Cutting-edge farming technology awarded £9m

Three cutting-edge projects will receive a share of £9.13 million in government funding to carry out research and development on proposals to boost agricultural productivity, sustainability and climate resilience.

The funding will support projects developing robotic crop harvesting for horticulture, an autonomous system to change cows’ bedding to improve their health, welfare and productivity, and a more environmentally-friendly approach to potato cultivation.

The three projects are being supported through the Large R&D Partnership competition, which is part of the government’s £270 million Farming Innovation Programme, and a second round of the competition is currently open for applications.

This is all part of the government’s commitment to spend around £600 million on grants to provide support for farmers to invest in productivity, animal health and welfare, innovation, research and development over three years. It will be funded from the £2.4 billion annual farming budget, which is being maintained at its current level for the rest of this current Parliament.

Alongside the ongoing roll-out of the Environmental Land Management schemes, the grants will help to deliver long-term sustainable food production and support farmers to halt and reverse the decline of nature as set out in the Environmental Improvement Plan.

Farming Minister Mark Spencer said: "It’s important that we fund projects like these – and those still to come in future rounds – as we support farmers to deliver sustainable food production and protect the environment."

Katrina Hayter, Interim Executive Director Healthy Living & Agriculture, Innovate UK, said: "These projects have all demonstrated not only an innovative solution to a real-life, on-farm problem, but also the value of partnerships and collaboration between different sector experts. For novel technology to truly succeed, it needs the input of the farmers themselves for the day-to-day realities of its use."

"We’re really pleased that these partnerships have this idea at their core, and we now look forward to working with them as they develop their solutions further and bring the benefits to life."

The Agri-Opencore project, led by APS Produce, has been awarded over £3.8m to accelerate the delivery of robotic crop systems for horticulture.

The AG ARC project, led by Garnett Farm Engineering, has been awarded over £2.5m towards the development of an autonomous cow cubicle bedding. This aims help to boost cow health and welfare, improve farm productivity and reduce costs through efficient use of bedding. 

The Potato-LITE project has been awarded £2,830,000 to explore optimised systems for potato cultivation to make the £824 million potato sector more resilient and sustainable.

Find out more here.