Funding Competition – Farming Futures: Environmental Resilience, Feasibility (UK)

Deadline: 19-Jul-23

UK registered businesses can apply for a share of up to £500,000 to develop innovative solutions for sustainable and resilient farming.

This funding is from Farming Futures R&D Fund. 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:

• support specific recommendations from recent Defra reviews, the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) act 2023 and the Government Food Strategy
• resolve key issues affecting the sector, where sustainable and resilient farming solutions can mitigate climate challenges and increase productivity

Your proposal must be able to demonstrate how the project will benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England.

The innovative technologies in your proposal could include one or more of the following biological (biotic) and physical environmental (abiotic) challenges:

• integrated pest management ​
• detection, prevention and management of diseases​
• agro-ecology ​
• gene editing and breeding​
• regenerative cropping, livestock and mixed systems​
• livestock housing, nutrition, health and management​
• innovative fertiliser practices​
• soil resilience​
• water management and innovation​

Specific Themes

Your project must focus on one or more of the following agricultural and horticultural production sectors:

• Farmed animals
  • monogastric
  • ruminant
• Plant
  • broadacre: cereals, root crops, grassland
  • horticulture: field based and specialist growers
  • fruit: top fruit, stone fruit and soft fruit
  • vineyard
  • protected cropping: glass and polytunnel systems
  • controlled environment and vertical farming systems
• Forestry
  • agro-forestry
• Cross-sector
  • bioeconomy

Funding Information

• Your project’s total costs must be between £200,000 and £500,000.

Projects they will not fund

• They are not funding projects that:
  • are equine specific
  • are focused specifically on financial resilience​
  • are specific to non-food or ornamental plants
  • involve wild caught fisheries
  • involve aquaculture for fish production or human consumption
  • involve cellular expression of proteins or cultivated meat
  • involve acellular production systems, fermentation systems for bacteria, yeast or fungi for human consumption
  • are for the production of crops or plants for medicinal or pharmaceutical use
  • do not benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England
  • involve post farm gate processing and packaging
• They cannot fund projects that are:
  • dependent on export performance, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it exports a certain quantity of bread to another country
  • dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it uses 50% UK flour in their product

Eligibility Criteria

• Your project
  • Your project must:
    • start by 1 January 2024
    • end by 31 December 2025
    • last between 12 to 24 months
    • be able to demonstrate how the project will benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England
    • carry out all of its project work in the UK
    • intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
  • Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian and Belarusian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian and Belarusian source.
• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project your organisation must:
    • be a UK registered business of any size
    • collaborate with other UK registered organisations
• Project team
  • To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
    • business of any size
    • academic institution
    • charity
    • not for profit
    • public sector organisation
    • research and technology organisation (RTO)
  • 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.
  • To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.
• Non-funded partners
  • 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
  • Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.
  • Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.
  • You can use subcontractors from overseas but must make the case in your application as to why you could not use suppliers from the UK.
  • You must provide a detailed rationale, evidence of the potential UK contractors you approached and the reasons why they were unable to work with you. They will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use an overseas subcontractor.
  • All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.
• Number of applications
  • A business, can only lead on one application in each strand but can be included as a collaborator in 2 further applications in each of the 2 strands of the competition. If you are successful, you will be asked to confirm you have the capacity to run multiple projects simultaneously.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.