Farming Innovation Programme

Application is open for the Farming Innovation Programme – Large R&D Partnership Project. The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) will work with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), to invest up to £8 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. The aim of this competition is to:

• Drive the development and demonstration of solutions that have the potential to substantially improve overall productivity, profitability, and environmental sustainability
• Help the sector mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change
• Ensure solutions deliver positive benefits for England’s farmers, growers, or foresters in commercially relevant situations
• Accelerate research development and demonstration of new agricultural solutions by driving collaboration through active engagement of end-users and the wider UK research community in the innovation process
• Enable adoption by demonstrating knowledge exchange to the wider sector and other stakeholders

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Eligibility

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

• Work with end users across the supply chain to identify the major on-farm or immediate post farmgate challenges or opportunities
• Benefit farmers, growers, or foresters in England
• Build understanding of how your approach can best achieve widespread use, developing a theory of change, working with economists, social scientists, and other relevant experts
• Have scalable solutions that can be taken up widely and have widespread impact
• Demonstrate how the project will support a transformative change in the agriculture or horticultural sectors
• Develop and deliver a knowledge exchange (KE) plan that identifies the targets for the solution with a clear dissemination plan
• How you will exploit the outputs of the project, and expected outcomes in terms of solution adoption

Your project must:

• Have total costs between £3 million and £5 million
• Start by 1 February 2023
• End by 31 January 2027
• Last up to 48 months
• 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

Benefits

The scope of this competition is to fund industrial research and experimental development projects that will address major on-farm or immediate post farmgate challenges or opportunities.

Your solutions or project outputs must significantly improve:

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

Businesses within a supply chain, are encouraged to come together as a partnership to solve major challenges or opportunities.

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

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

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Application process

Before you start

You must read the guidance on applying for a competition on the Innovation Funding Service before you start.

What we ask you

The application is split into 3 sections:

1. Project details.
2. Application questions.
3. Finances.

• Interviews

If your online application is successful at this stage, you will be invited to attend an interview, where you must give a presentation. Your interview will take place either online or at a designated location.

Before the interview, by the deadline stated in the invitation email, you:

• must send a list of who will attend the interview
• must send your interview presentation slides
• can send a written response to the assessors’ feedback
• List of attendees

Agree the list with your consortium. Up to 9 people from your project can attend, ideally one person from each organisation. They must all be available on all published interview dates. We are unable to reschedule slots once allocated.

• Presentation slides

Your interview presentation must:

• use Microsoft PowerPoint
• be no longer than 15 minutes
• have no more than 20 slides
• not include any video or embedded web links

You cannot change the presentation after you submit it or bring any additional materials to the interview.

• Written response to assessor feedback

This is optional and is an opportunity to answer the assessors’ concerns. It can:

• be up to 2 A4 pages in a single PDF or Word document
• include charts or diagrams

Interview

After your presentation the panel will spend 30 minutes asking questions. You will be expected to answer based on the information you provided in your application form, presentation and the response to feedback.

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