Deadline: 15-Mar-23
UK registered businesses can apply for a share of up to £12.5 million across the two strands of this competition, to develop innovative solutions for automation and robotics. This funding is from the Farming Futures R&D Fund.
The aim of this competition is to fund collaborative development projects with ambitious solutions for robotics and automation in agriculture and horticulture to:
- Support specific recommendations for automation innovation funding from recent Defra reviews and the Government Food Strategy
- Address key issues affecting the sector, where automation and robotics can mitigate labour challenges and increase productivity.
Focus Areas
- The innovative technologies in your proposal must focus on one or more of the following:
- Robotic and automated machines and systems for static or mobile operation
- Imaging, sensing, and monitoring devices and systems to collect and store data and associated systems to process data for management records and to drive management decisions and automated actions
- Systems for on-farm processing and packing operations.
Specific Themes
- Your project must focus on one or more of the following agricultural and horticultural production sectors:
- Livestock
- 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.
Funding Information
- Your project’s total costs must be between £750,000 and £1.5 million.
Eligible Projects
- Your project must:
- Demonstrate environmental benefits and societal impact
- Include clear project deliverables for measuring the sustainability of your solutions, and how they are preventing negative impact upon the sector
- Ensure your solutions are closely aligned with industry priorities to deliver business-orientated and transformative opportunities
- Consider how it will encourage dissemination and knowledge exchange to the wider sector.
Eligibility Criteria
- Your project must:
- Have total costs between £750,000 and £1,500,000
- Start by 1 September 2023
- End by 31 August 2025 for 24 month duration projects
- End by 31 August 2026 for 36 month duration projects
- Be able to demonstrate how the project will benefit farmers or growers in England
- Carry out all of its project work in the UK
- Intend to exploit the results from or in the UK.
- Lead organisation
- To lead a project your organisation must:
- Be a UK registered business of any size
- Collaborate with other eligible UK organisations.
- To lead a project your organisation must:
- Project team
- To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be a UK based farmer or grower, or a UK registered:
- Business of any size
- Academic institution
- Charity
- Not for profit
- Public sector organisation
- Research and technology organisation (RTO)
- To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be a UK based farmer or grower, 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.
- To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.
For more information, visit Innovate UK.