Our ambition for the UK Food Valley remains to be a top 10 global food cluster and it is important for us to be building links to other parts of the world, as many of our leading businesses already do really well.

With over 90 large national or international food chain businesses in the UK Food Valley, our industry is truly global in its outlook and continues to attract investment from across the world.

But we want to go further and in autumn 2024 the UK Food Valley had made lots of new international connections as we welcome visitors from overseas, host international events and seek to build new international research partnerships.

The first edition of Potato Days UK happened in September, run by the German Agricultural Association or DLG which organises the world’s largest agritech event, AgriTechnica, every two years in Hanover. Potato Days UK has built on the successful potato industry events DLG has run in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France for many years, and was co-produced with the UKFV in just over a year after DLG first approached us. The event was focused on business visitors and included field demonstrations of potato technology as well as a packed seminar programme. We'd like to thank Dyson Farming for stepping in to host the event so effectively at its Nocton site, to the Lincolnshire Agricultural Society which supported the event with its events team, and particularly to DLG for selecting Lincolnshire for its first UK event. We hope to welcome the event back in 2026!

The Lincoln Institute of Agrifood Technology and Barclays Eagle Lab also hosted a team from the Danish Embassy in London to discuss our respective ambitions for the agrifood industry, focusing on how agritech and innovation can support sustainable growth of the industry. Not surprisingly given the similarities we share with Denmark, we were delighted to find that Denmark is focusing on many issues, such as digitalisation and low carbon transition, where we also have many developments, meaning we can work with them more closely. We look forward to continuing the collaboration and building new commercial and research links.

The UK Food Valley hosted another delegation of Dutch agritech businesses and researchers who were on a three-day mission to the UK hosted by the Department of Business and Trade, organised by the British Embassy in the Netherlands. During the Lincolnshire visit our Dutch colleagues visited the Lincoln Institute of Agrifood Technology and Barclays Eagle Lab, were introduced to the UK Food Valley and then in the afternoon visited Worldwide Fruit’s excellent packhouse and cold store complex in Spalding. Once again, we explored many synergies with our visitors and are thrilled to continue to build on the excellent links we have had for hundreds of years with the Netherlands, which remains our leading trading partner in the food industry.

The visits from Denmark and the Netherlands, and an upcoming visit by the German Embassy and MPs, all align really well with the ambitions set out for the Agri-tech Global programme.  This programme is run by CERES Agritech, as a partnership spearheaded by the University of Lincoln and Cambridge Enterprise alongside UEA in Norwich. Agri-tech Global is focused on building international connectivity to help commercialise agritech from the UK, and to help bring innovations from other countries into the UK. The programme focuses on the USA, Netherlands and Australia, but is also open to working with partners across the world.

While the UK Food Valley can grow our domestic agrifood industry substantially, the UK market will still import food and exchange technology with the rest of the world, which also provides excellent export potential for our food businesses and the technology sector which supports them. Evidence shows that trade increases prosperity and therefore to deliver the ambitions of the UK Food Valley it is vital that we continue to support international connectivity in all its forms.

It is also important that we remember the scale of the global market compared to the UK and the opportunities this provides. Our region specialises in crop production, and we have the largest crop output of any UK region, but it is interesting to reflect that the global crop sector is 180 times larger than the UK crop sector according to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The global market in food was worth $5,169 billion at the farmgate in 2022, a 31% increase on the value in 2017, with crop production totalling 10.8 billion tonnes in 2022.

This means that if we can develop new technologies or find new markets for our food products, the global export potential is very large and continues to grow strongly.

For all of these reasons, we are determined to be an outward facing region and open to the world. If you have ideas on how we can help drive food chain collaboration with the rest of the world, either through food trade or by supporting technology and innovation partnerships, please do get in contact as we are keen to support international trade, investment and collaboration as a key part of our sector growth strategy for the UK Food Valley.

Effie Warwick-John

Programme Manager, UK Food Valley