On the 24th March government announced that three cutting-edge projects will receive a share of £9.13 million in government funding to carry out research and development on proposals to boost agricultural productivity, sustainability and climate resilience.

The funding support projects developing robotic crop harvesting for horticulture, an autonomous system to change cows’ bedding to improve their health, welfare and productivity, and a more environmentally friendly approach to potato cultivation.

The three projects are large R&D partnership competition winners in the £270 million Farming Innovation Programme (FIP), part of the government’s commitment to spend around £600 million to provide support for farmers to invest in productivity, animal health and welfare, innovation and research and development over three years.

The successful projects include the Agri-Opencore project, led by APS Produce, which has been awarded over £3.8m to accelerate the delivery of robotic crop systems for horticulture, with the University of Lincoln as their academic partner.

With labour shortages affecting the horticulture sector around the world, there are huge opportunities to reduce costs and labour requirements.  As reported previously Prof Simon Pearson of the Lincolnshire Institute of AgriFood Technology (LIAT) co-chaired a review of Automation in Horticulture published in summer 2022, with then DEFRA Secretary of State, George Eustice MP.  The UK Food Valley has also focused on automation and digitalisation as one of its three core themes, to create more labour efficient food chains, so that we can create more cost-effective supply chains with higher value jobs.

The Agri-Opencore project will help create the world’s first open development platform (software and hardware) for agri-robotic crop harvesting.  The open development platform will enable multiple organisations to contribute, allowing cross-sector collaboration and demonstration of technologies on english farms.  It is hoped that the project will help to accelerate the adoption of robotic picking by two years.

Phil Pearson, from APS Produce which has about 140 acres of greenhouses producing 30% of the UK tomato crop, said: “The Agri-Opencore robotics project is an exciting, and vital project for the fresh produce industry.  It promises to deliver the significant progress required to automate fresh produce harvesting in the UK.  As this work brings leading technology providers, Dogtooth, Xihelm and Wootzano, with the academic excellence of the University of Lincoln team, we can expect significant progress towards autonomous harvesting.”

Farming Minister Mark Spencer said: “It’s important that we fund projects like these – and those still to come in future rounds – as we support farmers to deliver sustainable food production and protect the environment.  Innovation, research, and development will help keep the sector at the cutting edge of technology as we look into the future.”

Katrina Hayter, Interim Executive Director Healthy Living & Agriculture, Innovate UK, said: “These projects have all demonstrated not only an innovative solution to a real-life, on-farm problem, but also the value of partnerships and collaboration between different sector experts.  For novel technology to truly succeed, it needs the input of the farmers themselves for the day-to-day realities of its use.  We’re really pleased that these partnerships have this idea at their core, and we now look forward to working with them as they develop their solutions further and bring the benefits to life.”