Hundreds of square miles of mainly English farmland risks being lost to solar panels by 2030 under Labour's net zero plans, according to estimates. The loss of productive fields and landscapes risks a rural backlash, a political earthquake and a blow to food security.
But there is another way, say campaigners who want to both protect Britain's agricultural industry and embrace solar.
They are calling on Energy Secretary Ed Miliband to adopt a new approach called "agrivoltaics" where solar panels no longer replace crops, livestock and farmers but instead sit above productive land on stilts. Agrivoltaics allows farmers to harvest both energy and food from the same fields, while, supporters argue, minimising the impact on treasured landscapes.
The idea may sound outlandish - but American farmers are already adopting such approaches. The US Department of Energy is sponsoring a massive project at its National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. The idea is growing fast in Africa and Asia too.
"Loss of agricultural land and landscape impacts are the main reasons people oppose solar parks but we really don't need to be losing good farmland to solar," says energy expert Richard Randle-Boggis.
"There is enough opportunity for agrivoltaics in Great Britain to surpass the Government's solar targets and protect landscapes."
Agrivoltaics, also known as agro-solar, involves placing mounted solar panels above crops at an angle and frequency that allows crops to still get enough sunlight throughout the day to grow.
It can work with livestock too. Lightsource BP, one of the UK's biggest solar developers, has developed an experimental agrivoltaics farm in Henroux, near Bourges in France, with elevated panels that allow cattle to graze underneath them.
Lightsource BP hopes the panels will shelter the cattle from sun or rain and protect the soil from drying out in summertime droughts, while also generating energy.
For now, such developments are largely happening elsewhere. But Britain has its pioneers too. Among them is Hugh Lowe Farms, a major soft fruit producer near Mereworth in Kent, renowned as a leading supplier of strawberries for the Wimbledon tennis championships.
Transparent solar panels have been strung along the sides and roofs of its glasshouses, generating electricity to recharge the crop-picking robots and other machinery that help it produce several thousand tonnes of soft fruit a year.
The benefit of cheap power for the farm is obvious but food production and local people also gain, argues Hamish Watson, managing director of Cambridge-based Polysolar, which developed the transparent panels.