Small and medium-sized farming businesses to benefit from £5 innovation grant

The UK agriculture industry is set to receive a significant boost with the announcement of a £5 million grant funding initiative aimed at scaling up agricultural innovation.

The funding is targeted at small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and is part of a broader effort to increase sustainable food production, drive progress towards net-zero emissions, improve farm resilience, and support nature recovery.

The funding will come via the Farming Innovation Investor Partnership Competition, which is set to start on Monday 24 July and will end on Wednesday 30 August.

This competition is a mix of grant money and private investment, all aimed at speeding up research and development in agriculture.

The initiative supports new and exciting projects in the farming sector that have shown they can make money. The main goal is to help get new farming technologies out of the lab and onto the farm where they can be used by everyone.

This competition is a follow-up to the successful Farming Innovation Programme, which has already given out over £100 million to fund early research and development projects.

Some of the exciting projects that have been funded include systems that monitor livestock by themselves, robots that can pick fruit, AI-powered weed control, smart cow sheds, and digital systems for spotting pests and diseases in greenhouses.

The competition is open to a range of projects, whether they are about livestock, crops, gardening, and more. The main thing is that they should help make farming more productive, sustainable, and environmentally friendly by reducing emissions.

The grants will cover up to 45 per cent of the cost of the project, but there needs to be at least double that amount coming from private investment.

The Farming Innovation Investor Partnership Competition, which is funded by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) and run with UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) and Innovate UK, will start taking applications from Monday 24 July.

The competition is focusing on later-stage innovation, which means encouraging new ideas and technologies used by the industry and making the agri-tech sector more attractive to UK investors.

This competition is a big step forward in the UK’s commitment to sustainable farming and developing new technologies that will shape the future of farming.

If you’d like more information about this funding or would like any other information on grant funding, please contact us today.