Agricultural buildings

Before design work starts, establish with the planning authority which route applies to the holding and the specific proposal. That single conversation, made early, frequently saves months of abortive design work later. Points worth clarifying at that stage include whether the holding meets the area and use tests for agricultural permitted development, whether the proposed building's floor area and height fall within the current allowances, and whether the site sits within a defined distance of a residential curtilage — a common trigger for needing full permission instead.

Prior approval, where it applies, still requires the authority to assess siting, design and external appearance, and it can refuse or impose conditions on those grounds even though it is not a full planning application. Landscape and visual impact carry particular weight in a county with as much open, visually sensitive farmland as Cumbria.

Siting decisions affect both the planning outcome and the practical running of the building for years afterwards. Distance from watercourses, visibility from public roads and rights of way, proximity to residential property, and the building's relationship to existing farm buildings are all planning considerations as well as operational ones.

Access — the route in for construction traffic and the ongoing route for agricultural vehicles, including whether an existing farm track needs widening, strengthening or a new junction onto the public highway — is frequently a condition of any consent and a genuine construction cost in its own right on rural sites with soft ground or long approach tracks.

A shed on its own is rarely the whole job. The works around it usually are, and they are where budgets are most often underestimated.

A building erected under an agricultural planning route is generally expected to be used for agriculture. Converting it later to a non-agricultural use — storage for another business, a workshop, tourism accommodation, or residential conversion — is a separate planning matter and is not automatic, however long the building has stood. If diversification is part of the long-term plan for a building, it is worth raising with the planning authority before construction, not after.

Some agricultural buildings and yards need permits or consents that sit entirely outside the planning system, most commonly around slurry and silage storage, and any structure or activity with the potential to pollute a watercourse. Storage capacity, distance from watercourses and boundaries, and construction standards for slurry stores are typically governed by separate regulations, and the Environment Agency should be consulted directly for any building storing slurry, silage effluent or fuel above a threshold quantity.

New or altered watercourse crossings, culverts, or land drainage works on or near a main river can themselves require a separate consent, and should not be assumed to be covered by a planning permission for the building itself.

The table below is a general orientation only — every holding and building must be checked individually against current thresholds, since area and use tests change periodically and a building's classification is not always obvious from its name.

Where full planning permission or prior approval is confirmed as the right route, the practical sequence usually looks like this.

Most agricultural building projects happen on a working farm, not a clear site, and sequencing needs to account for livestock movements, seasonal work such as lambing, calving or harvest, and shared use of tracks and yards with ongoing farm traffic throughout construction. Agreeing a sequence and temporary access arrangement with the farm before work starts avoids conflicts that are otherwise discovered on day one.

Weather and ground conditions also affect programme more on working farms than on many other sites, since heavy plant sharing wet, unmade tracks with livestock and farm vehicles can quickly make an access route unusable for both purposes if it is not managed carefully from the outset.

Agricultural buildings are usually straightforward structures — steel portal frames, concrete panel walls, fibre cement or steel roof sheeting — but the base and yard around them carry most of the site-specific risk. Concrete specification for a slab taking regular machinery or livestock loading is different from a domestic slab, and getting the mix, thickness and reinforcement wrong is expensive to correct once the building is up.

Where a building sits on soft or variable ground, a proper ground investigation before the slab is designed avoids later settlement or cracking, particularly on fellside or reclaimed farmland where made-up ground is common.

A groundworks contractor pricing an agricultural building needs more than a floor plan and a rough footprint. The information below removes the assumptions that most often cause a price to move once work starts on a working farm.

SHS is the contractor, not the planning authority. What SHS can do is look at the building and the yard around it from a build point of view — access, ground conditions, levels, drainage, foundations and buildability — and tell you plainly what the construction side is likely to involve.

If drawings already exist, send them. If they do not, a site visit and a conversation usually establishes what information you need to gather next and who you need it from.