The public good of accelerating adoption
By Tom Allen-Stevens
Defra plans to roll out the much delayed farmer-focused element of its R&D strategy this autumn, which could finally bring on-farm innovators the recognition they deserve.
The Government has pledged to progress plans to encourage on-farm innovation this autumn, and in particular the Accelerating Adoption Fund, designed to help farmers test the viability of new technology on farm.
Speaking at Groundswell, Defra secretary of state George Eustice indicated that pressure from farmers and farmer-led networks had been acknowledged and programme director for the Future Farming and Countryside Programme Janet Hughes confirmed she would “publish timescales etc ASAP”.
It’s likely funding will be available to encourage on-farm trials and to offset the costs of new technology and innovations. These often come to market at a higher price or with untested functionality, compared with products or services that have reached maturity or market saturation.
What’s not clear is the scope of the funding, nor exactly how much will be made available to farmers. In line with much of ELMs, these aspects may be the subject of on-going discussions, and it’s those who engage early on who will shape the opportunities.
What’s the background?
Defra’s R&D Innovation package is currently being delivered through the Farming Innovation Programme (FIP). This sees the department team up with UKRI’s Transforming Food Production Challenge to deliver three distinct funds:
Industry-led R&D partnership fund – this connects groups of farmers, growers, foresters and businesses with researchers for R&D that’s responsive to immediate, practical industry needs.
Farming futures R&D fund – which drives more fundamental R&D into strategic and sector-wide challenges, aiming to improve productivity and enhance environmental outcomes in the long term.
Accelerating adoption fund – these smaller-scale, agile projects trial the on-farm viability of new technology ideas, processes and practices, with a view to boosting their adoption by farmers and growers.
The department’s pledged to spend around 9-10% of its £2.4bn annual budget on Improving Farm Prosperity. FIP falls within this, along with the Farming Investment Fund, slurry investment, farm resilience, new entrant support and The Institute for Agriculture and Horticulture (TIAH).
To put this in perspective, environmental and animal outcomes, including ELMs, currently get 23% of the Defra budget, rising to 57% by the end of the current government term in 2025, as direct payments progressively reduce.
While that doesn’t leave much for FIP, farmers are assured it will build as other elements of Improving Farm Prosperity, such as the Lump Sum Exit Scheme, are scaled back. Increasingly, the funding will complement existing Defra R&D spending, as well as BBSRC fundamental research programmes, now administered by UKRI.
What’s more, the element that’s set to go from standing start to substantial is on-farm involvement. All the existing R&D projects underway and those in the running for funding have a strong emphasis on getting growers involved. Accelerating Adoption is set to be truly farmer led, and this hasn’t yet started.
This is why Defra’s talking big about farmer-led innovation, even though precious few farmers have actually benefited to date. At the Cereals Event in June, then minister for agri-innovation and climate adaption Jo Churchill emphasised the “exciting role that technology has in addressing the challenges that we face in farming”.
“The potential is huge, and we need to unlock it fast. And we need to enable you the farmer to be at the forefront. The government is making significant investments into innovation, driving that transformation of the cutting-edge research into practical farmer-led solutions,” she claimed.
"Technology has an exciting role in addressing the challenges that we face in farming", Jo Churchill at Cereals.
What progress has there been?
Defra says it has committed over £40M into FIP since October, and that this is part of an overall commitment of £270M planned for R&D in agriculture over the next 6-7 years.
Several rounds of funding are underway under the industry-led and farming futures funds. One project that’s benefited from one of these is Farm-PEP (Performance Enhancement Partnerships), a £750,000 two-year project led by ADAS that started in October 2021.
Farm-PEP aims to develop the platform, tools and partnerships that will enable farmers, advisors, industry and scientists to identify, test and share crop production practices that work on-farm. Digital tools, metrics and a new platform for collaboration provide an innovative framework for ‘what works’ on farm to be rapidly tested and shared.
While these projects don’t directly award funding to farmers, Research Starter projects can only be applied for by farming businesses. Typically, these are £28,000- 56,000, 12-month projects, for farmers to develop the initial seeds of ambitious ideas and claim up to 70% of the cost.
Rob Hodgkins and his partner Jo have a tenanted 650ha arable business with 2500 New Zealand Romney sheep, for example. They’re looking to bring the latest gene-marker technology to the UK to breed sheep with a lower carbon footprint. “There’s no real financial incentive to do anything like that – Tesco won’t pay me more for sheep that fart less,” Rob points out.
“That may change, but it will take a long time to change that one trait within a population of lambing ewes, keeping all other productivity and high-health traits the same. So the grant brings us funding for something that might not be applicable now, but will be in 10 years.”
While UKRI, through the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) has worked hard to make the grants more accessible to farmers, the competition is fierce, especially for larger projects. Farmers have complained that worthy projects are being overlooked and told they fall outside the scope.
That puts the focus on Accelerating Adoption, that was due to get underway in spring 2021, but discussions haven’t even yet started. The lack of action by Defra has attracted growing criticism from farming innovators such as the British On-Farm Innovation Network (BOFIN), the Farmer-Led Innovation Network (FLIN) and the Centre for Effective Innovation in Agriculture (CEIA).
Already in place is the Farming Transformation Fund which provides grant-funding for capital projects designed to improve farm productivity. You choose from a list of eligible items and can claim £35,000-500,000 in funding, which represents 40% of the total cost of your project.
There are specific eligible items, which include autonomous and robotic equipment, those that reduce water pollution and reduce emissions. In the past, farmers have part-funded direct tillage equipment through the fund. But it doesn’t contribute to annual licenses, such as for software that measures carbon emissions and nitrate leaching.
Nor does it fund service agreements where you don’t own but lease or hire the equipment, such as Small Robot Company’s Farming as a Service. And, ironically, FarmDroid’s FD20 for example, at a total purchase price of a little under £64,000, falls below the minimum threshold for funding.
The Farming Transformation Fund doesn’t currently fund service agreements such as Small Robot Company’s Farming as a service.
At Cereals, the minister announced a new £30M fund to help farmers add value to their food produce, as part of the Farming Investment Fund. Brief details you provide through an online checker tells you if your project, mainly for capital items, is eligible for £25,000-300,000 grants, representing 40% of total project costs. Qualifying projects will then be invited by Rural Payments Agency to make a full submission.
Jo Churchill believes the Government’s approach “will maximise the impact of investment in innovation. And crucially, and the bit that farmers talk to me most regularly about is how we get hold of it on farm – and that is what these are intended to do.” But within a month of making these remarks, she had tendered her resignation.
What’s the on-farm opportunity?
There’s no doubt public funding for on-farm R&D currently has its challenges: the programme’s running horribly late; it’s difficult to access, with specific and spurious rules that put well-meaning ideas outside its reach; precious few farmers directly benefit from funding, with many who are involved in projects still putting all their time and resources in for free; and following recent upheavals in politics, FIP has lost its ministerial lead.
If it can overcome these troubles, however, FIP represents a golden opportunity for on-farm innovators ready to take a bold step into the unknown. The call for farmer involvement is a recent introduction into public-funded research projects – there’s an emphasis in the current round of projects being funded like never before.
And there are sound reasons. One criticism of public-funded research is that it’s often irrelevant to farmers – used to justify the next round of research and rarely implemented on farm. Or it ends up in the ‘valley of death’ where not quite enough R&D has been done to de-risk a technological advance for commercial backing. It’s hoped farmer involvement will keep the R&D relevant and provide the pull-though.
But there’s more – the funds come from the drawdown of the Basic Payment. If money that previously went directly to farmers is diverted elsewhere, ministers will face some tough questioning over whether farmers still receive the value from the funding.
And on-farm innovation is a public good of considerable value, especially when it’s carried out by a group of farmers with the results shared. Accelerated advance of on-farm productivity arguably has a far greater public benefit than wildlife habitat creation or even fundamental research. But the public funds currently spent on it are dwarfed by both.
So the opportunity is a funding structure that properly rewards the on-farm innovator for the work they do. This is more than reimbursement for the extra cost, but recognition of the value of the time and resources invested – the hours of downtime spent getting a new piece of tech to talk to the tractor, the ideas and feedback on how to use it.
If a farmer is to receive a proper reward, this may require the maintenance of a professional standard – the company that entrusts its innovation to an on-farm trial doesn’t want to lose the entire year’s results because the sprayer operator wasn’t aware an area of the field should be left untreated.
“An innovation community would give the farmers the recognition they deserve for the contribution they make to positive change”.
What would then develop is an innovation community, headed up by farmers maintaining a professional and recognised standard in the work they perform and the results they achieve. For this they’re given proper reward and true recognition for the contribution they make to positive change and productivity gain.
That’s how you accelerate adoption, how transformational change takes place and how you usher in the fourth agricultural revolution. That’s what the discussions this autumn should revolve around. So perhaps it’s an opportunity in itself that the scope and the size of this fund hasn’t yet been decided.
