a cost to food production or security.

“We are confident that the rollout of ground-mounted solar will not affect UK food security.”

The minister added: “Estimates suggest that ground-mounted solar used just over 0.1 per cent of land in 2022 and we expect any future rollout to take up a very small amount of agricultural land.”

Lady Hayman told peers that the Government’s Land Use Framework would be “critical” in working out what land should be used for and that it would be published in the form of a Green Paper in the new year, along with a public consultation.