Vineyard and cider buildings: agriculture or processing

A vineyard building for planning purposes is agricultural while it serves the growing and harvesting of fruit on the holding, and stops being agricultural once the main activity inside it is manufacturing a product. Growing grapes or cider apples is fruit growing, which falls within the definition of agriculture in section 336 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Pressing, fermenting, bottling and selling are not obviously agriculture at all. Where the line sits on a particular holding is a question of fact and degree, and the answer decides whether Part 6 permitted development rights are available or whether a full planning application is needed.

That is not a technicality. It is the difference between a prior approval notification and a contested application in open countryside.

Where growing ends and processing begins

The statutory definition of agriculture covers horticulture, fruit growing, seed growing, dairy farming, the breeding and keeping of livestock, grazing land, meadow land, market gardens and nursery grounds. It says nothing about turning the crop into something else.

Courts have nonetheless declined to draw a hard line at the farm gate. In Millington, the Court of Appeal considered whether a grower making wine from grapes produced on the holding was still using the land for agriculture, and held that the answer depends on the facts: whether the activity is what an ordinary farmer of that crop would do as part of the farming business, judged by scale and by proportion.

The practical consequence is a spectrum rather than a test. At one end, a building storing the holding's own fruit and housing a press used for a few weeks a year. At the other, a unit fermenting and bottling tankered-in juice year round with a bottling line, a warehouse and a delivery yard. The first reads as agriculture. The second reads as industry in a field.

Why the distinction affects permitted development rights

Part 6 of Schedule 2 to the General Permitted Development Order 2015 permits buildings and operations on an agricultural unit that are reasonably necessary for the purposes of agriculture within that unit, subject to limits on size, height and proximity, with a prior approval notification covering siting, design and appearance.

Two words in that phrase do the work. Necessary, which means the building must serve the agricultural operation rather than a diversified business alongside it. And within that unit, which means a building handling fruit brought in from elsewhere is not covered, however agricultural the holding looks.

The percentage of throughput from the holding is the number an authority will ask for. It is worth recording it from the first harvest, because a claim made three years later without production records is hard to sustain. Where a diversified activity has grown past the point where Part 6 helps, the position is closer to the general farm diversification into workshops and offices than to an agricultural building, and it should be applied for on that basis.

Buildings for storage against buildings for production

Describe what the building does and the analysis follows.

Mixed buildings are the difficulty. A single shed containing a press, tanks, a bottling area and a chiller does several of these at once, and an authority will characterise it by its primary purpose. Splitting functions across two buildings, one clearly agricultural and one clearly not, is sometimes the cleaner answer and sometimes an artificial one that an officer will see through.

Tasting rooms, retail and visitor uses

This is where most vineyard schemes get into trouble, because the commercial logic points straight at visitors and the planning consequences arrive one class at a time.

Selling the holding's own produce from the farm at a modest scale can be ancillary to the agricultural use. A shop stocking third-party wines, food and gifts is retail in Class E. A room serving coffee and lunch is also Class E, as a café or restaurant. A tasting room where the primary activity is drinking on the premises looks much more like a drinking establishment, which has been a sui generis use since the 2020 changes to the Use Classes Order and therefore needs express permission.

Events compound it. Weddings, tours and seasonal markets are capable of being a separate use entirely, and repeated use under the temporary use provisions does not build up into a permanent right. Where the business plan depends on events, apply for them rather than relying on a limited number of days each year and hoping the complaints do not come.

The same pattern of a rural activity gradually becoming a business appears in livery yards and the point horses become a business, and the analysis runs the same way: primary purpose, scale, and whether the original use is still what is happening.

Traffic, parking and seasonal peaks

Two different transport problems sit on the same site. Harvest generates a short, intense peak of agricultural vehicles, tractors and trailers, and in some cases articulated lorries collecting fruit or delivering bottles. Visitors generate a sustained pattern of cars at weekends, concentrated in summer, on lanes that were not built for it.

Authorities respond to the visitor traffic rather than the harvest traffic, because the harvest is agricultural and short. Expect questions about access visibility splays, passing places, coach access if tours are proposed, and parking provision measured against the maximum event capacity rather than the average day.

Provide a transport note that separates the two patterns and gives numbers for each. A single figure averaged across the year describes neither and satisfies nobody.

Effluent, washings and drainage

Winery and cidery washings are high strength waste. They carry a high organic load and a low pH, and discharging them to a septic tank or a small package plant designed for domestic sewage will damage it.

Three routes exist and each needs consent. Discharge to the public foul sewer requires a trade effluent consent from the sewerage undertaker under the Water Industry Act 1991, with conditions on volume, strength and pH. Discharge to ground or to a watercourse requires an environmental permit from the Environment Agency. Tankering away requires a licensed carrier and a disposal route.

Pomace and marc are the other output, in quantity, seasonally. Spreading it to land may need a waste exemption or a permit depending on quantity and method, and composting on site has its own controls. Deal with this in the foul sewage assessment and in the application narrative rather than leaving it to a condition, because an environmental health officer who spots an unexplained high-strength effluent stream will ask before recommending approval.

Describing the use accurately on the application

The description of development defines what is permitted, and a vague description is a liability in both directions.

Write it to match the actual operation. Something like the erection of a building for the storage and pressing of fruit grown on the holding, with ancillary tasting room, is specific enough to be enforceable and specific enough to be defended. An application for an agricultural building that later houses a bottling line and a bar is an enforcement case waiting to happen, and it removes the protection a clear permission would have given.

Where the business will grow, say so and apply for the growth rather than the current position. It is easier to justify a scaled proposal once, with a planning statement setting out the production model and the proportion of fruit from the holding, than to return three times with incremental applications that each look like creeping industrialisation of open countryside.

To see which supporting documents a vineyard or cidery project is likely to need, enter the postcode on PlanScope and work from the report list it produces.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. A lawful development certificate is the only formal way to confirm that a use or building operation is lawful. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.