Chinasa Asonye used to wake before dawn to switch on a generator that pumped water into her fish ponds. Some mornings the fuel ran out before the ponds filled.
Others, the noise and diesel fumes were the least of her problems – the cost was.
‘I was buying fuel almost four times every week and spending nearly N30,000 each time,’ Asonye, a large-scale farmer based in Lagos, said in an interview. ‘When I calculated the cost of fuel and generator maintenance, I realised I was spending almost N400,000 every month just to keep the generator running.’
That math, not sentiment, is what’s pushing Nigerian farmers toward solar power. Across a country of more than 200 million people, where the national grid collapsed more than 10 times in 2024 alone and has already logged multiple partial and total failures in 2025, agricultural businesses are abandoning petrol generators for photovoltaic systems – not as an environmental statement, but as a cost-cutting one.
Agriculture contributes more than 20 percent of gross domestic product in Africa’s most populous nation, and food security is a persistent policy concern as the population grows roughly 2 percent a year.
Power, or the lack of it, sits at the center of that equation. Irrigation pumps, cold storage, processing equipment and lighting all depend on electricity that the grid increasingly fails to deliver.
The financial pressure has been compounded by fuel costs. Petrol prices have risen more than 400 percent since 2023, according to farmers interviewed, a burden that smallholders, who make up much of Nigeria’s roughly 40.2 million-strong farming population, per National Bureau of Statistics data – can ill afford.
Drought has added another layer of stress, particularly in northern Nigeria, a key food-producing region. Over the past five years, crops have withered as rainfall has grown less reliable, and few farmers can afford diesel-powered irrigation as a backup.
The result has shown up in consumer prices: food inflation stood at 20.31 percent in the most recent reading, its sixth straight increase.
‘Renewable energy products like solar are something that most farmers are now embracing because of what is happening with electricity,’ Asonye said. ‘Farmers now use solar pumps to pump water, poultry farmers install solar for lighting, while processors are also adopting solar systems.’
The economics increasingly favor that switch. Solar photovoltaic technology has become one of the cheapest sources of new electricity generation globally, a shift that has reshaped power markets far beyond Nigeria and made self-generation more attractive wherever grid supply is unreliable.
‘Solar won,’ Harald Friedl, a circular economist, wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.
He noted that solar was the second-cheapest new power source globally in 2024, trailing only onshore wind, and that prices have fallen steadily since 2010. ‘Solar cannot do everything, but it changes everything around it.’
For Cynthia Ijeoma, a farmer in Imo state, the upfront cost was steep but the payback clear. ‘It cost around N1.5 million to install solar on my farm,’ she said. ‘This is cheaper compared to the amount on fuel.’
She added that farmers are increasingly focused on financial discipline alongside labor: ‘A lot of farmers now understand that it is not just by working hard, but by working smart and saving funds.’
Larger agribusinesses are making the same calculation. Soilless Farm Lab, a technology-driven farming company, has installed solar capacity to keep operations running through grid outages.
‘It has helped us operate in the absence of light from the national grid, while reducing overhead diesel costs used for administrative operations,’ said Peace Okwara, the company’s chief operating officer.
The pattern across interviews is consistent: businesses are not waiting for grid reliability to improve. Instead, they’re routing around the problem, using solar to lower operating costs, stabilize output and remain price-competitive in markets where the cost of running a farm ultimately shows up on grocery shelves.