Defra Farming Futures: Environmental resilience, Feasibility

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:

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

This competition is split into 2 strands:

• Strand 1 – Farming Futures: Feasibility; evaluating emerging solutions with the UK’s world-leading research base, agri-tech businesses, SMEs and the UK agricultural sector to develop innovations in agriculture, forestry and horticulture (this strand)






• Strand 2 – Farming Futures: Industrial Research; progressing emerging solutions to new products, processes and services with the UK’s world-leading research base, agri-tech businesses, SMEs and the UK agricultural sector to develop innovations in agriculture, forestry and horticulture

This competition will address the challenges to plants, crops and farmed animals, from both their biological (biotic) and physical environments (abiotic). 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​

This list is not exhaustive.

Your project’s total costs must be between £200,000 and £500,000. Applications close 11am on 19th July 2023. Find out more here. Agri-TechE can help members identify project partners.