The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) will invest up to £12.5 million in innovation projects.
This funding is part of Defra’s Farming Innovation Programme, which is a partnership with UKRI’s Transforming Food Production Challenge and delivered by Innovate UK.
The aim of this competition is to fund collaborative development projects with ambitious solutions. Solutions provided will enable sustainable and resilient farming through addressing biotic and abiotic stresses in agriculture, horticulture and forestry to:
Your proposal must be able to demonstrate how the project will benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England.
This competition is split into 2 strands:
This competition will address the challenges to plants, crops and farmed animals, from both their biological (biotic) and physical environments (abiotic).
It is your responsibility to ensure you submit your application to the correct strand for your project. You will not be able to transfer your application and it will not be sent for assessment if it is out of scope.
In applying to this competition, you are entering into a competitive process. This competition closes at 11am UK time on the deadline stated.
The aim of this competition is to fund collaborative development of projects with ambitious solutions. Solutions provided will enable sustainable and resilient farming through addressing biotic and abiotic stresses in agriculture, horticulture and forestry to:
The innovative technologies in your proposal could include one or more of the following biological (biotic) and physical environmental (abiotic) challenges:
This list is not exhaustive
Your project must seek to significantly improve:
You must be able to demonstrate how your solution and output will benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England.
Your proposal must:
Portfolio approach
We want to fund a variety of projects across different technologies, strands, themes, markets, locations and research categories. We call this a portfolio approach.
Your project must focus on one or more of the following agricultural and horticultural production sectors:
Farmed animals
Plant
Forestry
Cross-sector
We will fund industrial research projects, as defined in the guidance on categories of research.
We are not funding projects that:
We cannot fund projects that are: