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 delivered in partnership with UKRI’s Transforming Food Production Challenge.
Defra and Innovate UK will work in collaboration to deliver a portfolio of projects that meet the objectives of the Farming Innovation Programme to develop innovative solutions that increase the productivity and sustainability of farming. The focus of this competition is sustainable farm-based protein production.
The aim of this funding is 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:
It is the responsibility of the applicant to ensure they are applying to the correct strand for their project.
Eligibility
If you are successful, any awards given to primary agricultural producers are subject to the green box exemption under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture.
Please see further guidance on green box subsidies here WTO Guidance for support in Agriculture. Applicants receiving this type of support must ensure that there is minimal to no distortion of trade and comply with the requirements of Annex 2 of the Agriculture Agreement.
Your project must:
You must only include eligible project costs in your application.
Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian source.
To lead a project your organisation must:
If the lead organisation is an academic institution or an RTO it must collaborate with at least 2 businesses of any size.
To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be a UK business of any size or a UK registered:
Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once accepted, partners will be asked to login or to create an account and enter their own project costs into the Innovation Funding Service.
The lead and at least one other organisation must claim funding by entering their costs during the application.
Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding, for example non-UK businesses. Their costs will count towards the total project costs.
Subcontractors are allowed in this competition. All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.
The aim of this competition is to fund collaborative feasibility studies developing ambitious new solutions for sustainable farm-based protein production in the UK. These must address identified major on-farm or immediate post-farmgate challenges or opportunities in agricultural and horticultural practices.
Your project must seek to significantly improve:
Your proposal must:
We want to fund a variety of projects across both strands of the competition, different technologies, markets, technological maturities, and research categories. We call this a portfolio approach.
Specific themes
Your project must be in one or more of the four industry subsectors:
Your solutions can also support emerging production systems that create new sources of resource efficient, low emission proteins that address longer-term food security for mainstream consumers or animal feed users.
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