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Farming Innovation Programme

Fund Name

Farming Innovation Programme: Large R&D partnerships Round 3

Project Length

Up to 48 months

Project Value

£3m - £5m

Deadline

13.03.2024

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) will invest up to £7.8 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.

This competition aims to fund industrial research and experimental development projects that will address major on-farm or immediate post-farmgate challenges or opportunities.

Check Your Eligibility

Fund details

Your solutions or project outputs must significantly improve:

  • productivity
  • sustainability and environmental impact of farming
  • progression towards net zero emissions​
  • resilience

Your proposal must be able to demonstrate how the project will:

  • benefit farmers, growers, or foresters in England through commercially relevant solutions
  • actively work with end users across the whole supply chain to identify the major on-farm or immediate post-farmgate challenges or opportunities
  • accelerate the development and demonstration of new agricultural solutions through collaboration with the wider UK research community
  • build an understanding of how your approach can best achieve widespread use, develop a theory of change, working with economists, social scientists, and other relevant experts
  • have scalable solutions that can be taken up widely, be integrated into existing production systems, and have widespread impact
  • demonstrate how the project will support a transformative change in the agricultural sector
  • develop and deliver a knowledge exchange (KE) plan that identifies the targets for the solution with a clear dissemination plan to relevant stakeholders and the wider sector
  • exploit the outputs of the project, and expected outcomes in terms of solution adoption, for example, the number of end users, area of land, and percentage of production using the new solution

Specific themes

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

  • livestock
  • plants
  • novel food production systems
  • bioeconomy and agroforestry

Eligibility

Your project must:

  • have total costs between £3 million and £5 million
  • start by 1 October 2024
  • end by 30 September 2028
  • last up to 48 months
  • carry out all of its project work in the UK
  • intend to exploit the results from or in England
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