UK Registered Businesses Can Apply for a Share of £5.5 Million for Feasibility Projects

Deadline: 12-Oct-22

UK registered businesses can apply for a share of £5.5 million for feasibility projects, from the Industry-led R&D Partnerships Fund, a part of the Farming Innovation Programme.

Aims

The aim of these funding competitions is to:

• Investigate early stage solutions that have the potential to substantially improve the overall productivity, sustainability and resilience of farming, and move existing agricultural sectors to net zero
• Prioritise solutions that will have positive outputs for farmers, growers and foresters in commercially relevant situations
• Accelerate research and development of new agricultural solutions by actively engaging collaboration with the wider UK research community in the innovation process
• Your proposal must be able to demonstrate how the project will benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England.

Specific Themes

Your project must address a significant industry challenge or opportunity in at least one of the four industry subsectors below:

• Livestock
• Plants
• Novel food production systems
• Bio economy and agroforestry

Funding Information

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

Eligibility Criteria

Your project must:

• Start by 1 April 2023
• End by 31 March 2025
• Last up to 24 months
• Be collaborative
  • Carry out all of its project work in the UK
  • Intend to exploit the results from or in England
  • Have a minimum of 50% of any grant requested by farmers, growers or foresters, allocated to farmers, growers or foresters based in England
  • 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 or Belarusian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian or 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
    • Academic institutions cannot lead or work alone.
• Project team
  • To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be a UK business of any size or a UK registered:
    • 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.
  • 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
  • Subcontractors are allowed in this competition. All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.
  • 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. We will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use an overseas subcontractor.
• Number of applications
  • A business, can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in a further 2 applications.
  • If a business is not leading any application, it can collaborate in any number of applications.
  • Academic institution, research and technology organisation (RTO), charity, not-for-profit or public sector organisation can collaborate on any number of applications.

For more information, visit Defra.

For more information, visit https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/1279/overview/e7deb89b-2048-4f87-a5a2-019459520d04