Farm solar is a different customer entirely

Self-consumption is the whole argument

A unit used on site is worth what you would have paid for it. A unit exported is worth considerably less. Domestic solar in Ireland exports a lot, because the house is empty during the day.

A working yard is not. Milk cooling runs after each milking, plate coolers and water heating run through the day, and the load profile lines up with production in a way a house never does.

That means the return calculation is genuinely better, and it can be made without optimism or hand-waving — which matters, because this customer will check it.

They buy like a business, because they are one

Payback period, capital allowances, and how it sits alongside the other things the yard needs this year. Not monthly savings and not environmental feeling.

There is also a separate grant route for farm investment at a considerably better rate than the domestic scheme, with its own application windows and its own paperwork. Timing your marketing around those windows matters more than anything you do to the ads themselves.

Your website is written for the wrong person

A farmer landing on a page about reducing your household bills leaves immediately. They are looking for evidence you have done a yard like theirs.

That means photographs of arrays on parlours, sheds and grain stores; system sizes in the range they care about; and language that assumes three-phase supply and a working building rather than a semi-detached house.

A separate page is the minimum. A separate campaign with its own lead form is better, because the qualifying questions are completely different.

What the farm lead form should ask

Different questions, because the wrong ones make you look like you have never done this.

• —Enterprise type — dairy, tillage, poultry, pigs, beef
• —Roughly what the yard spends on electricity a year
• —Single or three-phase supply
• —Shed roof type, age and rough area
• —Whether a grant application is already in train, and for what

Where these people actually are

Cork, Tipperary, Limerick, Wexford, Meath and Kilkenny carry most of it. A national campaign spreads a budget across a country where the customer is concentrated in a handful of counties.

They also read the farming press and talk to each other constantly. One completed yard in a parish generates conversations you did not pay for, which is the opposite of how domestic solar referrals work.